604 The American Century: Literature since 1945spontaneity (“To Bobbie”): above all, a willingness to follow the peculiar shape and
movement of an experience, however unpredictable it may be. This last point is
nicely dramatized in “I Know a Man,” where the unnamed narrator talks to his
friend “John” about what they might do, or where they might drive, to escape
“the darkness” that surrounds them. John’s reply is short and to the point: “drive, he
sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.” As Creeley observed, “you can drive
to the store with absolute predetermination to get the bread and return home.”
Alternatively, “you can take a drive, as they say ... where the driving permits you
certain information you can’t anticipate.” To plan is one thing: it has its advantages,
but it inhibits discovery, “the delight of thought as a possibility of forms.” To take a
chance is quite another, and it is clearly what John and his creator prefer: to go off in
an unpremeditated way and simply to watch, to “look out” where one is going.
“I want to range in the world as I can imagine the world,” Creeley said, “and as I can
find possibility in the world.” This he did in sparse, brittle poems that use their
silences just as effectively as their speech and that (“true / Puritan” as the poet was,
he admitted) present the cardinal sin as cowardice: a reluctance to resist the several
forces that would imprison us in habit – the fear of the challenge thrown out to us
by the, as yet, unseen and unarticulated.
If Creeley’s work represents a peculiarly Eastern, and more specifically New
England form of “open” verse, then the poetry of Ed Dorn draws much of its point,
wit, and power from his attachment to the American West. This is not simply because
some of his poems, like “The Rick of Green Wood” (1956), are situated in Western
landscapes or, like “Vaquero” (1957) or Slinger (1975), play with popular mythic
versions of the frontier. It is also because Dorn adopts a poetic voice that in its
expansiveness, cool knowingness, ease, and wry humor seems to belong to wide
open spaces. Additionally, it is because he adopts an alert political stance that
depends on an understanding of the different possibilities of American “know-how,”
mobility, and energy: the same forces that could be positive, humane, and liberating –
and have been, sometimes, in his own personal history and the story of the
West – have also, he realizes, generated the “North Atlantic Turbine” of mass
production, conscienceless power, and the destruction of people and the planet for
profit. “From near the beginning,” Dorn has said, “I have known my work to be
theoretical in nature and poetic by virtue of its inherent tone.” He is not afraid of
speculation and direct, unmetaphorical speech; however, he is saved from simple
didacticism by his “tone” – which is the combined product of rapid transitions of
thought, subtle tonalities of rhythm and phrasing, and an astute use of personae,
irony (“a thing I’ve always admired,” he said), comedy, and sarcasm.
Apart from political works such as “The Sundering U.P. Tracks” (1967) or
“The Stripping of the River” (1967), Dorn wrote many lyrical poems: explorations
of human sentiment like “The Air of June Sings” (1955), that demonstrate, with
especial clarity, what Creeley called Dorn’s “Elizabethan care for the sound of
syllables.” In the later part of his career he favored epigrams, tight aphoristic pieces
which he labeled “dispatches.” Light and essential enough, Dorn hoped, to be
accepted “in the spirit / of the Pony Express,” they carried his commitment toGGray_c05.indd 604ray_c 05 .indd 604 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM