Title: Abilene! Abilene!
Description: "A cross between The Seventh Seal and Blazing Saddles, Abilene! Abilene! is the unfinished screenplay poet Ed Dorn drafted for a collaboration with filmmaker Stan Brakhage in the late 1960s. Though Brakhage once claimed their film “was to be America’s answer to The Blood of a Poet,” the project was twice abandoned for lack of funding—first in 1969, leaving the script half-finished, then again in 1976, when San Francisco-based Zephyrus Image Press canceled plans to publish its first (and only) section. Four decades later, Abilene! Abilene!’s incompleteness and colorful bibliographic history make it a remarkably reflective text: altogether its many versions afford a privileged glimpse into Dorn’s editorial process, and its multistage, prismatic failure offers a narrative index of the waning autonomy of countercultural production and experimentation over the course of the latter half of the 1970s. A peculiar result of cross-media affinities among the post-war American “avant-garde,” Abilene! Abilene! is an idiosyncratic artifact of “Sicksties” (Dorn’s spelling) zeitgeist, and makes an instructive and entertaining component to Dorn’s mock-epic Gunslinger."--Publisher's website.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, American Poets, American Motion picture plays
People: Edward Dorn
Time periods: 20th century