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Customer Reviews (9)

Buy THIS !
'Gunslinger' stands alone....a wonderfully moving ballad of everything thats anything......Ed you are a Master !

Clever and entertaining.
This book is, a hilarious look at wordplay, images, and symbolism towards a very serious subject... war. A lot of the literal ideas I do not totally get (give me a break, I'm 27) but I read it has to do w/ vietnam. It relates to any inane/insane fight based on questionable info... a breath from that... it's humor is really funny... the games he plays with words are genius, (a horse named I = I is a horse)... stuff like that. I would have given it 5 stars if I understood it more... but a great read, if I had not researched it and found out it was about Vietnam, I would have enjoyed its funkiness, just the same.

The Postmodern Epic Poem
The epic is conceivably the endpoint of the modernist implosion into premodern aesthetics and anti-formal/anti-perspectival tribal art. Whether that makes GUNSLINGER modern, postmodern, or premodern is anyone's guess, 5 of 8 dentists prefer "postmodern." The book smears semantics and Heidegger and cocaine into a psychedelic, post-industrial dreamscape. Ed Dorn studied an americanized version of "psychogeography" at the Black Mountain College with Charles Olson and Robert Creely which contributed to the development of his slow-acid-laced-western-sound poetry aesthetic: "I have no wish to continue my debate with men, my mare lathers with tedium, her hooves are dry. Look, they are covered with the alkali of the enormous space between here and formerly."(Gunglinger, Book 1). This should be read with some cigars and cactus and MM's cover of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show's"Get My Rocks Off" and Beck's parenthetical "Lazy Flies" ("The skin of a robot vibrates with pleasure, Matrons and gigolos Carouse in the parlor").

Do It
It's great that Ed Dorn's poem (in book form, though it was originally published in a sequence of smaller parts, and assembled) is back in print, after the single-volume version took a short drop to the OOP lists. There are few poems that so effectively capture a decade -- and a century. Read it; fight with it; enjoy the sensibility. This is a book about the American West and, like the work of Charles Olson (one of Dorn's teachers), it is about poetry as a means of understanding aspects of the psyche, motivation, and acquisitiveness that is so American.

That's the good new; you'll read this and laugh about parts, and agonize over others, and relish still more. But be wary of the "Introduction," which is a heavy bolus of words (read the back cover excerpt, if you doubt me). Yes, the folks at Duke (a University Press) felt it necessary to drop a scholarly "Introduction" on the book, but Perloff's offering will inspire you to reach for your Metamucil. As a scholar, she is accomplished (publications on Beckett, Plath, Pound, O'Hara, Lowell, Stevens, Yeats, Williams, Berryman, Rimbaud, Zukofsky, Blackburn, John Cage, Goethe, Ginsberg, Ashbery, and a dozen others), but her treatment of Dorn is at best wooden, and with 35 years of writing on poets she musters great range without summoning either a notable depth or enthusiasm.

Buy the book for Dorn's own work and fight to cherish the results.

John Bunyan in a showdown with Paul Bunyan
An epic poem so richly filled with wisdom, wordplay & laughs that a little of it is often enough. Dorn's characters - who are derived from both John Bunyan & Paul Bunyan - wander through a landscape that feels likea spaghetti western existing inside a Star Trek wormhole. All of therituals of the Great American Desert are honored & performed in waysthat surprise & delight. The cinematography is nonpareil. Does theZlinger fall in love with Lil? Does he ride off into the Sunset of HappyTrails? Does Walter Brennan make a cameo appearance? Read on, fellowpilgrims, read on.

Bob Rixon ... Read more

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Edward Dorn (1929–1999) was a poet whose strength rested on his ability to portray through language the lives and the land he knew best. In more than 30 books of poetry, Dorn’s sympathies were always with the working class and the dispossessed. Poet Robert Duncan describes Dorn’s most acclaimed work, Gunslinger, as “an American Canterbury Tales.” In this biography, Tom Clark, the poet’s close friend and spiritual companion, brings to life a man and a body of work that make up an iconic American tale. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Remarkable and Serious Fare for a great american poet...
Any serious person would love Ed Dorn, and I've been an admirer of his through poetry readings (at UCSD, when I was a student there), into earlier years when he was at Black Mountain College (when I wasn't born), and through the great works: Slinger, the North Atlantic Turbine, the Collected Works, and all the editions in between and later. I was so saddened when I learned he'd died; I wasn't so patched in that I heard about it right away, but the passing left a void.

Dorn wrote political poetry, but also great poetry; he avoided the fuzziness of the Beats while capturing their passion and engagement with life. He was a scholar -- especially of the American West -- and he made much of what he could do. This biography by Tom Clark is a completely solid one -- it catches the essentials, perhaps more strongly in the later years than in the early ones (thus the one-star deduction). Tom is an accomplished writer, essayist, biographer, and poet in his own right, and that mastery shows. But if you're interested in one of the great minds, and one suffused with a gentle (and at times not) skepticism about the West and its geography, you will find this of value. And then, please DO load up on Ed Dorn and his essays and poetry volumes. You will find that they do not pall, and that all you bring to them adds to their strength, and to yours.

