When Ed Dorn died on 10 December, 1999, The Guardian obituary by James Campbell described him as a poet “rooted in the imagery of the dispossessed, of working-class America and the mythology of the wild west”. Dorn’s practice in his later poetry was to interrogate and satirise excesses of power in darting, elliptical, explosive little poems, often responsive to particular events. Effectively, this was a poetics of critical journalism. As he puts it elsewhere: “The curtain might rise / anywhere on a single speaker”. The English poet, Tom Raworth, ended his obituary of Dorn in The Independent with the sorrow: “Fools can sleep easier.”

Among Dorn’s most lasting attacks on fools are the epigrammatic observations from the 1990 volume Abhorrences: A Chronicle of the Eighties. This remains a contemporary guidebook to what Dorn called “the Rawhide era”: Reagan in the White House and Thatcher in Downing Street. The two of them were famously depicted in a poster popular in student flats throughout the decade, based on the cinema hoarding for Gone with the Wind, with the leaders of the free world superimposed over the Hollywood icons Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh and instead of a background depicting the burning of Atlanta, a nuclear mushroom blossoming behind them, with the caption, “She promised she’d follow him to the end of the world – He promised he’d arrange it.”

Dorn’s “chronicle” is even more pungently redolent of the period. Here are the references to Aids, to the Chernobyl disaster with its nuclear fallout, to popular culture with the Star Wars films and the “Star Wars” nuclear rhetoric, pop songs and TV, Central America, the Lebanon, Algeria, the pieties of local politics and the hypocrisies of the international arena. Black humour is characteristic, elliptical yet unrestrained. The position Dorn takes is that of the solitary individual, not turning his back on society but squaring up to it, face to face, in a confrontational poetry of unhesitating judgement. “The Protestant View” tells us that “eternal dissent / and the ravages of / faction are preferable / to the voluntary / servitude of blind / obedience.”

The temporal nature of popular culture was captured in “Every example tells a story”: “Like everything else / rock & roll / is here to go away.” Yet the ephemerality of all culture gives Dorn authority in Abhorrences. There’s a story that at a public reading of his tragic sequence of poems about the native Americans of the south-west, Recollections of Gran Apacheria, a questioner drew attention to the fact that the sequence had been published (in 1974) in an A4 comic-book format, with a lurid coloured cover (brazen reds and yellows), poor quality paper, pre-aged, browned and fragile, and the staples destined for rust. Wasn’t this a pretty ephemeral way to publish such an important sequence of poems? Dorn nodded in reply: “Yeah.” Implication: the people concerned were considered ephemeral so why be more precious about poems?

Identity is a function of position and position is a function of power. For Dorn, the objection to poverty is an enablement of authority. When you’ve nothing to lose, nothing can be taken from you, and your freedom to speak has weight because of that. Its effect is neither the exaggeration of frivolity (commonplace in mass media culture), nor rut-stuck, monotonous, self-indulgent, self-righteous complaint.

The dissenting voice was a great tradition in America from the start: what is the voyage of the Puritans, if not an original act of dissent? Here in Scotland, the great dissenter, Hugh MacDiarmid, in Lucky Poet (1943), emphasised that, growing up in the Border town of Langholm, he was familiar from an early age “with Bret Harte (who was Consul in Glasgow for a time), protesting editorially against a massacre of Indian women and children about which the rest of the community thought it expedient to remain silent, and the outgrowing of his ‘literary’ attitude, and beginning to see the creative possibilities in the life about him; Mark Twain…having ‘a good time in spite of alkali hell and high wind’; Ambrose Bierce, one of the first American writers to portray war realistically, and one of the few satirists who refused to sell out during the Gilded Age…and John Muir, proving to the reluctant scientists his theory that the Yosemite Valley was formed through erosion… All these and American politics and history which, as Bret Harte had the penetration to see, was the essence of that fun which overlies the surface of our national life enthralled my mind and excited my imagination in a way that nothing English has ever done…” In 1959, MacDiarmid wrote an essay for the Edinburgh University students’ magazine Jabberwock, “America’s Example to Scottish Writers”, welcoming Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg to a new Scottish readership when they visited Edinburgh.

What exactly is being approved here? (1) commitment to speaking out when silence seems more expedient, and taking the life around you as literary material; (2) refusing to sell out to comfort and celebrity; (3) proving the truth by not giving in; (4) sheer exhilaration and “fun”; and (4) new forms of address in the American poetry of the 1950s and what was to come in the 60s. The key qualities are of hard observation, moral commitment, fierce independence, self-determination, irrepressible humour, ironic flair, a flourishing sense of engagement, and literary and poetic structures to match and convey all these things. They were as essential to Edward Dorn as they were to Hugh MacDiarmid.

Dorn’s early poetry and intellectual life comes out of the rise of American imperialism after the Second World War. The 1950s was, generically, the great era of the Hollywood western. At the beginning of Dorn’s long, loose-shouldered, casual, flippant, intensely serious yet constantly ironic 1960s poem, Gunslinger, we meet the title character and ask where he’s going. The Gunslinger says he has a mission: he intends to seek out the inscrutable “Hughes, Howard” (inscrutable because “He / has not been seen since 1833”). This mysterious figure represents an establishment against which Dorn’s Gunslinger stands in opposition: “But when you have found him my Gunslinger / what will you do, oh what will you do?”

