Don Gordon — Collected Poems
Don Gordon wrote as though the lyric poem were a pressure gauge held against the machinery of history. Depression hunger, fascism, world war, the blacklist, psychiatric wards, nuclear weapons, and old age all register in sentences that are muscular, compressed, and alert to the vulnerable body inside every public declaration. A Los Angeles studio reader and political organizer, Gordon refused to name others before HUAC in 1951 and returned to MGM to find his desk cleared. His later work in day care, a halfway house, and a night clinic carried institutional damage and survival into On the Ward. Across six books—from Statement and Civilian Poems to Excavations and The Sea of Tranquility—his poems keep asking whether a human scale can be recovered from historical ruins. This volume restores that forceful, long-scattered body of work.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Gordon, Don. Statement. Bruce Humphries, 1943.
———. Displaced Persons. Alan Swallow, 1958.
———. On the Ward. West Coast Poetry Review, 1977.
———. Excavations. West Coast Poetry Review, 1979.
———. The Sea of Tranquility. Curbstone Press, 1989.
———. Collected Poems. Edited with an essay by Fred Whitehead, University of Illinois Press, 2004.
———. “The Kimono.” Poets of Today, edited by Walter Lowenfels, 1964.
———. Eleven poems in We Believe in Humanity. Raduga, 1986.
———. Six poems in Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era. Edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak. University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Gordon, Don, and Aaron Kramer. Civilian Poems. Bernard Ackerman / Beechhurst Press, 1946.
Magazine acknowledgments in the 2004 edition record work in Accent, The American Scholar, The Antioch Review, Asia, Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Centennial Review, Coastlines, Colorado Quarterly, Contemporary Reader, Dacotah Territory, Electrum, Experiment, Free World, Gramercy Review, Green River Review, Greenfield Review, Grove, Harper’s, Harvest Quarterly, Icarus, International Poetry Review, Menorah Journal, Minnesota Review, The Nation, New Caravan, New Earth Review, New Kent Quarterly, New Masses, New Mexico Quarterly Review, New Quarterly, New Republic, Neworld, North Country Anvil, North Dakota Quarterly, North Stone Review, Northern Light, Poetry, Poetry View, Prairie Schooner, Praxis, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly Review of Literature, Quindaro, Samisdat, San Fernando Poetry Journal, San Marcos Review, The Saturday Review of Literature, Snowy Egret, The Southern Review, Southern Voices, Southwest Review, Stone Country, Texas Quarterly, West Coast Poetry Review, West End, Western Review, and Xanadu.