Lorine Niedecker

Edward Dorn

My Friend Tree

By the Sound

The North Atlantic Turbine

Black Sparrow Press

Fielding Dawson

Joanne Kyger

Collection of Black Sparrow Press Ephemera

The Collected Poems, 1956-1974

An essential anthology of an innovative American poet Edward Dorn was not only one of America’s finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and commentator. He was a student of Charles Olson, who helped him to see the American West as a site for his quest for self-knowledge; at the core of his work is a deep sense of place and the people who occupy it, underpinned by a wry ironic dissent. It was Dorn’s comic-epic masterpiece, Gunslinger, which began appearing in 1968 and had already become an underground classic by the time it was published in its entirety in 1974, that established his reputation in the wider world. This new volume brings together poems from Dorn’s entire career, including previously uncollected work.

Way More West

Jennifer Dunbar Dorn

After studying with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, Dorn took on the American West, developing an unmistakable voice, 'as evocative as a lonesome train whistle in the night'. This book is a collection of his poems.

Collected Poems

Peter Michelson

“Ed Dorn’s achievement has been to create single-handedly a language of public reference, and to have brought within the sphere of expressive language and poetic experience objects and feelings which had been, literally, unimaginable in those terms. It is in this context that he is one of the masters of our contemporary language.” —Peter Ackroyd “Ed was one of the most thoughtful but penetrating thinkers. There was no PollyAnna in him at all. And that’s what I liked about him.” —Amiri Baraka Along with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, and others, Edward Dorn taught at and became associated with the Black Mountain school in North Carolina. Although influenced by Charles Olson, Dorn’s poetry was really like no other’s. The Virginia Quarterly Review called him “an experienced and accomplished poet who has absorbed Olson, Williams, and Pound and moved beyond them.” This book is especially important for the way it synthesizes Dorn’s views on poetic experimentation, the distinction between consciousness and sensibility, and “heretical” intellection, which is to say the components of his poetics of aggression.

Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes

Ed Dorn Live

The Newly Fallen

Marjorie Perloff

Dorn’s high-spirited, crazy-quilt, complex anti-epic is a masterful critique of late twentieth-century capitalism and is one of the great comic poems of American literature. Dorn is one of the few political poets in America; this fantasy about a demigod cowboy, a saloon madam, and a talking horse named Claude Levi-Strauss, who travel the Southwest in search of Howard Hughes, as become a minor classic.

Gunslinger

Fiftieth Anniversary Edition "Gunslinger is a fundamental American masterpiece."---Thomas McGuane This fiftieth anniversary edition commemorates Edward Dorn’s masterpiece, Gunslinger, a comic, anti-epic critique of American capitalism that still resonates today. Set in the American West, the Gunslinger, his talking horse Claude Lévi-Strauss, a saloon madam named Lil, and the narrator called “I” set out in search of the billionaire Howard Hughes. As they travel along the Rio Grande to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and finally on to Colorado, they are joined by a whole host of colorful characters: Dr. Jean Flamboyant, Kool Everything, and Taco Desoxin and his partner Tonto Pronto. During their adventures and hijinks, as captured in Dorn’s multilayered, absurd, and postmodern voice, they joke and smoke their way through debates about the meaning of existence. Put simply, Gunslinger is an American classic. In a new foreword Marjorie Perloff discusses Gunslinger's continued relevance to contemporary politics. This new edition also includes a critical essay by Michael Davidson and Charles Olson’s idiosyncratic “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn,” which he wrote to provide guidance for Dorn's study of, and writing about, the American West.

Edward Dorn

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