Edward Dorn out: forms of dispossession.(Critical Essay)

In the summer of 1965 Edward Dorn attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference, substituting for LeRoi Jones. He spoke to the audience of his travel with photographer Leroy Lucas through what is known geographically as the Basin-Plateau, an area occupied by several of the western United States, including Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah. Beginning in Duck Valley, on the Nevada-Idaho border and continuing west as far as Reno, both men documented their experiences on long and often gravelly roads that led from boom-and-gloom towns of western settlement to more desolate and isolate reservations. The results of their journey were documented and published a year later in The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau.

"Okay. So there you are, right there with the first, with the natives, with the first people, the first human beings ... on this continent," Dorn told his Berkeley audience. "And you don't know what to say to them. You can't say, 'Well look I'm a poet you can trust me to be sympathetic. You can trust me to know that you're Indian and that this man is a Negro. And we're not here to really ... shame you or take bad pictures or anything like that'" (Views, 97).

Dorn's self-consciousness as a poet, an intellectual, and as a white man in the eyes of those he would question, pushes often to the surface of the taut, inquisitive prose of The Shoshoneans. In its first chapter, where he enters the home of Willie Dorsey, 102 years old, and his wife, "the grim weight of bad condition" is displayed "more heavy with despair than one could arrange with rubble." Here, the "curious paleface" was "suddenly arrested" by the facts before him:

 
    I was looking at the scene and at myself, in a mirror, seeing the 
    looking. The chair was covered with spilled water and bits of debris 
    from his eating. I sat down on it, and without, I told myself, 
    thinking to prove anything. It was difficult to do it. I felt 
    crossed by an embarrassed confusion: what and who I was compressed 
    all at once into one consideration, again I watched myself as I 
    might think of a god watching, and there was in me at the same 
    moment the hopelessly practical hesitation to soil my seat and the 
    public willingness to do so--followed by a self-censure for having 
    thought of it in either sense. (11) 

Recalling this moment to his audience in Berkeley, Dorn asks: "How do you get around being where you are? Even though you went to whatever you did to get there. You may question what you did to get there but you're there, alright" (Views, 110). The circumstances of his being there form a discomfort in him that gives insight into what led him there in the first place. Dorn saw himself by virtue of art and intelligence on the margins of American culture and alien to it. That, ostensibly, is why he is there, with an ancient relic of a man, whose presence turns the questions back onto the younger poet and the conditions that bring them together. Dorn put himself there with the Shoshoni because he felt that he didn't have a country "any more than they" (Views, 107). He found in them too the active consequences of that dispossession he sensed inside himself. "I'm like part of the Fourth World too," he said. "I, of necessity I have to be part of the Fourth World to retain any possible honor for myself. Which may be presumptuous, to want to honor myself" (Views, 107).

That sense of dispossession can be heard in his term, "Fourth World." To our ears it may carry a naive tone, as Dorn himself possibly sensed, especially once he penetrated beyond the recognition of a mere condition of himself outside. From here he could begin "seeing the looking" (11). In that perceptive act, in the filth of the old couple's home, an awareness formed in him, derived from a naked disposition and a genuine reduction of intellect or western self. Not only was he other in their home, he was sensing his own otherness, that trans-human quality of the self. "And trying the sense of their relationship with my own subjectivity," he writes, "at that moment it seemed to me here was the contrary of my own Western notion that one goes through the portal of death alone to greet some large blank which hopefully might be an extension of a 'personality,' whether that be God or oneself as a continued state" (12). An inwardness moved out and made him subject to facts accountable only to that moment. Dorn, Lucas, the old man, his wife--and all that could be joined by place in these names--move into the prose telling of a personally felt kind. The significant act is one of displacement, but the converging dissonance brings into recognition a social outing subtly transacted:

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