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.

These aren't biographical details really, but just some things I would want to write you anyway. I am thirty one, born in 1929. I would like to write to you a bit, if you find the time & inclination.

[...]

The magazine Sidewalk, (that used to be Jabberwok?) from Scotland seems interesting. Generally the thing that bogs down here and I have the feeling it might be the flaw with such things as Sidewalk, is that they are much concerned with being banned as such. Which isnt very important. And it is the emphasis, on the display made of such people as Burroughs, that cultural addict, and a hot man on this side, John Rechy, who is just a wordy fag.

I dont find that Onanism valuable as anything. What the Beats here triggered was potentially very good. In that the attentions were at least turned from the University poets which, I mean who, are a great blight. But with such a salesman as Luce, the whole thing got chucked. And I dont know what the Angries ever meant there (you might tell me what you think) what the beats did here, possibly. I mean possibly meant. I don't know of any poet here in US who gives a damn about his status. There are obvious exceptions like Roethke. But he isnt a poet in the normal sense of that term.

I just wonder how you feel about any of this. What do you read. Where were you born, and where did you grow. Robert Creeley is my good friend and he comes around here every summer. If you should want to write to him his add is: San Geronimo Miramar, Patulul Such., Guatamala, C. A. Scribners is doing a large book of his soon, I guess a bringing together of all his "little" books. If you are short of material and want any more from this side, he writes very very well. Every thing he writes is short I might add. The Lyric. As so. Gael Turnbull writes well and is more Brit than amer. His add is 1199 Church St. Ventura, Cal.

In English I like Keats' letters as the best care for statement during a possible 150 year span, altho Coleridge of course is possibly more important reading. The poems are remarkable mediocre. And in terms of having a better audience and fellowship Keats would have been better living now, with us, or I suppose but am not sure, earlier. Also I must admit to being hammy enough to dig Byron very much. The rymes are crazy, yes. I like everything W. Lewis wrote so much I could be called certainly an enthusiast. I think over the years I have read everything of his. He seems to me the only completely clean Englishman I have known. Ford M. Ford was a better novelist, but his total work will not come clear to us so continually as Lewis'. Probably because the Tietjens (forgot how to spell it) novel is already something one nods the head at, saying how true, and that's a deadly quality. Everyone has trouble with it. I have too much myself in spite of everything I can do, altho I am not trying to put myself up thereby. But with Lewis, altho the same argument might be applied, there is the ring of ultimate correctness about what he "says". I find valuable the polemics, all of them. But Self-Condemned is an amazing work. I was quite tired of DHL 10 years ago, but Kangaroo is likewise amazing, and the woman in plumed serpent still has her stuffing. I have read the Elizabethans and Dryden, Hardy and Dickens, Hazlett & Smollett, & many others.

Ok. You tell me how every thing is there. I will get a map of London to see where Hackney is. Just throwing out a few things to see where you are. I will send the book when it comes to me.

Many regards,/ Edw

P.S. in the interest of my curiosity, I must display my ignorance--you must write. Do you have a book? Or separate poems here & there I might locate?

"But with such a salesman as Luce" is likely a reference to the 11/30/1959 issue of Henry Luce's Life, which featured Paul O'Neil's expose/press release, "Beats: Sad But Noisy Rebels." Sidewalk was a quarterly edited in Edinburgh by Alex Neish that published two issues in 1960. Neish had gained some notoriety for publishing an excerpt from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch in Jabberwock: Edinburgh University Review. Contributors to the first two issues of Sidewalk include Christopher Logue, Marguerite Duras, Michael McClure, Alain Robbe-Grillet ("A New Start for Fiction"), Ian Hamilton Finlay, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg ("Kaddish"), Charles Olson, Edwin Morgan, Robert Creeley, and William S. Burroughs. A third issue, advertised in the second, was to include Dorn's "Notes on Working & Waiting Around" (published subsequently in Yugen 8) and poems by LeRoi Jones, but its publication was apparently suppressed. As the enclosures in Raworth's reply no doubt indicated (see below), in November 1960 Penguin Books successfully defended its publication in England of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover. In the wake of Howl's landmark obscenity trial in 1957, and the suppression of Chicago Review (1958) and Big Table (1959) for publishing excerpts from Naked Lunch, censorship remained a topic of interest for young writers of Dorn's ilk. (See also Jones to Dorn 10/1961, and David Southern's essay in this issue.)

