Cento Magazine

Edward Merton Dorn, born in Villa Grove, Illinois, grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. For his first eight grades, he attended a one-room schoolhouse. He later studied at both the University of Illinois and at Black Mountain College.

Leaving Black Mountain College in 1951 he traveled to the Pacific Northwest. He survived doing manual labor before returning to Black Mountain with Helene Dorn, his first wife in late 1954. Following graduation and two years of travel he settled with his family in Washington State, which became the setting for By the Sound, his autobiographical novel. Originally published as Rites of Passage, By the Sound, describes the grinding poverty of life.

Having lived through the Great Depression hardship was a way of life, Dorn was very familiar with. Unlike today when an unexpected expense occurs, Dorn did not have the convenience of getting payday cash loans when there was an immediate need for money. His early days living at the bottom of the economic ladder in a capitalistic society, both as a young child and then later as a young man with a family, informed and influenced his sensibilities as a writer and a political poet.

Dorn’s writing was almost always socially and politically oriented. A long-time teacher of writing, his resume includes being a faculty member in Literature Department at University of Essex in England, to teaching at over half a dozen universities across the country during the 1970’s until in 1977 he accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he taught for the rest of his life. Dorn most clearly made his mark in the provocative union between poetry and political engagement by bringing within the sphere of expressive language and poetic experience objects and feelings that had been before, literally unimaginable in those terms.

On December 10, 1999 in Denver, Colorado, Dorn died of pancreatic cancer.
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•    Ed Dorn Live: MP3 Audio files
•    Al Simmons // Live Long and Still Die With A Pretty Face
•    Alastair Johnston // Ed Dorn and the Z I Connection
•    Amiri Baraka // Ed Dorn
•    Barry Alpert // The Outrageously Invoked Tradition
•    Charles Potts // On Chemo Sabe
•    Charles Potts // On Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger
•    Charles Potts // The Dorn Story
•    Dale Smith // A Paramount Interrogation
•    Dale Smith // A World of Difference
•    Dave Cook // Ed Dorn at Essex: A personal recollection
•    Ed Dorn Interview // Effie Mihopoulos
•    Gerard Czerwien // His Mispronounced Character
•    Gloria Frym // No clouds bloom the soft-dying day
• Herbie Butterfield // Ed(ward Merton) Dorn (1929-1999): A Memoir, an Introduction, an Overview, Some Poems, and a Song
• Wilson Myer // Remembers hCG drops
•    Jennifer Dunbar Dorn // ROLLING STOCK: A Chronicle of the Eighties
•    Joe Safdie // Once Upon a Time with West Ed
•    John Wolff // Edward Dorn: An 80′s Reminiscence
•    Lorna Dee Cervantes // After the Wake
•    Robert Creeley // Oh, do you remember…
•    Stephen Ellis // Some Notes on Edward Dorn’s “The Problem of the Poem for my Daughter, Left Unsolved”
•    Terry Jacobus // The Air of June Sings
•    Tom Clark // Stolen Riches
•    Tom Pickard // First of May

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Ed Dorn Live: MP3 Audio files
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painting by Philip Behymer
Latest blogs about Ed Dorn
•    UbuWeb: Spring 2007
•    UbuWeb: Spring 2007
•    UbuWeb: Spring 2007
•    Ten Hours of Stan Brakhage Radio Broadcasts
•    Author’s Note (Blogging Spam Art)
•    Blah Blah About the Blog – Lorna Dee’s Partial Interview w/ Francisco Aragon
•    Wait until colors change to pick a peck of peppers
•    EVILS
•    Expert says home mortgage problems don’t affect most people (3d home architect)
•    Evils.
•    UbuWeb: Spring 2007
•    UbuWeb: Spring 2007
•    Polis Is This: The Life and Poetry of Charles Olson
•    She had Decadron with the biggest one being x x cm on the left side.
•    Counter-Factuality
•    The more people will trust Adorama both as a reliable information source and as a place where they can feel comfortable buying
•    Links for 2007-08-04 [del.icio.us]
•    Officials gather to celebrate opening of Dorn Community Center
•    Officials gather to celebrate opening of Dorn Community Center
•    Ed Dorn: From “SONGS Set Two A Short Count. This volume is to honour the Scald.”
more
New Dorn publications

“Edward Dorn: American Heretic”, Chicago Review, Summer 2004. 250 pages devoted to Dorn, including early correspondence with Leroi Jones, Tom Raworth, and Charles Olson, a transcript of a Dorn poetry workshop, plus interviews, essays and some of Dorn’s later poetry. For more information see the Chicago Review website.

Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, Outtakes edited by Joseph Richey. Forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in 2005.

Selected Poems edited by Michael Rothenberg is due from Penguin in 2006.