Debating the Gunslinger

Ed Dorn is one of those poets who gets people worked up. Notice the somewhat cordial, somewhat heated, all-together engaged back and forths in the comments section of Aram Saroyan's feature "The Hero and the Gunslinger" for some background, and then move on to this conversation between Dale Smith, one of Dorn's most eloquent admirers, and CA Conrad, one of Dorn's most impassioned critics, for more:

CACONRAD:
There are many things I want us to talk about Dale, but let me just start off with a big one. Ed Dorn. Let's just go ahead and be dramatic by having his name stand as its own sentence. Ed Dorn. It's important, at least it's important to me, to find out some of the details behind his fateful pronouncements. I'm not holding back about being VERY ANGRY when I read his book Abhorrences, being that I'm a queer man who had a boyfriend die of AIDS, saw many others die of AIDS, worked with herbalists on Essiac distribution and other herbal cures, being as desperate and traumatized as anyone else who lived in queer American inner cities in the late 80s and early 90s. And was paranoid that ACT UP was infiltrated and working with the pharmaceutical companies and on and on I could go with the wrath of our emotions at that time. But I feel enough distance from all of that now to REALLY WANT to understand how an American poet of note could write and say the things he did at such a time. In some ways the things Dorn said has put him in the category of Pound's open support of fascism for some people. I'm assuming this is a complicated answer, but please shed some light on this for us. For instance I'm feeling compassion for Dorn in that maybe he was angry at the loss of friends at Naropa? Meaning those who died of AIDS? And the means by which they contracted it? I don't know, but hope that you do.

DALE SMITH:
Conrad, thanks for inviting me to speak with you. I can't imagine what it must have been like in the 1980s and 90s to be gay, to watch people I loved die from HIV/AIDS. Life is brutal enough without feeling targeted by disease, and the opinions and prejudices that went along with AIDS in the early years. I was a straight white kid in Texas, very male in the sense I didn't have to question what that meant. At least not consciously. AIDS was a distant thing--something in the news--something that happened to others. It also brought queer sex into public view and into a mainstream imagination. And that was interesting to me. But I don't know. My sympathies have always been with everything that's not triumphant and celebratory in this craven and sad, crushed nation. I don't know why I feel this way. I lived in Yemen in the early 90s and had my suspicions of America confirmed there in many ways. It was like stepping outside a bubble. Life was raw and vivid there, if less defined. AIDS was beginning to affect life there, too, though the Muslim institutions that governed that small republic refused to acknowledge queer sexuality. I remember a teacher asking me if it were possible for boys to catch venereal disease by sharing a towel. I suggested that there may have been more going on.

This is all just to lead up to saying this: I don't think I can say anything to ease the complications you see in Dorn's late work. I don't want to be his defender, though I admire his writing . . .