“A Collected Poems of Edward Dorn, the American poet who died in 1999, is a necessary and overdue publication, and, whatever the circumstances, the fact that it was not published in U.S.A. suggests that there is something very wrong with the local culture over there, a fact of which Ed Dorn was very much aware. In fact most of the time it dominated his writing. It has often been said that a ‘Collected Poems’ is a dreadful thing, and when it is 1000 pages long it is certainly a daunting thing, and there are all sorts of problems in how to use it. When Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems appeared in 1971 I got rid of all the original books, and now can’t find a poem I want unless I can clearly remember the title or incipit. The first collected poems of Charles Olson (Archaeologist of Morning, 1970) had…
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