RAWORTH to DORN | 12/26/1960 | London

Dear Edward Dorn,

Thanks for long and interesting letter which arrived on Christmas morning. Get some facts in first. Am 22; mother Irish from a Dublin family of anti-british bomb throwers; father from poor London family. Wife (Valarie) half Welsh, half Irish. Son (Lloyd) 2 1/2. Enclose a couple of photos. One of me taken last summer at Dylan Thomas's town Laugharne in South Wales, near where we were staying (the dog turned up from nowhere and followed us for a day) with my wife's grandparents (Grandfather crippled in mine accident--no compensation, grandmother had first child born without doctor born with broken back ... lived for seven days in agony before dying as no-one knew what was wrong) All odd facts which may not interest you but are part of me.

Born in Welling, Kent (about 12 miles from centre of London). First seven years during war; bombs dropping, not much food--can remember asking 'what's that?' when I first saw an orange at eight.

Usual schools. Left at sixteen against parents' wishes--father wanting me to go to university because he wished he'd had the chance. Wanted to get out and write; to see people, hear them. Drifted around for couple of years ... discovered basic fact that living rough becomes an end in itself. Was called up for army; went for medical and was told I had a hole in my heart. Went into hospital for operation. After I recovered, was told by doctor that my heart had stopped twice; once, intentionally, for them to stitch the hole, and once, afterwards, accidentally. They had to inject me with something to start it again. My common natural laziness, I suppose.

Out of hospital without any money. Got job with the Wellcome Foundation (manufacturing chemists). Met wife there, married within six weeks. Detest the work; detest the place, but must have some money now.

Have two rooms and kitchen in Hackney (East end of London ... small shops that stay open nearly all day and night ... public houses that still have people singing, not yet invaded by the T.V. and jukebox ... area of very poor people, originally predominantly Jewish, now many Jamaicans ... scene of the great Fascist v Communist battle in the '30s). Rent is [pounds sterling]4.15 (about 13 to 14 dollars) a week. Impossible to get anywhere cheaper in London. May not be much by American standards, I don't know, but average wage over here is about [pounds sterling]11-[pounds sterling]12 (roughly 36 dollars), so doesn't leave much for food clothes fares gas electricity heating etc, etc, etc.

Hope I haven't bored you. [...] About banning writers and Lawrence etc. perhaps you'd like to see the enclosed report of our Lady C. battle. The way things are at the moment it seems we're heading toward a school of writers deliberately setting out to write books that will be banned for no other reason than to get them banned. Chapters from these books will then be printed in little magazines which will themselves be banned. It will all serve no purpose ... the writing will end up by being read only by the author, the publisher's reader, twelve jurymen, the editor of the magazine, and another twelve jurymen ... not a very large audience if something important is being said.

The angries over here have been turned into a joke. Of course there was no group calling themselves 'angry young men' but give something you don't like a label, and it's very easy to dismiss it. After all, who are the angries? Osbourne, Chris Logue, Colin Wilson, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Lindsay Anderson etc. etc. all are lumped under the heading. The only one who was a danger to the established order, Osbourne, was assimilated by it. 'Look Back in Anger' expressed what a whole generation over here feels. It changed the English Theatre nearly overnight. They couldn't let it go any further, so what happened ... he was praised by everyone ... loaded with this that and the other ... smothered with glory. His plays got worse. 'The World of Paul Slickey' was so bad it was unbelievable. However, I have always had a sneaking feeling that the last play was a gesture, a blow against the whole cult of personality as if he said 'look, I've got such a big name here now that they'll put on anything I write without even reading it' [...]

