Gunfire
Andrew Crozier
Slinger Edward Dorn (Wingbow Press) Most American poets worth their salt seem to feel challenged at some stage in their careers by the idea of the long poem, and indeed in certain honourable cases the challenge has seemed to be that of the unfinishable poem, the poem that can constitute the central experience of the author's life, brought to a close only by death. Edward Dorn's Slinger doesn't belong to thislatter category, fortunately for him, but mortality is one of a number of metaphysical topics with which he plays in a poem remarkable for the sustained pleasure it affords. As an accomplished rhetor Dorn reveals his pleasure as well, not in his own performance, but in the agility and gusto with which his inventions perform their discursive routines within his spare narrative.
A good example of this, which also reveals unobtrusively the fundamental poetic seriousness of Dorn's writing, occurs early in
the second book of the poem, when the ostensibly narrative of the poem abruptly dies on us, and is revealed to even the most stubbornly realist of readers as having been just another character in a dramatic narrative which has been going on all the time without benefit of subjective control :
Life and Death are attributes of the Soul not of things. The Ego is costumed as the road manager of the soul, every time the soul plays a date in another town
I goes ahead to set up
the bleechers, or book the hall as they now have it,
the phenomenon is reported by the phrase I got there ahead of myself Part of the pleasure of these lines, spoken by the Slinger, a semi-divine personage whose local manifestation encompasses the action of the poem, lies in their easy accommodation of both low and high language. Such range is a quality of the poem as a whole, not just of the speech of a single character, and is the achievement upon which the narrative depends. It is, moreover, an achievement of language inconceivable in the mouth of a subjective narrator. 'I' had to die for good reason but, although matters don't end there for him, as with any good film, it would spoil things for the reviewer to disclose too much of the unfolding action.
It would be more accurate, however, to talk of actions rather than a single action, for although the person of the Slinger persists as the centre of the poem's imaginative undertaking, one of his essential functions is to mediate the collective presence of an improbable group of mortals whose conversation reveals them to be, more than anything else, the projections of various metaphysical points of view, of which I' was merely the first. The last in the series, surely a subtle and covert attack on one of the softest but least exposed areas of the American gnosis,is a Speaking Barrel:
Can he walk ? No, but he can roll He hangs out with the tumbleweeds and he loves to talk • I can believe that Everything noticed look at the way it vibrates You better ask it a question before it busts a band Hokay, Portland Bill blurted What about Oil
I aint no drum! the Barrel shouted This is not contained humour, occasioned by a mechanical type of visual invention, but part of a continuous, free-wheeling comic rhetoric which binds together the poem's several voices.
But although this group of weird characters, as if in attendance upon the Slinger, are supposedly travelling in a purposive fashion across the American Southwest, the serial way in which the various individuals are introduced enables the writing to stay sharp and humorously alert without needing to peg such qualities on any specific action that is to be described. The poem moves forward more or less as continuous commentary, by
different dramatic voices, on a non-existent action, so that its true action is in fact the series of conversational occasions motivated by the Slinger's presence. What the Slinger stands for, by contrast to the New Mexicans who allowed their town to be renamed Truth or Consequences for the sake of a radio panel game, or the robber baron Robart whose existence is subsumed to the mechanically applied energy he exploits, Is a gestural quality of action the perfection of which transcends performance:
When the act is so self contained and so dazzling in itself the target then can disappear
Gunslinger Book I was published in 1968' Here, with the publication of Book IV, Dor° brings together the five sections of his long poem under a lightly modified title meant' perhaps, to carry fewer explicit associatiorl.s* If this is thecase it is evidence of a precise clts* crimination on the author's part that, out wishing to qualify the Western locale °I his narrative, he should detach his protag°11.ist from some of the more obvious her°I.c conventions that flourish there. And this 1,5 entirely appropriate, since the Slinger. is more truly the occasion for an act of writil that is self-contained and dazzling in It° It may appear in due course that Slinger wa," something of a long parenthesis in porn work, but even so it will remain a detoni well worth the visit.
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