49:3/4 & 50:1 Summer 2004

EDWARD DORN

Tribe

In Summer 2004 CR released a triple-issue entitled “Edward Dorn: American Heretic.” In my introduction to that issue I wrote

Edward Dorn, American Heretic is not exactly intended to introduce Dorn to the 21st century. Introduce Dorn? "Not even a sunrise could quite manage that," quipped Robert Creeley in his preface to Dorn's Selected Poems. Instead, this issue of Chicago Review intends to confirm Dorn's location on the map by presenting a number of late poems along with several different types of dispatches that show Dorn in action with his contemporaries. These include a cross-section of his correspondence with Tom Raworth, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and others between 1960 and '62; a 1977 poetry workshop that takes etymology and geography as two coordinates for a writing assignment; and a 1990 interview that sparks from Dorn's fiction and poetry to Olson to politics to Eliot, with various vivid waystations between. The essays on Dorn collected here fill several gaps in the archival and scholarly record, supplying context for his middle and late work (especially the central involvement printing and publishing was for Dorn — see Alastair Johnston on Zephyrus Image and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn on Rolling Stock), analysis and evaluation of his poetry and prose (Keith Tuma looks at Chemo Sábe and other late work; Dale Smith considers The Shoshoneans), a description of the man (in John Wright's memoir), and a proposal for collecting his correspondence (made by David Southern). Each of these essays demonstrates the kind of care and interest that persists for Dorn's work, while Dorn's own words in this issue reveal the generosity, the bracing intelligence, and the style of engagement that make him worthy of our attention as we slide into the 21st century now off to a calamitous start.

Among the late poems included in the issue was “Tribe,” an earlier version of which had appeared in the Spring 1999 issue. Penguin has a selected poems in the works; in the meantime it looks like Dorn's last chapbook, Chemo Sabe, is still available from Limberlost Press.

[ES, 2006]

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