A selection of Edward Dorn's correspondence (1960-1962).

Dorn's letters are his autobiography (as David Southern says in his essay that follows this selection). The archives are coherent enough to provide, in this brief glimpse, an insight into Dorn's early writing life, picking up where the narrative proper of Tom Clark's recent biography leaves off. (1) In addition to giving us a wider context for Dorn's writing from this period, the twenty-five letters selected here are valuable documents in their own right. They paint a picture of young writers starved for contact beyond their circumstances, and making that contact a center of reciprocal influence and consequence. At their hottest, these letters show agitated poets negotiating a series of convulsions--civil rights in the U.S., revolution in Cuba, and the consequent missile crisis--and debating the kinds of response, poetic and otherwise, these convulsions required. But for all their engagement with politics and poetics, the letters are filled with useful reminders of living: they show contemporaries simply talking to each other, telling each other of themselves and their families, encouraging each other, gossiping, pontificating, swapping reading lists, magazines, books, drugs, "views."

Dorn's primary correspondents in this selection are Tom Raworth and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka); there is one exchange with Charles Olson, and another with New York lawyer Harold I. Cammer. Raworth and Jones were both on the cusp of momentous careers when their correspondence with Dorn began: Raworth had just launched the magazine Outburst and wrote to Dorn soliciting work in late 1960; Jones, who published Dorn's first book, The Newly Fallen, in February 1961 (he also published Dorn's second book, Hands Up!, in 1964), was already a font of cultural production and exchange, editing Yugen and Floating Bear, journals that served as crucial synapses between the Black Mountain, New York School, and Beat branches of the so-called New American Poetry. (2) Olson's work at Black Mountain College was behind him when he wrote Dorn in praise of The Newly Fallen, but his masterwork, The Maximus Poems, was well underway. Cammer was an unusually responsive reader to the poetry being published by The Nation. He was a prominent anti-HUAC civil liberties and labor lawyer in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, and apparently also had a correspondence with Denise Levertov (then poetry editor of The Nation) about the poem he writes Dorn about here.

Dorn's spelling was erratic enough (he was a bad typist to boot) to warrant our policy of silently correcting distracting spelling errors and modestly regularizing punctuation. That said, when Dorn's off by a letter, and the intended word or name is obvious, we've let it stand, for flavor. Ditto with typographical shorthands (like "wld" and "cld," or "wd" and "cd," etc.). The correspondence has been shortened in places to conserve space and to minimize clutter in the notes. Editorial elisions within letters are indicated by ellipses in square brackets ("[...]"); gaps in the correspondence (i.e., when we've skipped letters) are indicated with a section break ("[section]"). There have been instances where a greater measure of annotation seemed desirable, either to sustain momentum or to account for gaps in the transcript, but for the most part matters of fact are either made explicit in the letters themselves or are easily ascertained.

The Dorn, Raworth, and Olson letters are at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries, Storrs; Dorn's letters to Jones are at the Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA (they're in the Imamu Amiri Baraka papers, Collection 491, Box 1); Jones's to Dorn are at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; the Cammer exchange is in the private archive of Fred Buck. The letters were transcribed by David Southern, Adam Weg, and Eirik Steinhoff. Thanks to the archives for supplying copies of the letters. Special thanks to Rutherford Witthus, who made a January visit to Storrs especially productive, to David Ray Vance for drawing the exchange with Olson to our attention, and to Amiri Baraka, Fred Buck, Robert Cammer, Helene Dorn, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, and Tom Raworth for their kind permission to publish these letters and for their patience and care in responding to several queries.

DORN to TOM RAWORTH | 12/17/1960 | Santa Fe

Dear Tom Raworth--

There is a great deal of snow here now. This town is sitting here 7000 ft elevation almost exactly. There is apt to be a lot of snow. We live at the bottom of a dead end street one block long, abt 400 ft long. The worst place in Santa Fe to live for getting out in the wintertime. I have had to buy chains at Sears Roebuck. I work full time at the state library commission ... helping a reference librarian. She's from North Dakota, a little town near the Canadian border, but went to school in Illinois, and then later worked most of her life in the Queens public lib, NY, and then after retiring there, took this job here. She's about sixty, a dyspeptic character. I want eventually to leave here because I, and so does my wife (I have three children), feel it to be a generally alien atmosphere to the way I like to live. About which I dont know what to say except I dont really have any great principles therefore except that I like to be fairly well alone and unbugged. So do lots of people I imagine. It is difficult in Amer to mind your own business, altho there are plenty of free spaces left in a certain sense, there are plenty of meddlers too. I dont really mind them so much but I have a common natural laziness and must concentrate myself a great deal to do anything. I was born in Illinois, east central near the Indiana line, about 150 miles from Chicago, south. I have been literally all over this country and most of Mexico and part of Canada, but not off the continent. And I doubt the possibility of leaving. I like America very much, and only as an American could I think.