An interview with Edward Dorn.(Interview)

This interview, first published in Chicago Review 39:1 (1993), took place at Dorn's home in Boulder, Colorado, on September 4, 1990. John Wright, who spent many years in northwest Washington, begins by asking about Dorn's early years in the Skagit Valley and his novel By the Sound. Later, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn joins them and the conversation for a while.

John Wright: You found your way to the Skagit Valley early on in your career, and it was there that you wrote your novel By the Sound. Tell me about your time there.

Edward Dorn: Well, I went to the Skagit Valley before I was even married. I was working in the timber, and that was when I was still in the middle of my Black Mountain years. But before that, when I was at the University of Illinois, I had known older students who had connections for summer work in Seattle, so I worked a couple of summers at Boeing. That's when they kept records by hand. This would have been '49, '50, along in there. There were whole rooms of people just transferring parts and keeping them on 5 X 6 cards. It was all intensive hand labor entry. It was very boring and so forth, but the pay was pretty good. I made my tuition doing that, and we'd rent rooms together to keep costs down, one time on Queen Anne Hill and one time in the Ballard District.

JW: Seattle was still a pleasant, fairly funky town, even ten years ago. It's all cleaned up now.

ED: Californians always dehumanize places. They're the lemmings of the real estate group. They just rush to the next cheaper place.

JW: And it's an exchange of different kinds of dirt. The streets are cleaner, but the air's filthy because of all the cars, and people are campaigning for mayor on the traffic issue because the freeways are unbelievably gnarled up. It's becoming like L.A. in that sense, while the rest of the city still feels like what San Francisco might have felt like long ago.

ED: Well, they bring all that with them. But Seattle was a very liveable town, actually. It was human.

JW: And you went up to the Valley after Black Mountain?

ED: Well, when I got married, my first marriage, we lived in San Francisco for a while after Black Mountain, and then I needed work. I was an itinerant worker in those days, and I went back to the woods because I knew how to do it, and it was easy to get a job in those days because there was no ecological movement stopping clearcutting or anything. The late fifties was still part of that fifties "cut 'em down." There was a lot of building going on then, too. That was before they were shipping the logs to Japan and reimporting the plywood. Actually, Anacortes was a thriving plywood town, a big plywood town. I don't know about it now.

JW: Well, it's gone through another bust phase, and now they're talking about growing seaweed. You know, there's always a plan for Anacortes to become a permanent boom town. But did you do any lookout work when you were up there?

ED: No, I never did that. Kerouac did that.

JW: Did you know those guys who were working in the woods--Kerouac and Snyder and Whalen?

ED: I knew Kerouac. Actually, Kerouac did a lookout up the Skagit Valley, up around, up above ...

JW: Baker?

ED: Well, it would have been south of Baker. It would have been Marblemount or something, but essentially in that area.

JW: But Gary Snyder got him that job, I guess.

ED: Right, and I never did that. I worked as a logger.

JW: So at the time you were out there doing that, you didn't know those guys?

ED: I had met Kerouac before I went up there, in San Francisco. We were in San Francisco in '56, '57, and we went up north in '58 and '59. That's before we went to New Mexico in about '60, I guess. Or it was '59, actually. We were up there a couple of years. And that's where I wrote By the Sound, which was then called Rites of Passage. Harvey Brown published that in Buffalo, and he just died last January.

JW: Oh really? And then it was reprinted by Frontier Press in Mount Vernon? Who was that?

ED: Well, we just put "Mount Vernon" on it because that's where it was. Harvey Brown was a real flexible publisher; I mean, he didn't care in that sense. But it was actually published in West Newbury.

JW: Oh, I see. I'd always wondered what the hell Frontier Press was in Mount Vernon because ...

ED: It wasn't there.

JW: ... it doesn't exist there now and I guess it didn't then. [Laughing.]

ED: No, it never did, and it was probably the only book ever published in Mount Vernon [laughing]; it was a bit of a joke, really.