I have nothing published ... I have never tried. Have files of stuff, but none of it good enough (in my opinion) Will not publish anything of mine in 'outburst' either, only brief note. If I do anything I like, would you like to see it? [...]

Best wishes to you and your family for '61.

I will be glad to hear from you, and can always make the time to answer. Perhaps writing to someone so far away, I can straighten things out, I find communication difficult.

Also enclose copy of a leaflet for mag. Printed it myself on very small press (printing area about two by two inches) which is why lines are out of true ... had to do about three prints. Am getting larger one with area eight by five inches to do magazine. Have some subscriptions in already, and more coming. Thanks for the two addresses.

This is rather a disjointed letter ... will try and be more coherent next time.

Yours,/ Tom

PS My wife says one of her illusions is gone. She had always imagined Santa Fe to be a town of wide hot dusty streets ...

PPS Photos enclosed--rest by surface. Staggered back when heard the cost by air--have no wish to buy part of the plane.

[section]

DORN to RAWORTH | 1/22/1961 | Santa Fe

Dear Tom: (I hope you don't wince at that easy American affability) Good to hear the babe cleared OK. Maybe things will ease off for all of you now. I enjoyed your letter very much, those were precisely the things I wanted to hear. I had planned to write you back immediately, a long letter, but several things intervened, not interesting enough to account for. I just a moment ago finished America and Cosmic Man Wyndham L. I am his perennial fan in America. I wonder if you know that book. Or of Hugh Kenner (a clod of a man, but methodic), who wrote a long essay published by New Directions, NY? Called WL I think. If you will be willing to wait and cant get Olson there I will send you a copy of the collected Maximus poems when I get to NY which will be shortly. Do you remember I told you I would be going there to read and visit shortly. Leave here the 16th Feb. Less than a month. I havent been to the Mecca in five years, indeed have been thousands of miles from it, constantly. Your Wife's impression of Santa Fe, is all off and I dont know if that is a stereotype or what. Those town which are all false front and with wide dusty streets lined by hitching posts, where men are men mostly and square off in the middle lane, backs slightly hunched arms slightly limp and long in the manner of suave baboons, and who like, draw--those towns are either in the south of New Mex, or a far piece on west o here. In Old Arizona. In Tombstone, which paradoxically never died, and show no signs as yet.

Santa Fe, and all of New Mexico, except a few strickly "Anglo" cow towns, and even the latter to some extent, is of Spanish origin (Mexican is abhorred here of course, as a tag). Thus--narrow dusty streets lined with mud buildings. They called it and still do Adobe. Pleasant, quiet sunny hillsides lulled by the setting or rising sun. There is NO industry at all in the highest, oldest state capitol not on a railroad, in the USA. Santa Fe, for which the famous railroad is named didnt get the railroad, it passes 16 miles south of here, thru Lamy pronounced Lame-ee, not lamb-ee.

I am enclosing a recent little mag called Trobar, and not much reason for doing so except I think it is a good example of how "cranky" the pronouncements about current verse can be. And I dont much interest myself in it. At least from that point of view. At least the ludicrous thing is it can never be shown they themselves write as they say they are, or are going to. But it is one example of what's going on, or going or going on not quite on. Deep images are found at the bottoms of wells, as any farm boy knows. Or as that Creek boy found out, elsewhere. The Cut of the type in the example you sent me is quite good and clear I think. I am anxious to see it completed and you must be too. The Max poems were just collected up to date by Citadel Press, NY, and I doubt you could get it there anyway let me send you a copy when I get to NY, it wld be a pleasure. Pardon all the typegraphical errs but I always try to get drunk on Sunday and this one I have succeeded. So. [...]

Lewis I respect more than any…