Ed Dorn

With what geometry (PoemTalk #101)

Edward Dorn, 'The Sundering U.P. Tracks'

Left to right: Simone White, Sophia Le Fraga, and Andrew Whiteman.

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Simone White, Sophia Le Fraga, and Andrew Whiteman joined Al Filreis to talk about Ed Dorn’s “The Sundering U.P. Tracks.” A political reading of the poem emerges through the discussion, as they group situates it as a late-1960s reflection on a slightly earlier moment of realization and radicalization: the turning-point summer of 1965, when Dorn’s collaborator, photographer Leroy McLucas, arrived in Pocatello only to discover that he was to be housed on the other side of the tracks. The racial trope and idiom of the US East reverts to its literal origins in the making of the US West. And there it is: the key fault line, a built-environment actuality and metaphor. Dorn here is ready rhetorically and politically for a counter-expansion that rereads American generations of Manifest Destiny, monopoly, segregation, and local oligarchy on one hand, and, on the other, “summer firebombs / of Chicago.”

Alan Golding reads Ed Dorn

Alan Golding reads from the work of Ed Dorn at the 40th University of Louisville conference on literature and culture after 1900 — on February 25, 2012: MP3. Recording made by Aldon Nielsen.

On Ed Dorn, 'The Newly Fallen'

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