Dorn sent a copy of his poem and a copy of Casteneda’s book to his close friend, esteemed
British poet, Jeremy Prynne, at Oxford. Prynne found the poem charming, and celebrated the
book as a mythical proposal see beyond the confines of the its enumerations, into a
“semidios” region, where Dorn’s Gunslinger also traveled:
...I least of all expected that in itself serio-comic notion of sitio (the good
spot) to re-emerge in the mock-heroic of the canine prayer parlour. I have,
indeed (watch this spot for further grave inflections) no frame at all for that
diatribe, so that I just found it funny (threatening to spiral off into hysteria
if ever the dog should be lost sight of): and, well, a man may see how the
world goes with no eyes, looke with thy eares, see how yon Iustice railes
upon yon simple theefe, harke in thy eare handy, dandy, which is the theefe,
which is the Iustice...
Casteneda’s book is truly exciting, especially as he lets you guess
right past him into a world too dangerous for him. The narrative is in that
sense clean, which is very good, showing what was almost open to him:
semidios. I was glad to be put on to that, what with all the puny fervour
still about the current drug scene. ... Maybe we are quite deeply stuck on
bad spot, now that the metaphor of culture as politics has been inverted
to make politics as culture. Frankly I think language is too resourceful to
commend itself to the current stylised dialectic of interest-groups. Only
the first phase of a new voltage-surge through the system seems to make
all the machines tick faster; then it gets more and more obvious that the
energy-source is highly specialised, you need a new apparatus (hardly
poesie, whatever else) to plug in to all that. ... 157