o_190rdjfm016nc2151bib7h517kha.pdf

Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn
happens as any new group of poets starts to fight for a
place in the sun. I’m not sure that it adds anything to
our knowledge of the poets, new or old, though
literary historians may thrive on such material.
Dorn was mostly based in Pocatello, Idaho,
during the years covered by the majority of the letters
(roughly 1959 to 1965), whereas Jones was in New
York and therefore in a position to meet a wide
variety of poets. In a letter from March, 1963, Jones
reports that several “Deep Imagists” had paid him a
visit and names Rochelle Owens, George Economou,
and Armand Schwerner. I can’t imagine that the Deep
Image group will now mean much to many people,
other than students of literary movements, but they
were active for a time in the early 1960s. And as
individuals the various poets carried on writing when
the group label lost its relevance. I have to admit that
I was never sure just what they represented in terms
of their ideas about how to write poems. Jones’s brief
report on their visit gives the impression that he
wasn’t too keen on their work. It also gives him the
opportunity to once again display his crude
comments about one of the women in the group.
Another letter, later in 1963, finds Jones sneering at
Denise Levertov. The misogynistic strain in his
thinking becomes so evident that the reader can’t help
wondering just what his problem was.
Jones was by 1963 beginning to establish a
reputation as a poet, critic, and editor. He edited an
excellent prose anthology, The Moderns, which
featured some of Dorn’s work alongside Kerouac,
Burroughs, Creeley, and others, and his jazz study,
Blues People: Negro Music in White America, was
published to critical acclaim. His early poems,
collected in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,
showed him to be an adventurous and entertaining
poet. Dorn, by contrast, was still largely limited to
publishing in little magazines, though his collection,
The Newly Fallen, had appeared in 1962. And that
came about largely due to Jones’s interventions on his
behalf. It wasn’t that Dorn’s work lacked substance or
interest, but the fact of his being away from a major
centre of literary activity like New York or San
Francisco meant that he wasn’t in a position to make
contacts and cultivate editors and publishers. He was
lucky to have Jones as a friend who promoted his
writing.
A letter in 1964 has Jones admitting to “Jewbaiting”
while he was “on some powder and drinking
my head off,” and it perhaps is an indicator of how
he would later write poems in which contained what
Kenneth Rexroth referred to as “vicious anti-Semitic
doggerel.” In 1965 Jones announced that he would in
future be known as Amiri Baraka and he began to
distance himself from his white family and friends.
The letters more or less come to a halt, partly because
of Jones’s new involvements but also because it was in
1965 that Dorn decided to move to England and take
up a position as a lecturer at Essex University. He
remained there until 1970. Claudia Moreno Pisano
mentions that Jones says that he and Dorn
corresponded in the 1990s, but the letters haven’t yet
come to light.
I’ve admittedly moved around the letters and
selected certain areas of them for comment. And it
may be that in doing so I’ve overlooked some of their
more interesting passages. Leaving aside the
tendencies to belittle other poets and to often
denigrate women, they do provide a great deal of
valuable material for literary scholars. Obviously,
much of the information relates to personal matters,
such as families and finances (always a problem), and
to the whereabouts and activities of mutual friends
and fellow-poets. But there are also references to little
magazines and small-press publishers. Jones’s
involvements with Yugen and The Floating Bear, are
discussed, and Dorn’s little magazine, Wild Dog, is
also referred to. Jones recommends Yowl, a magazine
edited by George Montgomery, and suggests that
Dorn send some prose to Second Coming. It seems to
me that information like this is useful to an
understanding of the period concerned. Little
magazines played an essential role in the rise of the
new writing. There is, incidentally, a letter from 1960
in which Dorn tells Jones that he’d sent a poem called
“Pronouncement” to a Dr Gilbert Nieman in Puerto
Rico but had heard nothing further about it. Nieman
edited a magazine called Between Worlds from the
Inter-American University in Puerto Rico and Dorn’s
poem was published in the first issue which is dated
Summer, 1960.
Claudia Moreno Pisano has provided
informative notes about many of the people referred
to by Jones and Dorn and she efficiently fills in the
gaps between letters. There is in, addition, a useful
bibliography. This is an essential book for anyone
with an interest in Jones/Baraka and Dorn or the
wider field of the development of the “New American
Writing” of the 1950s and 1960s.
Hardcover at 248 pages. $59.95.
ISBN 978-0-8263-5391-7
61