Remarkable and Serious Fare for a great american poet...
Any serious person would love Ed Dorn, and I've been an admirer of his through poetry readings (at UCSD, when I was a student there), into earlier years when he was at Black Mountain College (when I wasn't born), and through the great works: Slinger, the North Atlantic Turbine, the Collected Works, and all the editions in between and later. I was so saddened when I learned he'd died; I wasn't so patched in that I heard about it right away, but the passing left a void.

Dorn wrote political poetry, but also great poetry; he avoided the fuzziness of the Beats while capturing their passion and engagement with life. He was a scholar -- especially of the American West -- and he made much of what he could do. This biography by Tom Clark is a completely solid one -- it catches the essentials, perhaps more strongly in the later years than in the early ones (thus the one-star deduction). Tom is an accomplished writer, essayist, biographer, and poet in his own right, and that mastery shows. But if you're interested in one of the great minds, and one suffused with a gentle (and at times not) skepticism about the West and its geography, you will find this of value. And then, please DO load up on Ed Dorn and his essays and poetry volumes. You will find that they do not pall, and that all you bring to them add to their strength, and to yours. ... Read more

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Poetry. The result of a 20-year collaboration betweenpoet Edward Dorn and scholar Gordon Brotherson, THE SUN UNWOUNDgathers together the disparate voices of oppressed Americans throughthe centuries: the hymns, songs, and prayers of Mesoamericans andother native peoples; the verse of eight Latin American guerrillas ofthe 1960s; and works by three of Latin America's most importantavant-garde poets of the twentieth century. "You said the sun wouldrise. / Let's go / along those unmapped paths / to free the greenalligator you love. // And let's go obliterating / insults with our /brows swept with dark insurgent stars. / We shall have victory orshoot past death." (from Che Guevara's "Song to Fidel"). Thisextraordinary collection of poems offers a striking counterpoint tothe colonialist, capitalist, Anglo-Saxon ethos. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

never west enough
Edward Dorn's work is driven, turbulent, acute; there are tender moments too of course (eg "Song: Europa"), often interlaced with a poignant irony and a searching view of the contemporary. From the early reflective poems, writing himself out of rural Illinois, to the first flush of inspiration at Black Mountain (Olson, Sauer) to the time in the UK (esp. at the then new University of Essex) to the late reflections on heresy and chemotherapy, the sense of groundedness in a living tradition, but wanting to expand out of it, is clear. As he writes in the late poem "Tribe," his "tribe came from struggling labor" and this struggle to articulate the new is characteristic of his best work. This volume greatly expands the 1997 "sampler" "High West Rendezvous" and includes a generous selection from his parody epic "Gunslinger," not included in the much earlier "Collected Poems" (but available through Duke UP); yet "Way More West" shows that Dorn is much more, and other, than--as the cover has it--"the author of 'Gunslinger.'" Unlike its "Ur-text," Black Sparrow's 1993, "Way West: Stories, Essays and Verse Accounts : 1963-1993" this volume has no prose (ok, it's in a poetry series). Given however the range of Dorn's work, his classic narrative of Puget Sound, "views," "interviews" and prose commentaries and accounts of all kinds, and the abiding interest of this material (published through smaller houses), could this also be licked into popular shape?
A strong line of rather quizzical comedy runs through the volume, and a little poem like "the hazards of a later era" with its pastiche of Williams's icebox poem adds a reflection on the state of agribusiness, etc. (again, the rural).Dorn plays with his sources and influences, among themD. H. Lawrence, whose work can be detected at times from "Los Mineros" of the '60s to the "Languedoc Variorum" of the '90s. Always searching, probing, listening; "way more west", yes, but also never west enough.

Ed Dorn,Essential Reading
From his early lyrics like "The Air Of June Sings" and "The Rick Of Green Wood" and "Like a Message on Sunday" through his first experiencing England: THE NORTH ATLANTIC TURBINE, the long poem "Oxford" most specifically, to his breakthrough "spiritual" address in GUNSLINGER (notably Books I & II), and his gem, RECOLLECTIONS OF GRAN APACHERIA, on through LANGUEDOC to the brave work of CHEMO SABE, Ed Dorn has created a body of lucid and resonant and controversial poetry, in which there is often an effortless shifting of discourses within the poem, a mode whichhe developed into a postmodern way of usually hard-edge jump-cut justaposition.Tom Clark's impressionistic biography of Dorn is a useful accompanying text. ... Read more

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transcript of 1965 lecture on Shoshoni Indians ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Very Successful
The information in this book is very useful for starting a small advertising business. It offers information from setting up your agency to pricing each job. It's a small price to pay for the knowledge that I haved gained from this book.

Totally outdated
This book refers to telefaxes and manual pasteup. It may have been partially updated recently, but it is not terribly useful and certainly not worth the price. Buy the Graphics Art Guild Handbook instead. ... Read more