Edward Dorn: Abilene! Abilene! (Part I & II)
Edward Dorn: Abilene! Abilene! (Part I & II)
$15.00
Editor: Kyle Waugh
Part I: 54 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
Part II: 58 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding (with insert)
A cross between The Seventh Seal and Blazing Saddles, Abilene! Abilene! is
the unfinished screenplay poet Ed Dorn drafted for a collaboration with
filmmaker Stan Brakhage in the late 1960s. Though Brakhage once claimed
their film “was to be America’s answer to The Blood of a Poet,” the
project was twice abandoned for lack of funding—first in 1969, leaving
the script half-finished, then again in 1976, when San Francisco-based
Zephyrus Image Press canceled plans to publish its first (and only)
section. Four decades later,
Abilene! Abilene!’s incompleteness
and colorful bibliographic history make it a remarkably reflective
text: altogether its many versions afford a privileged glimpse into
Dorn’s editorial process, and its multistage, prismatic failure offers a
narrative index of the waning autonomy of countercultural production
and experimentation over the course of the latter half of the 1970s. A
peculiar result of cross-media affinities among the post-war American
“avant-garde,”
Abilene! Abilene! is an idiosyncratic artifact
of “Sicksties” (Dorn’s spelling) zeitgeist, and makes an instructive and
entertaining component to Dorn’s mock-epic
Gunslinger.
Author Biography:
EDWARD DORN (1929-1999) was born in rural Illinois on
the verge of the Great Depression. He studied under Charles Olson at
Black Mountain in the 1950s. In 1961, then LeRoi Jones published Dorn’s
first book, The Newly Fallen. Over the next four decades, Dorn taught at
universities across the US, and in England and France. He died in
Denver, CO, having published over twenty books of poetry and short
prose, one novel, and an anthropological account of the Shoshone
Indians.
Selected Archives:
- Edward Dorn Papers, Thomas J. Dodd, Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
- Zephyrus Image Archives, Special Collections at the University of Delaware Libraries, Newark, DE
- James Stanley Brakhage Papers, at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, Boulder, CO
- Black Sparrow Press Records, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico, NM
- Private Archives (Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Granary Books, Tom Raworth, Rob Rusk, John Friedman)
- Donald C. & Elizabeth M. Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK