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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
challenging
medium-paced
Deep-dive lyric poetry on a formidable scale, endlessly fascinating, gun, and gorgeous. It feels lived in, sacred and profane.
Art poetry is not entirely my bag but I checked this out because I dig the mythology of the American West, especially the bent versions of it. This is a picaresque epic poem about a gunslinger, a talking horse, a girl, a few other people who honestly I stopped paying enough attention to keep apart. It's surprisingly silly and outright funny in parts -- lots and lots of puns, some great, some ... not really worth recording for posterity. Like if my friend said some of these things while stoned (e.g. spelling the word "shit" as "xit" it would be amusing a few times and then dumb and then we would not bother remembering it or writing it down. Ed Dorn does not feel the same way. This book is definitely at least in part about drugs, and if you are not on those drugs, it is not super interesting in big parts. There is a real line-level genius at work. Not sure why he only does that like <10% of the time. Definitely not recommended unless you like irreverent stoned poetry A LOT. Still, a few chestnuts from this are going in my notebook of delightful mind diamonds.
this like a bob dylan album with one good song on it. and also no music.
this like a bob dylan album with one good song on it. and also no music.
Astounding. A Pynchon novel rendered in verse, and maybe with even more on its mind. The end-stage of the American spirit, traipsing across a plastic desert, in search of the Godhead of industry. I'm going to have to return to this often.
The funniest, most mind-expanding, most challenging, poetic epic of the last fifty years, or more. Read it!
challenging
funny
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
um, yeah mind blow-r. to call this an epic poem is an understatement. this is an epic unconventional braided tale(s) of glorious proportions. the wild west circa the 60's (makes me think of w. s. burroughs' use of 'the west'). undeniable word choice, unexplainable concepts. endless avenues of divine chaos that i could never, in a lifetime, explain. the poem is about Everything. edward dorn where have you been all my life, really?
A trip. Great use of language, even if a lot of it didn't exactly make sense.
Not quite what I expected from this. I thought like a pop art pastiche of Sergio Leone westerns but it ended up being an occasionally existential sixties/seventies drug romp (and not in the more entertaining Fear and Loathing way). However, this is poetry. So the next time I read it I might appreciate it a bit more. I should also read a little more about/of Ed Dorn and his work. Right now I feel the urge to make an abridged version of this poem to capture the best moments and philosophical musings from this work in order to release it from it's usually dated Beat-ish free verse. Perhaps a more detailed, learned review will come someday. For now, I don't get it... fully.