More Adventures in Explication: Ed Dorn's "Obituary"

I wish I learned as much in my early life from poet Ed Dorn as I have in later life. Dorn resonates with me in a way no other poet does. His is a tragic and bitter poetry; a poetry of loss and negation that affirms only through its unflinching implacability. In a way, Dorn is America's greatest naturalist poet. And by naturalist I mean gritty realism, no romance. In another time and place, not all that far from his own, he might have written "McTeague" or "An American Tragedy." He is the child of Norris and Dreiser, coming to us by way of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. His bleakness is beautiful--to me, at least.

The poem I want to share is called "Obituary" and it was written around 1960 when Dorn was a one-man golden age, a few years out of Black Mountain College, and investing his narrative poems with new-found compass and compassion. I read the poem, hoping it might provide a bouquet for my acupuncturist friend, Eva Zeller, whose father died of some high-speed, sudden deterioration last Friday. But any relevance that it might have will have to wait for a later time.

In this poem, Ed Dorn remembers his grandfather, a pipe-fitter who works for the railroad dead of throat cancer. From the outset, we see this poem is not going to be a eulogy. "Obituary" is a cold newspaper word, more a recitation of facts than a remembrance. Dorn starts his poem by picturing the man, named Metz, who had long coveted and then took his grandfather's job. The memory of his grandfather begins with and cannot survive the fate of his job. The poem begins:

Metz
dark, east, another place
a greasy plumber's cap
bent shoulders
fixed grin
was my grnadfather's
antagonist, had
the nerve to live near

and waited for
my frenchcanadian man--

When we think of elegies, we think of continuance--summarizing a person's life so what will be remembered endures as a proud legacy. But Dorn will turn that tradition inside out. Just like him to think of the one thing a man keeps all his life--a job--but cannot usually give to anyone of his choosing. So the poem begins with a lost, rather than last, will and testament--a job inherited by ruthless dint of seniority, rank, pluck and promimity. The first thing we learn about Dorn's grandfather that is utterly himself, and not to be forfeited or ransacked, is that he "fitted pipes from techumseh / to momence" and "smoked a pipe"--the last a kindly particular that does double duty as a clue to what killed his grandfather.

Dorn fixes his gaze on the man he intends to honor. It is heartbreaking what he remembers next in the scant summary of his grandfather's character:

. . . no intellectual he
graduated from
my grandmother
[who] used to feed
on the back steps pie
to tramps

The poem turns with grim irony on the word "graduated." For who would want to 'graduate' from the kindness and charity that is what he remembers most about his grandmother? And then, in another grim irony, and the only recall of direct interaction with htis grandfather, Dorn writes

but he
gave me a penny once
with a slick smile, big teeth

From pie plates to pennies. Oh the inverse ratio between the smallness of the gift and the grimacing big-toothed smile of the man who gave it. Gave what? Not a gift certainly, since the penny is meant as message to the boy, but a sense of a work-hardened life whose only extractable meanings are lessons of working class survival:

face to the wind in a motor car
down miles of track
grinning

This is happiness as his grandather knew it: miles of track, endless jobs to keep him busy and be paid for, no end of maintenance that keeps bread on the table. Not much of a life really, a surmise Dorn seems to anticipate on the reader's part by saying next

my grandfather did die
for that ambitious pipe fitter
next in line
a mailpouch cancer in his whispering throat

Metz returns to haunt the poem: a grim-visaged grimacing man who represent an iron legacy that is all of Dorn's grandfather that lives on:

So Metz stepped
from behind the motorcar shed
in the cold January sun
to piss
everywhere,
his dark jaw set
in pleasant anticipatory greed
the survey of
such small domain
as
one runt dispatcher skips across

At this point in the poem, I wanted memory to stretch so much farther than the personage of Metz. I wanted to see someone other than the man who took his grandfather's job. I wanted the job--his legacy--to be something that transcended any theft by mere succession and survival. I wanted Dorn's grandather to feed pie to tramps (remember this poem takes place during the Depression) like his grandmother, and, as such a person, to be part of a brotherhood united in her goodness rather than his grimness. But that is not to be. Dorn recites a litany of railroad repair jobs performed by his grandfather that stand as strange monuments against the cancer that killed him but are also, by dint of this hard, merciless heritage, Metz's, too.

his eye {Metz's}set
the glint of knowing
no cancer could cancel
his scaling career with dirty pipes
cancel no trips to Segal
to Effinghma
ambitious for troubling leaks
in Ficklin
trouble in Assumption, Illinois
in Teutopolis
and Altamont, those towns,
Joppa
where my grandather
in the leaky waters of winter
wasted like a job . . .

If we do not stand for much else than the tasks we performed, a rugged but dispirited competence, the remembrance is simply of hard labor. Consequently, every friend we ever had becomes part of a quilting of rote, menial tasks that forms the fabric of our lives. Suddenly, Dorn is writing a bitter but compassionate elegy to the meanness of American working life and the slow dying of its working class. His grandfather survives as symptom of all that Dorn laments in American life.

The poem ends, like a movie, in a smalltown cafe just after his grandfather's death. Presumably, this is a symbolic working class wake, a ceremony marking life's resumption. Presumably also the people seated in the cafe are 'friends' of the deceased, including Metz. The camera pans. We see the following people:

Shumway cars, St. Elmo
Elmer Chrissman, checking lackawanna cars
Metz, the happy witness of
his death
with pleasure eating mincemeat pie
at Dubois cafe
while black joe dernal in the coal pit
long black stripes on the sandwich he
held by black fingers
lunched on flat zebra
a mid-west african
kying in the spilled guts of a coalhopper
above the light halftoned sun
caught in the swinging steel vents

Somehow this section reminded me of "The Deer Hunter," only these guys are bereft of anything other than hard labor. Finally, Dorn returns to the present, and the poem ends as it began, only Dorn is no longer detached. He gives one last cry from his heart:

. . . oh
that was the time my grandfather died
and his helper hooked his job and death
hooked the master fitter's throat and now
the railraod too is dead

--Edward Dorn, The Collected Poems, Four Seasons Foundation, Bolinas, CA, 1975, pages 47-9