This work collects the commentary of the later years and last days of one of America’s most powerful and unique poets. Along with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, and others, Edward Dorn taught at and became associated with the Black Mountain school in North Carolina. Although influenced by Charles Olson, Dorn’s poetry was really like no other’s.
The Virginia Quarterly Review
called him
an experienced and accomplished poet who has absorbed Olson, Williams, and Pound and moved beyond them.
This book is especially important for the way it synthesizes Dorn’s views on poetic experimentation, the distinction between consciousness and sensibility, and
heretical
intellection, which is to say the components of his poetics of aggression.