DORN FOR PICKARD: AN UNCOLLECTED POEM

Luke Roberts generously sent to the Miami University Brit Po list a transcription of an uncollected Dorn poem, "To Tom Pickard and the Newcastle Brown Beer Revolutionaries" — not surprisingly a poem beyond the scope of materials available to Don Allen at the time he edited The Uncollected Poems (Four Seasons 1974, enlarged edition 1983). Roberts mentions that the poem appeared in The Lesser Known Shagg, mag edited by Pickard and Tony Jackson circa 1968. I suspect like Pickard's earlier mag King Ida's Watch Chain, this zine too was hastily printed, poorly distributed and abandoned after a number or two. Eager to know more about the journal, but for now the Dorn poem alone worth the price of admission:

that time's intestines took fake shit flower shit
and begged in those streets
for the mouth to take something in
where economy was agreed to be our debt
dropped into the nest, a machinegun nest
when the time's appropriation called
but a chit was offered when that time's times
were that old mother whore like a fixed address

(Photo above: Tom Pickard at the Old George Inn, presumably Newcastle, December 5, 1973. Posted by Jeremy James at Poets In A Lens, an extraordinary blog featuring the photography of David James. If I recall, there's a photo of Dorn at Morden Tower among the images.)