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5 unusual facts about Ed Dorn


Ed Dorn

During the 1990s, after a teaching exchange visit to Paul Valery University in Montpellier inspired an interest in the Cathars of Southern France, he started working on Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics.

He also started working with Gordon Brotherston on translations from Latin American texts, solidified his close friendship with British poet J.H. Prynne, and met his second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.

His second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, is an Englishwoman he met during his Essex-years.

In the early 1970s, as a visiting poet at Kent State University, Dorn, along with British poet and editor Eric Mottram, was a mentor and supporter of the musical group Devo, and its founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis.

Jennifer Dunbar Dorn

She later married American poet Ed Dorn when he was a guest lecturer at Essex University, with whom she collaborated, publishing the newspaper of ideas called Rolling Stock.


Eric Mottram

During this period, Mottram was twice a guest lecturer at Kent State University, where, along with Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, he was an early supporter of the musical group Devo, and its founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis, whose poetry Mottram published when he was editor of the Poetry Review.

Robert Bertholf

Bertholf lead a cadre of young professors at the university, and was largely responsible for bringing an amazing troupe of poets and intellectuals as visiting professors or lecturers to Kent, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer, Harvey Bialy, Joanne Kyger and Ed Dorn.


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