Two Interviews

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Edited by Gavin Selerie and Justin Katko. Edward Dorn's TWO INTERVIEWS brings together two largely unseen interviews from 1971 and 1981, conducted in Vancouver and London, with Tom McGauley, Brian Fawcett, John Scoggan, Stan Persky, J. H. Prynne, Ralph Maud, and Gavin Selerie. Published alongside the interviews are uncollected extracts from Dorn's Day & Night Report (1971), extracts from his unpublished prose work Juneau in June (1981), and three uncollected poems from 1981. Along with Justin Katko's preface to the book, which focuses on Dorn and Prynne's 1971 trip to Vancouver, and an extended introduction to the 1981 interview by Gavin Selerie, which deals with Dorn's geographical and linguistic alignments, particularly those relating to his first period in England, this book includes unpublished photographs, and a bibliography of Dorn interviews.

Edward Dorn (1929-1999) was an American poet who studied at Black Mountain College, and was to become one of the leading figures in the so-called Black Mountain group of poets. A crucial part of his life-story involved a five-year stay in England, where he was to influence local developments, and in turn be influenced. Most of his most important early volumes were to be first published in London, including Geography, The North Atlantic Turbine, and Gunslinger Books 1 & 2. In 1977 Dorn accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he taught for the rest of his life, directing the Creative Writing Program and editing the literary newspaper Rolling Stock with his second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn. Dorn's major work is Gunslinger, a long poem in five sections, which was published in its complete form in 1975. His Collected Poems appeared in England in 2012.