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Fielding Dawson
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Fielding Dawson
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I read a long feature article on Dawson in the Believer ages ago! All I remember from reading that was that he hung out with de Kooning and the Action Painters, and his writing style was perhaps influenced by his visual art experiences. Have you read any of his? I was curious at the time but then forgot entirely.
Most of those Black Mountain folk found themselves BURIED, no?And one certainly may c-n-p wikipedia, but howlers oughta be caught maybe before they infest more sacred graves ###"Dawson was known for his stream-of-consciousness style before the term was coined"?!?!?!?!
Nate: My local uni library has all of his Black Sparrow books, I was thumbing through to see if his style appealed to me. Not sure which one to swoop down on, maybe one of the short novels.NR: Ha. That leapt out at me as well. I thought maybe I was going mad. Excised.
here's the article in which clewell (poet laureate of missouri, btw, 2010-2012) talks about dawson: http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dail...
Am I encouraged to be snarky? If I were, then I would say that being nearly as good as Kerouac makes me nearly want to spew eight gallons of vomit on the floor, out the window, and all over the dog.
So I finally grabbed one of these after the cool old unread Black Sparrow editions stared me down from bookshelves for a while. Fortunately not nearly so irritating as Kerouac!
...But not entirely my thing either. His style is solid and original, but his content is of a kind of meandering mundane realism that I tire of. Oh well.
Fielding Dawson (New York City, August 2, 1930 – January 5, 2002) was a beat-era author of short stories and novels, and a student at Black Mountain College. He was also a painter and collagist whose works were seen in several books of poetry and many literary magazines.
Much of his work was lax in punctuation to emphasize the immediacy of thought. Additionally, dialogue would often be used to break this up. Though conversational, much of his dialogue could often halt the metre while still staying on track. His lack of deference toward tradition in writing, other than that of the necessity to evoke humanity, often painfully raw, is what puts him in the category of many of his better-known contemporaries, such as Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg.
Dawson was still writing up until his unexpected death in January 2002. He had become a teacher, first in prisons like Sing Sing, at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, where he taught regularly, and continuing on to work with at-risk students at Upward Bound High School in Hartwick, New York.
He was recently called "The Best St. Louis Writer You've Never Read" by David Clewell, a professor of history at Webster University.
Books:
"An Emotional Memoir Of Franz Kline" (1967)
"The Black Mountain Book" E.P. Dutton (1970)
The Mandalay Dream, Bobbs-Merrill (1971)
"The Dream" (1975)
"Penny Lane" (1983)
"Two Penny Lane" (1977)
"Three Penny Lane", (1981)
"Krazy Kat And 76 More" Black Sparrow Press (1982)
"The Black Mountain Book: Expanded and revised edition" North Carolina Wesleyan College Press (1991)
"The Orange in the Orange" Black Sparrow Press (1995)
"Three Penny Lane" Black Sparrow Press
"The Trick: New Stories" Black Sparrow Press (1990)
"Virginia Dare, Stories 1976-1981" Black Sparrow Press
"Will She Understand?" Black Sparrow Press