Vaya Con Ojo Caliente: a memoir of Edward Dorn.

In December of '99, when I first heard that Ed Dorn was dead at seventy of pancreatic cancer, I was at once stunned and not exactly surprised. He hadn't been looking too good in recent years. After performing a prodigious cleanup act in the late '80s (to overcome years of what might be called "exuberant living") and looking positively great when I first met him for an interview in the summer of 1990, he was looking disconcertingly aged when I saw him again at a reading a few years later, and even further worn in the cover photo of Sagetrieb's late-'90s special issue devoted to his work. I'm told pancreatic cancer is a quickly spelled sentence, and I also understand that Ed endured it for a good while longer than can most. Not exactly surprising, though; he was a tough bastard. And a great, and irreplaceable, poet, though few enough have been aware.

In the wake of his death, friends and scattered journalists wrote eulogies outlining, often with both eloquence and heart, the significance of his oeuvre while sometimes providing a hint, or more, of his stubbornly resilient spirit. He was, as many have noted, a heretic--a laser in the eye of the myopically hypocritically correct--but he was a good deal more than that as well, as I was privileged to discover. Although I knew him personally hardly at all--we met only those two times--he managed to effectively bowl me over with his still too unsung spirit on both occasions. Here then, in the form of my too-few memories, is some of that spirit for Dorn's readers, both the initiated and the as-yet-un--an interlinear of sorts to both the text of his poems and, in particular, that of his life.

I'd written Dorn from Chicago in June of 1990 identifying myself as a student of Robert von Hallberg--one of the few critics to have written of his work at all, much less intelligently and approvingly--and said I was interested in interviewing him for Chicago Review. His response, on impressively funky stationery from the "Hotel Capri, Habana," from which he'd covered the 1988 Latin American Film Festival for Rolling Stock, opened with an upper-right dateline that read like one of his early-'70s Day Reports or, at least in form, like a benign Abhorrence--"Boulder, 28 / June, 1990, / Temp in the 90's / but it's dry heat"--and followed with a text that was characteristically to the point--and pointed: "von Hallberg is a powerful ref.," it began. Dropping Bob's name had apparently been enough to secure me the interview, as I'd obviously hoped, since the rest of the typescript simply told me how and when I could find him during the summer. But there was a handwritten "P.S. Ann [sic] Waldman just told me she'd heard from you--the idea that someone should want to interview both of us is quite disturbing--and indicates a too pervasive view--or as the current buzzword has it--a diversity." And that was that. Pinned to the wall as I was, I cringed, cracking up at the same time, of course.

The Waldman aspersion was a reference not only to her poetics, but also to "the fondly remembered (by many, not by some) Great Naropa Poetry Wars, still the classic model of the spiritual and pecuniary corruption of the late, great…