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.

In 1965 Dorn was invited by Donald Davie to teach at the University of Essex and held the post for five years. There he met Tom Clark (then a graduate student and teacher), Tom Raworth, and Jeremy Prynne (with whom he had been corresponding for some years), and Jennifer Dunbar, who became his second wife. In England he began work on Gunslinger, his epic poem about the American West. Using various personae, Gunslinger is a provocative, wry commentary on popular culture. The voice, like a sportscaster who has forgotten the game to tee off on the crowd, is jaded and detached. He creates a character named "I," then has him leave the narrative for a bit. In fact, "I" dies, then is revived with five gallons of LSD. One commentator drew parallels to Carlos Castaneda's Teaching of Don Juan and characterized Gunslinger as motivated by Pot (Book I), LSD (Book II), and Cocaine (Book III).

"I wanted the narrative to operate by itself, if possible," Dorn told Roy Okada. "'I' is dead, actually. I think now the ego is obviously dead.... All our stories are so interchangeable. If they're significant they seem to be more interchangeable."

Jenny Dorn remembers her arrival in the USA:

 
    Ed first met Holbrook and Michael in the fall of 1971, when he went 
    to S.F. for the First Annual Bookfair. We were living in Chicago, 
    but the following January, facing the prospect of another winter in 
    the Windy City, we impulsively decided to take a trip with our 2 
    small children (Maya was 8 months) to the Yucatan. Ed passed his 
    teaching job at Northeastern on to Ted Berrigan. After a 3-month 
    trip through Mexico, we ended up in S.F. That spring and summer we 
    lived on Pearce St. and Ed began to work closely with Holbrook and 
    Michael on Bean News. We did not go back to Chicago. 

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Bean News

Meeting Teter and Myers, Dorn suddenly saw how he could make his work come alive. In an interview with Barry Alpert in Vort magazine (published Fall 1972), Ed Dorn explained,

 
    I've run into two other people--a master printer and a great 
    engraver--who want to do a newspaper. The lead story in Bean News is 
    "Sllab Outline Arrives". This is all like Book III stuff, the deity 
    of which Bean is the messenger. And Bean is the editor of Bean News. 
    So suddenly what's the newspaper our group reads as they're 
    traveling?--Bean News. In that sense I'm interested in the 
    experimental aspect of a newspaper rising vertically off the pages 
    of the poem in a three-dimensional sense. So this has "Sllab Outline 
    Arrives in a cloud of adobe dust and chicken feathers--out of state 
    eye-witness account." BNS, Bean News Service, Beenville, Colorado. 
    "I" is in the meantime off at Notsuoh, which is Houston spelled 
    backward, at the conference on mega-space and reporting what's 
    happening there. And the editorial quotes a signal which arrived too 
    late to print, which by that time deals with the arrival of Sllab in 
    Beenville because all those vectors have been picked up. I mean 
    that's what it means to me. Anybody else can read it as a newspaper. 
    In the list on the editorial page it shows who has contributed in 
    one way or another. I only wrote about 30%. It's a real newspaper. 
    Presumably, anybody might want to do a newspaper like this engraver, 
    this printer, and myself, but they might want to do it just because 
    they want to do it. They don't have to be interested in why I'm 
    doing it. We just try to make the best…