Edward Dorn: the poetry of pain
It is difficult for authors to describe extreme physical pain. Authors have suffered too much while enduring the pain, don’t want to relive the devastating experience if they survive and of course can’t record it if they die. They feel betrayed by their own bodies, which had previously obeyed them, but are now in full rebellion and trying to destroy them from within.
My friend and former colleague, the poet Edward Dorn (1929-99), managed to create an amazingly objective, vividly artistic account of the excruciating pain he suffered when he was treated for pancreatic cancer. In the last letters to his biographer Tom Clark and in his last book Chemo Sábe (“Chemotherapy, You Know,” a bitter pun on the Lone Ranger’s catchphrase Kemosabe when addressing his faithful friend Tonto), he chose to live in agony rather than surrender to death.
Dorn’s stoical endurance and physical courage when confronted with unbearable pain and imminent extinction prolonged his life for 2½ borrowed years. During that time he gave poetry readings in Berkeley, California, and Bristol, England, taught a final semester at Colorado, and took family trips to Jamaica and to Rome. But the experimental and increasingly toxic drug treatments intensified the pain of his disease and could not cure his pancreatic cancer. Rarely found in its early stages when the chance of recovery is greatest, this kind of cancer spreads rapidly and has a poor prognosis. As Dorn wasted away, he was more concerned with the psychological effects of his disease on his wife and two adult children than on his own degrading condition.
Four authors—Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Orwell and the little known A. E. Ellis—provide the literary context for Dorn’s poetry and illuminate his achievement. Melville, who witnessed the pain of another victim, explains that after the sadistic flogging on the ship in White Jacket (1850), the sailor “never is the man he was before, but, broken and shattered to the marrow of his bones, sinks into death before his time.” In The Idiot (1869) Dostoyevsky—condemned to be executed but pardoned at the last moment—describes in diminishing time the terrifying awareness of his impending death and end of his existence on earth: “the certain knowledge that in an hour—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body, and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Orwell based Winston Smith’s torture on his own dehumanising medical treatments: “unsympathetic men in white coats are feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search of broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm.” As the punishment continues, Winston imagines his physical destruction and, like broken pipes, his “vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them”.
In A. E. Ellis’ The Rack (1958), as in Dorn’s Chemo Sábe, the hero’s ghoulish treatments—as he is stretched “upon the rack of this tough world”—are not effective. Ellis notes that “his existence was purely physical; an agglomeration of aching, burning flesh. He felt that there was nothing more; that life, engaged in his progressive humiliation, had overborne itself, for his spirit was now dead and he could be tormented no further.”
In the spring of 1998, Dorn’s friend Tom Clark told me that Ed was seriously ill and I phoned to find out how he was. (In 2018 Clark himself was killed by a car when crossing a street in Berkeley.) Dorn told me he had suffered stomach pain, was misdiagnosed with an ulcer and had wasted precious time taking useless medication. In May 1997 a CAT scan revealed that he actually had pancreatic cancer. The malignancy had spread to other organs and was inoperable. So he was sewn up and given three different kinds of treatment. Experimental pills and biweekly chemotherapy had not worked, and he was now taking weekly drugs with harrowing side effects, which inhibited but did not destroy the slow-growing but inexorable tumor. His attitude had evolved from denial and rage to a determined effort to fight the disease and finish his poems. His weight had dropped from 170 to 135 pounds and, though he still had energy, he lacked strength.
Tom Clark’s Edward Dorn: A World of Difference (North Atlantic Books, 2002), includes an “Epilogue, 1997-1999” in which Dorn vividly and morbidly describes the progress of his cancer. The doctors could not cut out the tumor and had to attack it with destructive chemicals and radiation. During the treatments Dorn must have asked, “Why am I being punished? Why has my body betrayed me?” — but could find no meaningful explanation of his malign fate. On March 10,1997 he wrote Clark, with gallows humor, that he was tormented by both appetite and nausea, “lots of pain & can’t eat i.e. the thought of food really repugnant yet with constant hunger . . . if I survive I’ll let you know. . . When I die I’ll be dead but until then I’m living.” His wife Jenny explained that he thought cancer “was something you were living with, not dying of. It was only his determination to fight that got us those extra years.”
