#ed dorn

[johbeil]

Ein Haiku von Ed Dorn

Alaska ist die Raquel Welch der Landschaften

– Ed Dorn Aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt von Johannes Beilharz. Das Original ist im oben abgebildeten Buch von Ed Dorn, Yellow Lola, formerly titled Japanese Neon, enthalten, das 1981 bei Cadmus Editions in Santa Barbara, Kalifornien, erschien. Heute fühlte ich mich inspiriert, mal wieder ein Gedicht zu übersetzen, und überflog das Regal links…

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[dare-g]

Asylum (2000) 

[louderfade]

I still have a notion that in our time a poem ought to make something clear as well as be beautiful.

-Edward Dorn

[blessedrestlessness]

Some Recent Ruminations on Félix González-Torres, the Instability of Oeuvres’ “Relevance” and the Troubling of Ostensibly “Fundamental” Binaries

By James D Bowman 3

        In his essay “True West: Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger Reimagines America’s Frontier Myths,” Colin Dickey writes: “Rather than being a canonical masterpiece, Dorn’s book may fade in and out of relevance as the need arises. In 1990, Dorn himself reflected that there didn’t seem to be ‘any quarrels with that book because that’s so remote now. It doesn’t threaten anything.’ But in 2004, Steinhoff suggested there might be a newfound resonance for Gunslinger in the early 21st century due to the fact that, ‘once again we’ve acquired a paranoid and kleptocratic administration keen on imperialist adventures.’ / Another decade, another paranoid and kleptocratic administration, and yet again Gunslinger appears on the horizon.” The sociopolitical fecundity of González-Torres’ work could be said to fluctuate in a similar manner. It, too, lives “in excess” of any “moment”, whether that of its conception, its execution, its exhibition, etc.; rising and dipping with the shifts in civic consciousness and emerging noticeably when the need arises, not primarily as a criticism of the odious and endlessly lamented aspects of contemporary civilization, or even as a kind of escapist “antidote”, but as a proposal, a prescriptive suggestion, an “invitation” (in the religious sense) to “receive” [into our hearts] what it offers.

        In the same [September 2018] issue of Poetry Magazine in which Dickey’s essays appeared, the poet Jayme Ringleb, in a beautiful poem titled “My Husband, Lost in the Wild” conceives of a relationship with a man that troubles many binaries—between bodily integrity and dislocation, between presence and absense, between long-distance love and the irritation of imperfect (in this case absurdly so) close-proximity. It speaks of the husband’s eyeball, which he buried long ago (“on a dare, he said”) under a Georgian tree, and of the husband’s tongue, which he left as a tip (“slid under a mug / at a small North Florida diner”). Most poignantly, the poem speaks of the husband’s ears: “His ears / he’d left with me, / I told them / everything—words / I had invented for the color / of new moons, city names / I had given to four slender / ant colonies that had since / emerged on the lawn. / I told the ears Come back to me, / but they were unable to / relay these types of things […]”

        Is the art of González-Torres any less relationally radical? Or any less disturbing of our binaristic impulses we’ve been instilled with and conditioned to preserve? More than any other contemporary artist, he seems to me to have (to borrow theological language) a “real presence”, “in, with, and under” his works, and yet his works are immeasurably queer in their conception (and execution) of “stability”—of object, self, and [“I/Thou”] relationality.

[oakbug-oldacct]

[divisionleap]

Michael Myer’s linocut for the rare first edition of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Ladies, published by the Zephyrus Image in 1977. Those familiar with the story will know that the cleaning woman is removing coke stains from the ceiling. Never has a short story been brought into this world with more empathy, brilliance and attention - a model for what an artists’ book of prose can achieve. More images and the whole story can be seen today on Archive & Survive. 

[dare-g]

Asylum (2000)

[poem-today]

A poem by Ed Dorn

If It Should Ever Come

And we are all there together  time will wave as willows do  and adios will be truly, yes,  laughing at what is forgotten  and talking of what's new  admiring the roses you brought.  How sad.  You didn't know you were at the end  thought it was your bright pear  the earth, yes  another affair to have been kept  and gazed back on  when you had slept  to have been stored  as a squirrel will a nut, and half  forgotten,  there were so many, many  from the newly fallen. 

Ed Dorn (1929-1999)