Forensics in the provinces: collecting the correspondence of Edward Dorn.(Critical Essay)

By the 1990s, Ed Dorn had honed a sharp distinction between "poet" and "writer," making it clear that he was a member of the larger, more inclusive class. He is, of course, principally celebrated for his poems, in particular the modern epic, Gunslinger. He also wrote a novel, an unpublished novella (A Troublesome Spring), an anthropological study of the Shoshoni, a short screenplay (Abilene, Abilene), numerous short stories, essays, reviews, travel accounts, prefaces and introductions, translations from Spanish with the British scholar Gordon Brotherston, a few pieces of news reporting, and the lyrics to a country & western song.

To this wide range, one should add interviews--perhaps a dozen or more have been published, and these rightly belong within the body of work. (1) Appearing irregularly from 1963, the Dorn interviews have served as internal memos to his closest readers, and they cover such subjects as Black Mountain College, his influences, his evolving poetics and practice of craft, his enthusiasms, and his loathings. Central to all of his writing, Dorn's letters have not been systematically collected or published. He wrote very good letters, many thousands, from when he first began to consider himself a writer until shortly before his death in December 1999, and it may be that a significant number can be located and preserved. Like the man himself, his letters are vivid, acute, sensitive, and knowledgeable. They mark the constituent moments--his immediate news on several scales, what he was reading, who he was visiting, who was calling, what he was thinking. Each is a freeze-frame of the quotidian within a clear, continuous commentary on the late-twentieth-century world. Dorn's letters most emphatically belong in the greater consideration of Dorn's writing. His letters are his autobiography.

This article is an appeal to all who corresponded with Ed Dorn--whether the exchange was a pair of postcards or many letters over a long span of time--that you secure your stash. A number of his letters are already in various libraries as files within the papers of Charles Olson, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Allen, Denise Levertov, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Tom Raworth, Fielding Dawson, Tom Clark, Joel Oppenheimer, Stan Brakhage, and others. Of the above named collections, half are held by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, as are Dorn's own papers: twenty-eight linear feet of correspondence, manuscripts of published and unpublished work, galley proofs, notebooks, photographs, issues of Bean News, and the complete run of Rolling Stock, the literary newspaper edited by his wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn. (2)

The Dodd Center Dorn collection is dated 1956 to 1993, but the bulk of it begins at the late 1960s. The letters are almost entirely incoming mail from more than 200 correspondents. Among them the thickest files, commencing in 1960, 1961, and 1964, respectively, are those for Tom Raworth, Jeremy Prynne, and Tom Clark--all living in England when the exchanges began, all closely associated with Dorn until the end of his life. In 1977, when the first part of this collection was acquired by the University of Connecticut, the Dorns and Raworths were sharing quarters in San Francisco. Ed Dorn and Tom Raworth sold their papers in tandem through an arrangement with the curator, George Butterick. (3) Thus, both sides of the early correspondence between Dorn and Raworth are intact in a single archive from the first letter, an inquiry from Raworth dated 7 November 1960, to the point of sale.

The Dodd Center also holds both sides of the correspondence between Dorn and Charles Olson, as well as further concurrencies within the Dawson, Clark, and Oppenheimer papers. The Dorn collection was increased in several installments through 1993. From that date, his papers and manuscripts, with further archival data stored on computer hard-drives, remain in the possession of Jennifer Dorn, as does a remarkable packet of Dorn letters given her by Stephen Taylor, son of Gordon Taylor, a Villa Grove High School classmate with whom Dorn remained in contact until the mid-1950s.

For the period from the mid-1950s until the end of Dorn's marriage to Helene Helmers Dorn in the late 1960s, there is a private archive of incoming mail curated by Dorn's stepson, Fred Buck. A sense of a community of "ilks" (a Joel Oppenheimer coinage) rises from the roster of Dorn correspondents in Buck's files. These mostly uncelebrated writers, artists, and kindred spirits tended to know one another directly or with as little as a degree or two of separation. Many submitted work to little magazines such as Origin, Black Mountain Review, Evergreen Review, Ark II Moby I, Big Table, Yugen, Floating Bear, The Outsider, Nomad, Migrant, Wild Dog, ...