Zephyrus Image and Edward Dorn.(Critical Essay)

Zephyrus Image press in San Francisco was the brainchild of Holbrook Teter and Michael Myers, two unlikely partners who produced some of the most provocative and politically engaged ephemera ever to come out of the small press scene in this country. While they had the requisite skills for fine printing, Teter and Myers were not connected to the channels of distribution available to private presses (such as dealers, librarians, a network of collectors). They were not interested in creating collectibles: they wanted to effect social change, something for which the press, if turned to that end, is eminently suited. They subverted the notions of what constitutes a fine press by using "cheap" materials like newsprint and giving away their work. They would mail copies to friends, and choose a suitable venue to hand out their latest creation.

The success of Zephyrus Image was due to the contrasting personalities of the principals. Teter was a social worker who learned letterpress from Clifford Burke at Cranium Press in San Francisco; Myers had been a student of Walter Hamady, America's premier book artist, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Teter, the unruffled scholar and rock-solid anchor, was a skilled typographer, while Myers was a crazy artist whose drinking exacerbated his diabetes. Together they started publishing as Zephyrus Image around 1970. Soon they attracted a strong coterie of poets and artists around them and their meeting place, a bar called The Pub, next door to their Geary Street studio. Elizabeth (Gontard) Warner of Frontier Press brought them work, as did Robert and Eileen Callahan of Turtle Island Foundation, Steve Vincent of Momo's Press, and many other small press publishers in the Bay Area. Ed Dorn and Tom Raworth moved to their neighborhood and began collaborating on Bean News. Dorn's major book, Slinger, was produced by Teter and Myers for Wingbow Press; they were also the co-conspirators on Recollections of Gran Apacheria and a number of other Dorn publications.

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Ed Dorn (1929-99) had the right background to be a perfect ally of the Zephyrist crew. In high school in Illinois he had edited the school paper for a year and worked on the local newspaper for two years, but had mainly studied art. He had dropped out of the University of Illinois in 1950. He didn't want to go to Korea and wasn't qualified to be a conscientious objector, so he enrolled in Black Mountain College in North Carolina (at the suggestion of his painting teacher Ray Obermayr). This was the year before Charles Olson arrived to teach full-time, and there was still a heavy residue of Joseph Albers's influence. Dorn felt like a hick surrounded by all the sophisticated New Yorkers at Black Mountain and was drawn to fellow midwesterner Fielding Dawson. In an interview with Roy K. Okada on 2 May 1973, published in Contemporary Literature, he said:

 
    When I went to Black Mountain I didn't have any aesthetic values. I 
    was a work-scholarship student. I had learned how to print, working 
    in the hometown newspaper, and so part of the possibility of my 
    being there was that I could run the Black Mountain printing shop. 
    It was a small shop and they did their own programs for dances and 
    a little bit of poetry. 

In his second year he took courses with Charles Olson that usually began in the evening and went into the early hours of the morning. Jonathan Williams and Dan Rice were there at the same time and Robert Creeley arrived from Spain at the end of Dorn's stay, acting as outside examiner on Dorn's final thesis and recommending that he be graduated--with reservations. Creeley's printer in Majorca, Mossen Alcover, had printed the Black Mountain Review which contained an early prose piece by Dorn, "C.B. & Q."

Dorn worked in a lyric mode in books of songs and also developed narrative poems of place, working with a "morphology of land-scape" that he found in the writings of Carl O. Sauer, as well as the idea of sustaining a narrative over years, adopted from Olson. As he told Roy Okada about Black Mountain, "my curiosity, the questing after what will identify the west in some big conceptual sense, certainly comes from there." Olson got a sense of the West from his life-long study of Melville. He was also influenced by his Harvard professor, Frederic Merk, who instilled in him the romance of the frontier, according to biographer and poet Tom Clark. Planning a grand sweeping work on America that would encompass everything from Cabeza de Vaca to the California Gold Rush, Olson visited Berkeley geography professor Sauer in 1947.