JW: Let me ask you about the context of fifties avant-garde poetry. I'm interested in the extent to which avant-garde poets were calling themselves Romantics or neo-Romantics. Duncan certainly was, and this was true even of a poet like Creeley. While the "average reader" might look at Duncan and say "yeah, that's a Romantic poetics," in terms of stereotyped notions of Romanticism, Creeley's minimalism and objectivism don't usually strike readers as Romantic. Yet all over the place he's called himself a Romantic and talked about Romanticism. As far as I know, you never did talk about yourself as a Romantic, and you were developing a different kind of poetics, heavily influenced, of course, by Olson. So when you were at Black Mountain and then were meeting the San Francisco poets, did it seem to you that you were in the middle of a movement that was being characterized by the participants themselves as a Romantic or neo-Romantic movement? And how did you feel, apparently not identifying yourself as a Romantic?

ED: I never felt that, no. Olson soft-pedaled the Romantics because I think they were intellectually soft to him, in a sense. And besides that, he guided me more toward a kind of geographical-mindedness about all of that. The whole point there was intellectual inquiry to discover what was useful to you; it didn't matter where it was. I mean, it could be pre-Romantic; it could be anything. That line that you mentioned before we began the interview--about [Dorn's early "desire" to be] "a classical poet"--that's just something that occurred in this rather, to my knowledge now, crude, sort of discursive, kind of "on the road," triplike poem ["Idaho Out"]. But subsequently, now that I've learned more what that kind of ambition is, I really don't have it, and I wouldn't claim that any more. I mean, I can see that, say, Eliot's intention in that line--another reactionary against the Romantics; he didn't really have much patience for them--would make a lot of sense, for him. Because he had the kind of training that would allow the mind to encompass what that meant. I never did and still don't, actually. It's true that I respect that sort of rigor and elegance and dryness more than I do the Romantics, but that doesn't make me anti-Romantic, or Classic, or Classical. It's just that that would be sort of a matter of taste, I suppose.

JW: And so those categories in particular wouldn't have been meaningful.

ED: I wasn't so much aware at Black Mountain of those categorical designations in terms of the ambition of either Creeley or Duncan. I mean, I could see it, perhaps; I'm just saying I wasn't really aware of it. I can see that more, you know, in Duncan's neo-Platonism. And it makes a certain amount of sense. Although I suppose he was like the Romantics, too, in his style, in what used to be called lifestyle. [Laughing.] But I have a harder time imagining that Creeley has much of a relationship to the Romantics. For one thing, he doesn't inspect phenomena like the Romantics do. He's not very political like, say, Shelley was; he's not very reflective, like Wordsworth; he's not philosophically religious, like Coleridge; and he doesn't have a club foot like Byron. [Both laughing.] Now, whatever he means by that might clear it up, but I'm not actually aware of that, either. Maybe he just would prefer to be thought of that way than something else, but technically, I have a hard time seeing that.

JW: Well, it could have to do with his focus on the vicissitudes and the trajectory of the individual subject. In his book, American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980, Robert von Hallberg talks about your relationship to Creeley, who served as your "outside examiner" when you were graduating from Black Mountain. He says, "Creeley could be Dorn's outside examiner, but he could never be his mentor," referring to Creeley's focus on domestic relations and the personal while your attraction was more toward what Olson was doing in terms of a discursive poetics.

ED: Well, for one thing, the kinds of assignments that Olson set could never have been fulfilled by Creeley's methodology because they involved a certain kind of docu-poetry. Nobody called it that then, and nobody calls it that now, but I've come to recognize that's sort of what it is. In other words, it's not that far from journalism, really, which is a term that doesn't scare me, because actually later on ...

JW: Well, you do Bean News; you do Rolling Stock ...

ED: Yes, and besides that, I got to read a lot of Johnson, his pieces from the Gentleman's Magazine and the Tattler and all that, but I didn't get that at Black Mountain, because Olson never even brought up Johnson.

JW: So if Olson was diatribing against Romanticism, he wasn't propping up a neo-Classicist like Johnson?

