Editing Ed Dorn (section)

==Overview==
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Dorn was born in [[Villa Grove, Illinois]]. He grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. He attended a one-room schoolhouse for his first eight grades. He later studied at the [[University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign|University of Illinois]] and at [[Black Mountain College]] (1950–55). At Black Mountain he came into contact with [[Charles Olson]], who greatly influenced his literary worldview and his sense of himself as poet.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edward-dorn/company/02304585| title=Edward Dorn |publisher= Poetry Foundation|accessdate=4 March 2025}}</ref>

Dorn's final examiner at Black Mountain was [[Robert Creeley]], with whom, along with the poet [[Robert Duncan (poet)|Robert Duncan]], Dorn became included as one of a trio of younger poets later associated with Black Mountain and with Charles Olson.<ref>''The Lost America of Love'', by Sherman Paul, celebrates this relationship, as did the Charles Olson conference held under Paul's direction at the University of Iowa in 1978, in which Dorn, Duncan, and Creeley were the only poets participating among a flurry of academic literary scholars. Dorn is now considered by some commentators to be the inheritor of Olson's bardic mantle, the transmittee of the lamp.</ref>

In 1951, Dorn left Black Mountain and traveled to the [[Pacific Northwest]], where he did manual labor and met his first wife, Helene; they returned to the school in late 1954. After graduation and two years of travel, Dorn's family settled in Washington state, the setting for his autobiographical novel ''By the Sound'' (originally published as ''Rites of Passage''), which describes the grinding poverty of life in "the basement stratum of society."  In 1961 he accepted his first teaching job at [[Idaho State University]], where he published the magazine ''Wild Dog''. His first book of poetry, ''The Newly Fallen'', was published by [[LeRoi Jones]]'s Totem Press in 1961.

In 1965, with the photographer Leroy Lucas, Dorn spent the summer visiting Indian reservations for a book commissioned by William Morrow & Co. Press, ''The Shoshoneans''.  That fall, British poet and scholar [[Donald Davie]] invited him to join the faculty at the Literature Department he was creating at the new [[University of Essex]].<ref name="jacketmagazine.com">{{Cite web |url=http://jacketmagazine.com/38/waugh-dorn.shtml |title= "You Are Sometimes in the Trance of What Is Beyond You": Upheaval, Incantation and Ed Dorn in the Summer of 1968 |last=Waugh  |first=Kyle |year=2009 |website=Jacket Magazine}}</ref> He spent most of the next five years in England, where he published several collections of poems and wrote Book 1 of ''Gunslinger''.  He also started working with Gordon Brotherston on translations from Latin American texts, solidified his close friendship with British poet [[J.H. Prynne]], and met his second wife, Jennifer Dunbar.<ref name="jacketmagazine.com"/>

On returning to the United States, Dorn spent the 1970s as an academic migrant, teaching at over half a dozen universities across the country. In San Francisco, he collaborated with the printer and artist team of (Holbrook) Teter and (Michael) Myers on a number of projects, including the ''Bean News'', the comic book format of ''Recollections of Gran Apachería''', and the typesetting of the complete ''Gunslinger'' in 1974.  In 1977 Dorn accepted a professorship at the [[University of Colorado at Boulder]], where he taught for the rest of his life, directing the Creative Writing Program and editing the literary newspaper ''[[Rolling Stock (newspaper)|Rolling Stock]]'' (motto: “If It Moves Print It”) with his wife Jennifer.

Dorn was openly homophobic. His 1984 poem "Aid(e) Memoire" warned that those who "screw and are screwed...drink directly from the sewer." He inaugurated the "Aids Award for Poetry" in the same year, giving it to several leading gay poets.<ref>''Fairyland'', by Alysia Abbot, p. 189</ref>

During the 1990s, after a teaching exchange visit to [[Paul Valery University, Montpellier III|Paul Valery University]] in [[Montpellier]] inspired an interest in the [[Cathars]] of Southern France, he started working on ''Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics''. He was also writing another long narrative poem ''Westward Haut''. During the last two and a half years of his life, he wrote the poems for the posthumously published ''Chemo Sabe'', reporting on his cancer treatments.

Dorn's main work, his [[Masterpiece|magnum opus]], is ''[[Gunslinger (Ed Dorn poem)|''Gunslinger'']]''. ''Gunslinger'' is a long poem in five sections. Part 1 was first published in 1968, and the final complete text appeared in 1974. Other important publications include ''The Collected Poems: 1956-1974'' (1975), ''Recollections of Gran Apacheria'' (1975), ''Abhorrences'' (1989), ''High West Rendezvous: A Sampler'' (1997), and ''[Way More West: New and Selected Poems]'' (2008). <ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/01/collected-poems-by-edward-dorn-review| title=Collected Poems by Edward Dorn |publisher= The Guardian|accessdate=4 March 2025}}</ref>

Popular horror novelist [[Stephen King]] admired Dorn, describing his poetry as "talismans of perfect writing" and even naming the first novel of [[The Dark Tower (series)|The Dark Tower series]], "The Gunslinger," in honor of Dorn's poem.<ref>[http://jacketmagazine.com/32/fredman-dorn.shtml The Dark Tower (series)], jacketmagazine.com; accessed July 22, 2015.</ref> King opened both the prologue and epilogue of "The Stand" with Dorn's line, "We need help, the Poet reckoned."<ref>King, Stephen. ''The Stand''. New York; New American Library Publishing, 1990 Unabridged Paperback Edition. pp xix, 1136.</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://jacketmagazine.com/32/fredman-dorn.shtml| title=Introduction to Edward Dorn |publisher= Jacket Magazine|accessdate=4 March 2025}}</ref>