o_190rdufvh17l119a81ci61qo68hta.pdf

Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn
a position as a Fulbright lecturer at Essex University
where he remained until 1970. When he returned to
the USA he still found it necessary to teach part-time
while trying to develop his poetry. In 1977 he was
offered a teaching position at the University of
Colorado and stayed there until he died in 1999.
The initial contact between Jones (I’ll use the
name he had during the main part of the time they
corresponded) and Dorn was in 1959 when Jones was
editing his little-magazine, Yugen, and wrote to Dorn
to ask him to send some poems. Jones was publishing
a wide selection of the new writers, including Beats
like Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg, Black
Mountaineers such as Fielding Dawson and Joel
Oppenheimer, and Frank O’Hara who was linked to
the New York School. Dorn was going
to be in good company. There are
notes about most of the people
mentioned and it’s useful to have them.
Kerouac and Ginsberg don’t need to be
explained, but what about Max
Finstein? Unless you’re a specialist with
an interest in this period of American
poetry it’s unlikely you’ll know anything
about Finstein. His name does crop up
here and there in the letters, not always
in a complimentary way. But he’s not
alone in that and I’ll say something
later about how and why Jones and
Dorn seem to feel it necessary to be
derogatory about many other poets.
And not just poets. Joyce Glassman
(later known as Joyce Johnson) became a particular
hate figure for Jones. Claudia Moreno Pisano says
that Glassman “is the target of some of Jones’s more
vicious misogynist vitriol,” probably because in her
role as an editor at a commercial publisher she didn’t
match up to his expectations of publication of Dorn’s
work.
The exchange of letters became regular once
the initial contact had been established. Both poets
were experiencing financial problems and they often
compare notes on how much, or more likely how
little, they’re likely to be paid for a reading or whether
or not the money can be raised to publish a small
book. Publishing their poems in little magazines
wasn’t ever going to bring in payments of any
consequence, or even any payments at all, most
magazines struggling to stay alive. Jones’s own
magazine, Yugen, had folded after eight issues, and a
mimeographed publication, The Floating Bear, that
he’d started with Diane di Prima, didn’t pay
contributors.
above...Ed Dorn
60
By 1961 Jones was becoming increasingly
politicised and in September he wrote to Dorn to say
that he’d been arrested and charged with “resisting
arrest; inciting to riot; disorderly conduct.” He’d also
attracted the attention of the right-wing Senator
Eastland who described Jones as a “Beatnik poet,
radical leftist racist agitator.” This led to an exchange
of ideas about politics and to what degree poets
should involve themselves in activism. Jones was
obviously an advocate of poets getting involved, but
Dorn had his doubts and tended to take the position
that it was probably better to stay outside politics, at
least in terms of the poet being caught up in direct
action on the streets. He had a deep distrust of the
State (any State, even a revolutionary one) and
thought that they all should be treated with suspicion.
As Jones became even more
active and moved towards
changing his name and
abandoning his white friends
and even his white wife and
their children, they continued
to disagree about political
involvement. Claudia Moreno
Pisano has an interesting
quotation from Howard
Brick’s Age of Contradiction:
American Thought and Culture
in the 1960s: “American
thought and culture grew
turbulent and rife with
contention; the realm of ideas
and arts became more subject
to instability than the foundations of American social
structure itself.”
I mentioned earlier that throughout the
letters there are frequent derogatory references to
other writers. Philip Lamantia is described as “the
fastest longest more boringest talker in the East or
West,” and Michael McClure as “the hugest egotist of
us all.” There’s a reference to “hayseed Kerouac,” and
Robert Creeley as “simple-minded about sociopolitical
matters.” Max Finstein and Marc Schleifer
(connected with the magazine, Kulchur) are attacked,
with Schleifer said to be “the world’s worst poet.”
And women in particular seem to have angered Jones.
Denise Levertov, Diane di Prima, Joyce Glassman,
and Lita Hornick (who financed Kulchur), just to
mention the better-known names, come in for
criticism, often of a nasty kind. Dorn sometimes
joins in, but I had the feeling that his heart may not
have been in it and he was just reacting in a way that
Jones expected. Perhaps I’m wrong? There are other
dismissals, of course, often of established and/or
academic poets. I suppose this was inevitable and it