Twenty months later, on November 19,1998, Dorn called his treatments “the greatest nightmare of my life. . . . Taxol is a rough chemo indeed—it just dehydrates the shit out of my already desiccated system.” On March 29,1999 he exclaimed, “I thought my head was going to flame out—the worst heat I’d ever felt—scary—beyond pain.” He confessed “there are times of moaning and screaming and involuntary weeping at my awful condition (I try to keep that as private as possible).” When the tumor invaded his lumbar region, he compared himself to an automaton and declared, “I now move like a wind-up guy, only at the joints. . . . I thought I was going to buy it a couple of times . . . the swelling compression on my spinal column . . . radiation in the linear accelerator—a devastation I couldn’t have imagined.” After Job-like suffering, he died at home in Denver on December 10,1999. Jenny and her children went into the Rocky Mountains and silently scattered the poet’s ashes.
Dorn’s Chemo Sábe—a handsome unnumbered 50-page pamphlet, letter-pressed and hand-sewn in illustrated wrappers—was published posthumously in 2001 by Limberlost Press in Boise, Idaho. Long white threads are left floating in the center pages. The endpapers are made of thin black paper decorated with swirling golden threads. The cover portrays a huge hypodermic needle plunging into a feather that symbolizes the thin, weak and hopeless patient. In the pamphlet’s photograph Dorn, wrapped in a heavy shawl and scarf, sits at a table, faces the viewer and points his bent hand accusingly into the dark background. He has long unruly white hair and, like Max von Sydow, a long, narrow, deeply lined, skeletal face.
Jenny’s Introduction to Chemo explains that in May 1997 Dorn was expected to live for three months. “The scans invariably revealed the miniscule growth and migration of tumors and he went through four chemotherapies.” One treatment “dried his skin out so much his fingers and toes bled.” He was destroyed by both the cancer and the treatment, by “an army of chemicals drafted to fight the alien and an array of pills to deal with pain and side effects.” The book evolves in three crucial stages: the physical experience of pain, the objective observation of his treatments and the transformation of his pain into art. Dorn’s wit somehow breaks through and alleviates his despair. “Pump” rhymes with “hump,” “Superbowl” with the “superblow” of his radiation, “king” with “Sloan Kettering,” the leading hospital for cancer treatment. “The Pope is mobile as ever” in his Popemobile and Lewinsky is sanctified as “Santa Monica”.
Dorn’s pain intensifies as his treatments continue and he’s systematically dehumanised and broken in spirit. “Infusion Day” emphasises his posthumous existence and his role as prisoner, “the voices of the unburied dead . . . of the victim, condemned but not delivered.” On the Spanish Steps in Rome, Dorn had identified with the pathology of John Keats, who died in a house there of tuberculosis aged 25, and in “Ode to a Nightingale” wanted “to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” He finds “Keats’s room very haunting and deeply touching and could weirdly relate to the struggle for & against Death.” In “Chemo du Jour” he recalls “the moist brow / of Keats’s struggle to die, still palpable, almost / visible through the window of his somber room.” He then quotes the eye-witness account by the painter Joseph Severn of Keats’s death in February 1821: “John knew his dying day had come, yet to achieve death might be a day’s hard labour . . . the problem was to separate himself from his body.” After dwelling on the poetic memory that provides a temporary escape from his own condition, Dorn compares himself to the mythological Medusa, a woman with living snakes tangled in her hair and a hideous appearance that turned anyone who looked at her into stone: “MISERY rises to the surface of my cocoa / as the nurse strips away the Medusan tubes of my oncology.”
This painkiller he was given, pounded four times into this stanza and opposed to the blissful Nothing (which has two different meanings), causes dry mouth, lightheadedness, dizziness, weakness, sweating, nausea, vomiting and constipation. In “Denver Dawn: With Ceiling Fan” the whirling blades seem to cut inside Dorn, who his concludes his poem with stoical wit:
Oxycontin could put the dead to sleep–
But Oxycontin can wake the living
Just as well. Oxycontin can do anything,
Oxycontin can make you feel Nothing
And there are times Nothing is exactly
What you most desire to feel
Internal Resistances, the title of a Cal Press book about Dorn published in 1985, is a major theme of Chemo Sabé. In “The Decadron, Tagamit, Benadryl and Taxol Cocktail Party of 1 March 1999” (who thinks up these names?) Dorn ironically calls his via dolorosa a jolly event. He enlivens the poem with a Metaphysical conceit by comparing his tumor to “Wittgenstein’s lunch, utterly invariable.” The eccentric Austrian philosopher had said, “It doesn’t matter what lunch is, as long as it’s always the same.” In this drug-filled poem Dorn establishes a personal intimacy with his fatal internal adversary, which can see, hear and sympathise with the strong opinions of his unwilling host. But his enemy cannot feel or express kind emotions. It attacks him like a frightening army and threatens to carry him across a Styx-like river and into Hell.
