Features

Gathered here are twelve letters from Kenneth Irby to Edward Dorn, spanning roughly a decade, from January 1963 to February 1974. While this selection constitutes a small portion of only one side of the complete correspondence between the two poets — a correspondence they maintained until Dorn’s death in December 1999 — it is intended to provide a representative sample of Irby’s epistolary prosody, exuberance, and generosity.

As we all know, poets can be difficult.

The vision seeks the man — Zora Neale Hurston

I first encountered John Taggart’s work while living in Boulder, Colorado, circa 1990.[1] A now long-vanished indie bookstore, the Aion, which had a remarkably rich poetry collection (oh, for the era of real booksellers!), actually called me to say they had a few books I might like.