The reply is one of those perennially haunting and terrible mysteries: “You would not know / That the souls of old Texans / are in jeopardy in a way not common / to other men, my singular friend. / You would not know / of the long plains night where they carry on / and arrange their genetic duels / with men of other states – / so there is a longhorn bull half mad / half deity / who awaits an account from me…”

It feels like he’s talking about the owner of the Turnberry Hotel.

The final confrontation never happens. Real solutions are redundant in a world so committed to the superficial. This makes the proposition of Dorn’s late work both horrific and prophetic. It is a reinstatement of tribal value, grounded in economics but open to human contact, opposed to the foreclosures of the oligarchs. It tells of bad weather ahead, and clearly, it can be trusted.

Dorn’s childhood was characterized by deep hunger for education and knowledge, a yearning for guidance he could trust. He grew up in the 1930s, in the Depression. In 1968 he wrote, “I was never middle class nor were my parents. I mean our safety was never public. Our poverty was public.” Dorn noted later: “The first truly educated person I ever met…was a preacher who came to visit my church in what would have been about 1948. Scottish Reverend Aldridge was the first preacher I had heard talk to the congregation like they were adults… And in fact it was the first time I ever heard somebody actually address a group of people in that straightforward way without trying to make things easy or softening, or ‘it’s going to be okay.’ None of that. It’s not okay, and it’s not going to be okay was the message…”

In the early 1980s, Dorn started a newspaper called Rolling Stock. The cover logo was “an oncoming steam locomotive, full front. The motive of the project was a freewheeling critical resistance”. The paper was intended to act “as a vehicle to conduct its marginal crew toward the impossible dream of a drifter’s hope”. Its “thematic assertion of the poetic authority of the hobo carried Dorn’s old sympathy for the itinerant class-victim who once survived at the margins of the system by a clever and persistent vagrancy.”

In 1992, Dorn confirmed the socio-religious character that gave spine, depth and flexibility to his own intellectual, spiritual and political development: “The Protestant Revolution precipitated all the other revolutions, and all the other revolutions were failed revolutions. The American Revolution came out of it. The French Revolution came out of it. The basic proposition of the Protestant Revolution was that authority is inherently corrupt. And you know, Machiavelli said that one of the most salient things about Christianity is its pious cruelty. If torture hadn’t already existed, the authority of the Church would have had to invent it, to have something it could do with heretics.”

In High West Rendezvous (1996), Dorn quotes B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Only Heretics understand heretics / only heretics can spread heresy / and only heretics dare / to help other heretics.” He elaborates: “It’s a lot easier to be a heretic than it used to be. There are more religions willing to kill you, there are more states willing to cooperate with sectarian harassment, there are more laws cranking out more crimes”.

Dorn was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in 1997 and his last, posthumous collection, Chemo Sábe, is a testament to the courage with which he faced the terminal showdown. The autobiographical location of his utterance is intensified. Its force has the authority of mortal commitment. When he speaks of his own sense of historical identity, he gives America a global context of human solidarity, against its worst excesses. The poem “Tribe” notes: “Governments always conspire against / The population and often / This is not even malice; / Just nothing better to do.” Its culmination is thunderous: “I’m with the Kurds and the Serbs and the Iraqis / And every defiant nation this jerk / Ethnic crazy country bombs – / World leaders can claim / What they want about terror, / As they wholesale helicopters / To the torturers”. And it ends like this: “it would take more paper / Than I’ll ever have to express how justified I feel.”

Dorn’s prophecy in these last works is of expanding greed and deepening measures of control, where even terminal illness and hospitalisation insulates nothing. The world outside becomes the world inside: globalisation indeed. Against it, his own writing and the dissenting voices of those who recognise its affinity, continue to help. We live and learn from them. Edward Dorn is needed more than ever in the era we’re facing up to now.

ED DORN IN HIS OWN WORDS ...

In a 1993 interview, Dorn notes: “Multiculturalism’s denial is so monumental, and their refusal to look at the past’s complexities so complete, that history has just dropped out of consideration. It has no meaning, and is part and parcel with an intense anti-intellectualism that now rules. So you can’t seek to understand the whole transmission of human life without an intellectual distinction. And that, of course, is totally forbidden.

Asked, “Do you think that’s just cultural relativism?” his response is this: “No, I think it’s programmed ignorance. And like religion of any kind, and like the intention of the state, all states, its function is to enslave, capture and enslave. Once that’s even partially successful economically, it’s easier to run a kind of blind consumerism which is the engine then of a further economic reality that seeks to manipulate on a global level. This, of course, is the meaning of ‘corporate world, corporate globe.’

And its aim is total control and its outward manifestation is consumerism and its mechanism is ignorance.”

See Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes, edited by Joseph Richey (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007)

Edward Dorn’s Collected Poems (2012) are published by Carcanet Press. Tom Clark’s biography is Edward Dorn: A World of Difference (2002)