My tumor is watching all this.
My tumor is hearing all this. My tumor
is interested in what interests me, and
She detests who and what I detest. . . .
The blind cells thereof are not interested in love or affection,
she sends out little colonies, chipped genes
mark their crossing the river, they are
without variation, they keep time with terror.
In “White Rabbit” cancer takes on a perverse religious aspect, and a miserably unhappy technician sadistically intensifies his pain:
Cancer is Catholic—it loves to
evangelize, and it will intermarry with anything
to claim the progeny.
[The well-named bloodworker] had a great irresistible
need to hurt me deeply
because I was a bearer of cancer.
Some of his wishes are too complex and unrealistic to be granted, so he dare not wish to recover. Instead, and modestly,
I wished for a needle worker to
set up my infusion lines
without blowing a vein.
Radioactive iodine was a supposedly “safe and effective” way to kill cancer cells. But it didn’t work that way in “Iodine Fire” as it tears through his body parts from gorge to gut like a burning furnace:
Throat ripping
Ball torching
Fire balling
Gut trenching, war. . .
Iodine fire, barbed
Wire snaking through the veins.
The five present participles show the speed of his torture; the “fire-wire” rhyme recalls the allusion to Medusa.
“Enhancement” argues that “my tumor was environmentally / Induced and politically generated” by governments that allowed industry to create a carcinogenic atmosphere. Merging science and art, Dorn brilliantly compares his cancer molecules to the tiny dots of Georges Seurat’s pointillism paintings and to the people who leisurely appear under umbrellas in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte (1884):
I can draw them in their molecular pointillism,
Their shadows Seurat’s ghosts,
Under their molecular umbrellas.
In “The Beat Goes On” the unbeliever satirises the various ways he could die if God takes an interest in his fate. A quick death would be most desirable, a slow death would be a triumph for Satan, worst of all would be a slow disease that reveals God’s cruelty:
Instant death is God’s deliverance
lingering death is God’s indecision
and the Devil’s successful advocacy
Lingering illness
followed by Death
is God’s wavering
and impudence.
“Droegs” (which suggests drugs, drags and dregs) puns on prison and prism, which should bend the light instead of bending pain, Dorn portrays himself as a prisoner—like the cancer imprisoned in his body—trapped, confined and punished on a hard bed—like the victim in the bed of needles in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.”
Pain is the prison
it’s inside, the prism
bends the pain.
In the artificial prison
down the millennia
the victim lives inside
the prison, lies
on the steel cot.
“Linear Acceleration” describes the machine that delivers therapeutic X-rays or electrons meant to destroy the patient’s tumor. But Dorn suffers from another nurse’s carelessness and rages against the dying of the light:
Rage is not enough—
I’m filled with fury.
I just learned
I got infected because
A sleepy Seik [Sikh]
Forgot to change
his turban.
Uncertain and unafraid in a world he never made, he thinks of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the atomic bomb was developed, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, where it was exploded in 1945. These places first sent radiation into the world and all our woe, and inflicted great damage on human bodies:
Staring up,
one’s thoughts
alone on the cold hard bed
the memoried map of Oak Ridge
[and] Los Alamos.
In Dorn’s last two poems, he’s “Torn loose from / the human fabric, / adrift in the human breeze,” and looks in vain for “light against the / threatening darkness.” Jenny observed, “after Ed got cancer, he changed as a person. He was made incredibly sensitive” and miraculously achieved a “heightened perception of his own precarious condition” that enabled him to complete his excruciating work. “Physically gaunt and emotionally frail, the sharpness of his mind was never blunted by self pity or remorse.” Brave, stoical and dignified, despite the midnight agonies, he kept his fighting spirit to the end. In poetry, the essential part of his life, he consoled himself and communicated his pain to his readers.
Jeffrey Meyers published a chapter on Dorn in Privileged Moments (Wisconsin, 2000).
His 44 Ways of Looking at Hemingway will be published by LSU Press in 2025.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.
