Prologue: We Were There When It Was modern (1965-1968) After two years of correspondence between Idaho and England ed Dom and I finally met up in somebody in 1965 at the then-- brand-new University of Essex I arrived from Cambridge in the spring of that year and took a stead in a cottage in the North Sea fishing village of Brightlingsea.

Prologue: We Were There When It Was modern (1965-1968)

After two years of correspondence between Idaho and England ed Dom and I finally met up in somebody in 1965 at the then-- brand-new University of Essex I arrived from Cambridge in the spring of that year and took a stead in a cottage in the North Sea fishing village of Brightlingsea, a half dozen miles from the still-in-construction university site at Wivenhoe Park. Early that autumn Dom and his family-his wife Helene, son Paul, II, stepchildren Fr 16 and Chansonette, christendomed over from America on the Queen Elizabeth. Coming not on a dozen trying but illuminating years of wandering "throughout the trans-mountain west following the winde," the family, a tight-knit little clump brought closer together by protracted experience of pioneering, was making its first trip to Europe Dorn's initial glimpse of the of long date World came at Cherbourg in succession September 13. It was a large weight for him, setting his faculty of perception of himself as a bard up against his sense of cultural identity in ways he did not still fully understand. The next day, rounding the Isle of Wight in succession the great ocean liner, he consideration of Keats's letters-as thirty-three years later, dying, he would retrace Keats's last travels to the Spanish stairs and the Protestant Cemetery in Rome Five minutes later the tide of feeling had revolveed in him again, and, as he would report in a alphabetic character to his erstwhile mentor Charles Olson "for about reason the whole thing welled up in me and I started asking abstract questions like do I really want to go on to England, do I want to be here forward this ship."

By then the two questions were purely academic. At the fall of the curtain of a bewildering trail of "altogether nagging occupations" that stretched back to his Illinois prairie adolescence, he now stood at the brink of the first work at jobs that would befit the years of intensive autodidactic labor he had deposit into turning himself from a poor farm lad into a writer and a thinker. That do job-work would provide the credential to enable a peripatetic career in academia. (Ever restles Dom would in the decade to take rise wander from school to school-Kansas, Essex again, Northeastern Illinois, Kent State, Riverside, Essex further again, San Diego-performing the kind of intellectual migrant work he one time spoke of as "'casual labor'-where there's a work at jobs you show up," before settling in 1978 at Colorado, eventually to become a tenur professor of English.) With his first "respectable" work at jobs would come other transformations he could hardly have suspected in his equivocal second aboard the liner off the English coast. Those changes are single hinted at in Dorn's capsule autobiographical accounts of these years: "In 1965 a Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Essex turn rounded into an odyssey of upheaval and exile." "We were there when things were new" Dom would remind me in a alphabetic character on the occasion of returning to the University of Essex in 1990 for a colloquy commemorating the school's twenty-fifth anniversary. Back in 1965 he had been appointed to reprimand "on the nature of westward expansion" according to the head of the thennew university's Department of Literature, Donald Davie. The department was Davie's brainchild; a highly defer toed poet, critic and teacher, he had left his certain position as a Cambridge don to take up the comparatively risky work of founding a novel kind of English Literature program-including in its amplitude American and European literary studies -at a fledgling provincial drill where (as Dom reported back to Olson shortly after arriving) "the buildings [were] not nevertheless finished, even the ones being used."

Both Dorn and I were Davie recruits at Essex; 'both of us had arrive to England as Davie-ored Fulbright companions During my two years in Davie's Cambridge society Gonville and Caius (where he was supervising my PhD research forward Ezra Pound), I had observ Davie's growing interest in Dorn's writing. Given the obvious disparity in their training and tastes-Davie had been a disciple of the fiercely canonical F R Leavis, Dorn of the equally dogmatic anti-canonist Olson-that interest assumeed at first quite unlikely. moreover there were strong underlying reasons for it. Coincidental similarities of background created surprising frequent ground between two men of seemingly divergent denomination and sensibility, the polished don and the hard-edged migrant worker. one as well as the other were self-demanding, ambitiously driven son of Protestant families of the industrial working classes. In his youth Davie had attended a Yorkshire Baptist chapel, a class-parallel with the Methodist congregation of Dorn's childhood: the message in one as well as the other venues could be summed up by the agency of the words of a Scottish-Reform Methodist preacher born considered his earliest intellectual influence, "It's not okay, and it's not going to be okay." Davie's primary part model as a child, like Dorn's, had been a grandfather who was a lifelong railway man (Davie's was a signalman, Dorn's a mechanic and pipe fitter). Early instruction in the pains of upward mobility had left each man with his avow particular distance from and distrust of the middle classes: Davie for his part had chosen to expres his feeling of difference from above, by the and of an enlightened intellectual elitism that had allowed him to make successful in his career among the academic intelligentsia, whereas Dorn had stubbornly maintained an oppositional stance, his identification with the dispossessed of the socioeconomic "basement stratum" not surprisingly retarding his career progres further Davie would not easily forget his admit class history, nor Dorn easily accept the fates apparently attendant on the subject of his.