Ed Dorn. And all.

Thank you for your sympathies about Black Kitty's death. It's been meditative and helpful to read them. I do, I miss him.

Here's a link to an article in the New York Times about the late Ed Dorn with a picture I kind of love. I guess that there's a new collection of his work out. The older sister of my best friend in high school was a poet, and raved about her teacher Ed Dorn with such over the top admiration that he became one of the reasons that I decided to go to college at the University of Colorado. We all lived in a suburb of Denver, and one of her big selling points for Ed Dorn was that he knew The Ramones. Wikipedia says he was an early supporter of Devo, but The Ramones were the rock connection I heard about.

I took a bunch of classes from him, and found him to be kind of a mess, but also serious and oddly generous in his frequently absent way. His class on the Literature of the West changed the way I thought of that subject forever, and I almost fainted with pleasure when he read my paper on Carry A. Nation (the saloon smasher who later had a cameo in my novel Martha Moody) aloud to the class as an example of how such things should be written.

I agree with the reviewer -- my favorite of his poems are short, elegant love poems -- some of them are in my life for good, entwined with everything that happened for me in Boulder in the early eighties, but I don't see any online. Here's an excerpt from his long poem, From Gloucester Out. ("Man" as universal is all over it. Ed Dorn was like that.)

And, with that, I'm in a work crunch before heading out to Budapest, so may not be posting much for a while. Or I might, because I sometimes find lj hard to resist. And there are things to say about Budapest, and the beautiful support I've gotten around that trip, but, for now, it's just a clear, heartfelt thank you to those who have been so generous. And to everyone who reads here with an interest in my work.