Due to an unforeseen situation, this lecture has been cancelled. We hope to reschedule it for Spring/Summer of next year.

In this loosely biographical lecture, Kyle Waugh will explore the influence of Charles Olson’s pedagogy on the development of Edward Dorn’s eclectic career, and how Dorn used the methodology he’d absorbed to transform the ways in which poems could “include history” and be “kinetic” at the same time. This program is free to members or with Museum admission.

Edward Dorn (1929-1999) was a dedicated student of Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, and he remains the primary inheritor of his teacher’s historically rooted, geographically oriented, and politically charged poetics. But while Olson descried this vast and shaggy continent from his beloved Gloucester, which served as Muse and model for his vision of a new “human” republic, Dorn roamed the American West, taking stock of its drift and drifters, and sharpening his vision of a retrograde civilization consuming itself for profit. Assiduously deploying Olson’s DIY methodology, Dorn’s deep study of the West led him to a radically different poetic address from that of his “skaldic” teacher, which came to a head in Dorn’s narco-mock epic of the “Sicksties,” Gunslinger. And yet, beneath its narrative flourishes and comic masque, the methods and themes of Gunslinger, and its deepest sensibilities, are still grounded in Olson’s system. 

Kyle Waugh (b. 1978) is a literary scholar and PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is editor of Edward Dorn’s Abilene! Abilene!: A Variorum Edition with Notes and Commentary (Lost & Found, 2013), and co-editor of Edward Dorn’s Derelict Air: From Collected Out (Enitharmon, 2015), The Collected Poems of Edward Dorn (Carcanet, 2012) and Kenneth Irby’s The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962-2006 (North Atlantic Books, 2009). His writing has appeared in Jacket2, Washington Square, Hot Gun!, Zen Monster, and elsewhere.