Ed Dorn (Edward Dorn) Biography

American poet, born in Villa Grove, Illinois, educated at the University of Illinois. Dorn's childhood in the Great Depression was marked by the transient migrant life of his impoverished mother and stepfather. He became disaffected from the orthodoxies of the state educational system, and went to Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he came under the influence of Charles Olson, whose A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn (1964) was written in response to Dorn's request for guidance in studying the American West. A wanderer by temperament, Dorn has taught at several universities in the USA and abroad. His first poems were published in the Black Mountain Review; his volumes of poems include From Gloucester Out (1964), Geography (1965, revised 1968), The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), The Collected Poems 1956–1974 (1975; enlarged 1983), and Abhorrences (1990). He has published translations of Latin American poets, and Native American poets. His major prose works are What I See in The Maximus Poems (1960), a critical tribute to Charles Olson; The Rites of Passage (1965 and 1971; alternately issued as By the Sound), and The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau (1966). Dorn is a political poet, fiercely desiring the democracy that he finds lacking in the capitalist orthodoxy of American political and social institutions. He cherishes the Native Americans and their ancient culture, and mourns the loss of their ancestral lands. His Gunslinger (Parts 1 and 2, 1968–9; complete version, 1975) is an abrasive, witty grotesquery, mocking the myth of the West.