Dorn is the most prolific of the Black Mountain student poets…. Even in his first collection of poems, The Newly Fallen (1961), a youthful and uneven book, he showed an understanding of the techniques of open poetry. Many of the poems are breezy general commentaries on the failings of American culture, but several of the poems, "Sousa" in particular, display a sharply observant mind and a complex imagination….

It is apparent from his second volume, Hands Up! (1964), that Dorn requires a large, loosely structured format for his best work. His shorter poems are either petulant in their attacks upon the cheapness of Southwestern culture or blandly lyrical when he turns to the standard themes of love, friendship, and having children. (p. 203)

Dorn's poems typically invoke seemingly closed events and "resist" them with a multiplicity of perspectives and perceptions. But the poems [in Geography] are deliberately rooted to a political awareness; like Duncan, Dorn is insistent that the quality of American life be examined with stern critical judgment…. Although he frequently writes brief poems, Dorn pushes for the sustained narrative. His genius as narrator is already evident in this volume; his best poems narrate adventures in the landscape around him, as in "Idaho Out," a rambling travelogue dense with observation and mordant social commentary….

Throughout the long, often barbed discourse of [The North Atlantic Turbine], Dorn struggles to come to terms with [Western] civilization, to understand his existence amid all the politically contrived circumstances in which he finds himself…. The work is subtitled throughout with parodic headlines that promise but do not always deliver the sober reflections of a learned adventurer in a foreign land. Instead, Dorn's commentary runs the gamut of language and experience in a style that is unrestrained and critically acute. The drama of the book comes in the confrontation between the youthful, frank American and the look, sound, and feel of England, America's doddering but cultivated parent. (p. 204)

Gunslinger (1975) is Dorn's boldest and most sustained effort at a long poem. It is open in construction, even langorous in its disheveled narrative style, and, like any profusive discourse, lives by its flashes of perception. But it is different from the long poems of Pound, Williams, and Olson. There is none of the halting progress of these earlier poems, where the difficulties of the subject are overcome slowly and with painful self-scrutiny. Dorn worked on the sequence sporadically over a period of seven or eight years; each of its parts appears to have been composed in one intense, uninterrupted effort. The language pushes forward without the kinds of resistance one finds in Olson's Maximus; as a consequence, the language lacks rough texture. And the subject becomes increasingly amorphous as the sequence moves on. (pp. 204-05)

The poem proposes a stunning possibility at its opening: Dorn seems about to write a new Canterbury Tales, with this crew making a pilgrimage to a peculiarly American shrine. But in the ensuing books of the poem this plot disperses into rant. The Gunslinger himself is credited with more possibilities than he can embody. His purportedly mystical faculties and his semidivine potential are rendered as stuffy and half-private witticisms spread out in long digressive monologues….

The poem is bold in its grasp of contemporary experience, and the humor, often crude but effective, registers a new but as yet lightly treated aspect of life: the America that is projected through television, night club entertainment, and films. If the poem fails, the theme it attempts to treat is an important new direction for a long poem. With Dorn, the long poem has ceased to be a form to be discovered in every step of its making: it is now an available convention in which to gather in the reality of the moment. (p. 205)