ED: No, not at all. You know, he really did come out of Pound, in a sense, as being immediately a predecessor, and he came to his sort of transcultural interests through Pound, although Pound knew a lot of languages and Olson didn't. I mean Olson took up these anthropological, archeological, and linguistic elements, while Pound was obviously more interested in cultural internationalism, archeology, and things like that. Those sort of soft sciences didn't interest him at all, that I could see, because he stuck with language, whether it was the troubadours or Renaissance Italian. To him, the whole key was the language, right back to the Greeks. And he wasn't really interested even in the Egyptians, either, let alone the Abyssinians or the Hittities or the Sumerians.

JW: Olson goes back further, for one thing; he goes back to the Sumerian, at least.

ED: Yes, but they shared that same interest in the culture.

JW: And perhaps in reconstructing the cultural tradition.

ED: Sure, and it's sort of like a cultural archeology, too, in both their cases, really--although Pound wouldn't have thought of it that way--which involves going back to roots, doing ethnologies of that kind, which increases knowledge and results in the greater power of knowing. And so it gets away from the surface. Actually, a lot of the Romantics' preoccupation with the self in relation to whatever environment they found themselves in was really superficial in some ways. You know, the dark figure, the lonely figure, by the sea, in a glade. But that's all self-reflective; it finally comes from Narcissus in a strange way, looking into the pool. I mean, they had a lot more pools. Landscape was important, that in which they set themselves as figures and in which they imagined their existence and so forth.

JW: In so much of Olson's work, it seems he was attempting to cut through what you just characterized as this sort of superficial Romantic preoccupation with the position of the self in the landscape--which existed for obvious historical reasons--and get through to his new humanism.

ED: There was another thing about the Romantics, which is really pretty simple, too, and this was their metaphysical preoccupations with the other world--ghosts, monsters, metalinguistic expressions of all that, and magic.

JW: The relationship between Duncan and Olson is extremely interesting in this regard. How did that strike you, when you were first getting to know these guys? I ask because with Duncan, of course, you get his interest in all these things you were just describing, whereas you don't in Olson. Yet they saw themselves, apparently, as tracking parallel courses toward more or less the same or a similar end, yet through these very different paths.

ED: Well, they shared this real interest in mythology, of course. It's just that what it meant to Olson is not what it meant to Duncan. That is, Duncan would just talk automatically about everything; he was like a real free-form talker. If it hadn't been intellectual, well, the nonintellectual later expression of that was called "psychobabble," right? [Both laughing.] But this was psychobabble of some kind of incredibly interesting and lofty order, in which the connections being made, and the free-association over time and throughout the literature and the power of tale--both human tales he had heard and relating it to the mythology of the record--was Romantic, I suppose, in a sense. But with Olson it always had a certain kind of structure. And the purpose, really, was to find out what you could know. But I don't think that bothered Duncan at all. These were all just materials of the psyche that could be spilled and disgorged.

JW: What was your own relationship to Duncan's work?

ED: Certain things like The Venice Poem and so forth were very influential to me. Just the fact that you could organize thought into a long, sustained, and fairly ordered structure. His preoccupations with his own relationship to H.D. and how he built huge things--that kind of thing interested me a lot less. Still does.

JW: How's that?

ED: Well, because that's a kind of psychological exercise, and I'm not psychological.

JW: And metaphysical.

ED: Or metaphysical. I could understand what he was doing to a certain extent, but it was nothing that I could actually find of use. For one thing, I never had any relationships like that. I mean, that's not even my world. Even if I was interested in it, it would be abstract in working terms. Totally.

JW: So it's not the methodology, because the method seems not unlike Olson's. That is, you were describing The Venice Poem as the long construct, the sustained intellectual endeavor, so it's more the specific materials Duncan's working with--the psychological and the metaphysical--and the connections he makes with a previous mind that make the difference.

ED: Right. As though they're there, actually. There's a strange way in which that's not historical. I mean--and again I suppose this is Romantic, too--it's suddenly present; it's being…