‘Movement/occurs at the split’: Turning to late modernity in Edward Dorn’s ‘North Atlantic Turbine’

Abstract This article is presented in two parts. The first is an interrogation of the specific spatial practice of ‘A Theory of Truth’, held in conversation with the thesis that Reitha Pattison sets out for Edward Dorn’s early poetry. The specific interrogation of Dorn’s linguistic and spatial practice in ‘A Theory of Truth’ presented here will be braced against certain aspects of Gunslinger (Dorn, 1968). Furthermore, exploring how Dorn’s language manifests a particular political position with regard to the enclosure acts of late capitalism, this article brings to light some tensions in the poetic relationship between Dorn and Charles Olson, and brings forward the strength of William Carlos Williams’ influence on Dorn’s spatializing tactics. The works of Christopher Beach, Michael Davidson and Sherman Paul are essential to this study. In the second, longer part of this argument, the way that Dorn uses language to manifest experience rather than simply to represent space will be set out, allowing a clear analysis of the relationship between spatial process in phenomenal reality and spatial processes in the ‘experienced or imagined’ loci of Dorn’s poem. This part of the article draws in particular on the ideas of Lytle Shaw, Ian Davidson and Justin Katko.