FULCRUM

Idaho Out (London: Fulcrum Press, 1965). Cover drawing by Fielding Dawson. Design by Stuart Montgomery. Dedicated to Hetti and Roi.

Geography (London: Fulcrum Press, 1965). Cover drawing by Fielding Dawson. Design by Stuart Montgomery. Dedicated to Charles Olson.

The North Atlantic Turbine (London: Fulcrum Press, 1967). Portait of the author by Ron Kitaj. Design by Stuart Montgomery. Dedicated to Jeremy Prynne, Donald Davie, and Tom Raworth. 

Responding to my esteemed co-editor’s previous post, I wouldn’t go so far as to call Tom Clark’s Edward Dorn biography a “piece of shit,” but it is puzzling on many levels (as are his Berrigan, Creeley and Olson memoir/biographies). The forms are all quite different from one another, and each presents its own quirks, so let’s stick with Dorn, for the moment. Edward Dorn: A World of Difference resembles a biography in its heft (clocking in at over 400 pages) but lacks the deep scholarly research one would want, and as Jed mentioned, footnotes and an index would be appreciated. The more important omission in my estimation is over 45 years of the poet’s life, aside from his death, which comes no so much as a shock, but as a morbid afterthought as the reader leaps from the young Dorn to the dead Dorn with the literal turn of a page. Had Clark written a memoir, or chosen to identify his book as a memoir, perhaps I wouldn’t find his book as confusing, but Clark’s aspires to something more than a memoir in spite of the fact that his personal recollections of Dorn are indeed some of the highlights of the book. Clark never claimed to be the author of the authoritative womb to tomb Dorn biography, and A World of Difference certainly leaves plenty of space for others to step forward with their own research on Dorn while providing a lot of helpful primary information, particularly about Dorn in the 50s. As one reviewer notes in the in Edward Dorn: American Heretic, the book on Gunslinger has yet to be written, and of course, it’s the 70s where I see Dorn’s real innovation and brilliance in full form, where he breaks away from the Black Mountain College years and turns toward, what an art historian might call, the ‘mature work,’ while Dorn in the 80s tells me more about that dark decade than Dorn ‘himself.’ But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here are a few books Stuart Montgomery published in the UK with his Fulcrum Press. In my other office, I have a dissertation that includes a chapter on Fulcrum, which is the most I’ve read on the press, and to the best of my knowledge, it has yet to be published.

—KS