Edward Dorn is the dead bard I miss...

Edward Dorn is the dead bard I miss most these days, when the rhyme passing for political is about as forceful as a garden breeches sans nozzle. In the last decades of his life, Dorn was mainly writing a topical verse and that is exactly what we ne right now--a topical numbers unafraid of statement but refusing the easy solidarities of agitprop. Dorn's is a topical verse grounded in a reading of history, a metrical composition in which history is made topical, as relevant to the not past nor future as a slash-and-burn cartoon. That kind of thing hasn't been at all fashionable of late--Vietnam is about as