Alfred Dorn

Alfred Dom, poet, critic, art historian, has won more than seventy awards.  His poems and articles have appeared in some fifty journals.  A former Vice President of the Poetry Society of America, he is the Director of the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, which has sponsored inter-national contests since 1980.  He regards the New Formalists as the most dynamic movement in current American Poetry .

"The poems of Alfred Dom seem to me vigorous. imaginative and original, graced with elegant formalities when the occasion warrants, manumitted and free when the spirit moves.  His gifts, instincts and actual procedures are all admirable. " --Anthony Hecht

"Alfred Dom is a master of ballades, rondeaus, sonnets, epigrams and other forms.   Like most serious poets, he writes about other people as well as himself, and his creation of types reveals him as a sturdy ally of human nature, a critic with a heart ." --Felix Stefanile

"Throughout years of faithfully standing out in thunderstorms, Alfred Dom has been struck a surprising number of times by lightning bolts directly from the Muse.  His new collection is among the more satisfying books of verse I have seen in a long time. " --X.J. Kennedy

"In Alfred Dom's Voices from Rooms I was impressed by the breadth of his scope and the clarity of his vision.  Alfred Dom's best poems --highly original, sharply observed, forcefully expressed- -deserve a wide and appreciative audience. " --Frederick Morgan

"The carefully crafted poems of Alfred Dom's Voices from Rooms are serious, often startling, reflections on the voids and isolations of human existence --life in a universe where each and every room has a provocative tale to tell." --William Baer

"Alfred Dom' s poems in different modes and moods are united by an appealing sympathy for their subjects and by a sensibility robustly receptive to human experience. " --Timothy Steele

Alfred Dorn's books are available on-line from Somers Rocks Press.





In Simultaneous Rooms

How many doors open, how many close
while your eye skims this "moment's monument"?
Holed up in a slum lord's apartment house,
an old man dies, alone, irrelevant.
Another life is pincered out of the womb,
from tropic sleep into our arctic day.
In a deluxe hotel's Edwardian room
a widow fiercely hugs a rose bouquet
sent by a charmer half her age, with card
warbling silk words that curtain his design.
In the Sahara of a hospital ward
a bed explodes with pain like a land mine.
And meanwhile the galaxy, that spiral ear
carrying us through darkness, does not hear.



From Bengal

A monarch walks in stripes of gold and black,
pacing the floor where he must live and die.
He lunges at the bars that hurl him back.

Around his cage the popcorn eaters pack;
they hoot and howl but fail to catch his eye.
A monarch walks in stripes of gold and black,

glaring at me, legs tensed for an attack.
(How could he know that I am his ally?)
He lunges at the bars that hurl him back.

Attendants clean his cage.  He does not lack
raw meat, yet hungers for another sky.
A monarch walks in stripes of gold and black

I'd swipe the jailer's key, I'd blowtorch, hack
or saw through steel to let the prisoner fly.
He lunges at the bars that hurl him back

and roars.  The echo shakes the zodiac.
I clamp my ears in shame to mute his cry .
A monarch walks in stripes of gold and black
He lunges at the bars that hurl him back.



First Encounter

They've dressed him up in black from shoes to tie,
a straight-backed, stiff-lipped gentleman aged six.
They tell him everybody has to die.

He sees his aunt, a big-boned redhead, lie
in a pine box, clenching a crucifix.
They've dressed him up in black from shoes to tie

to hear the organ shudder and sob and sigh,
to hear the preacher, nasal and prolix.
They tell him everybody has to die.

He thinks:  She's fast asleep.  Not breathing.  Why? . . .
She bakes great cherry pies for our picnics . . .
They've dressed him up in black from shoes to tie

to stand near a hungry ditch and say goodbye.
Gravediggers lean upon their spades and picks;
they tell him everybody has to die.

But how can buried people reach the sky?
Are they alone or do they meet and mix ?
They've dressed him up.
                                                In black, from shoes to tie,
they tell him everybody has to die.



Requiem for a Nose

She paid high fees to get herself defaced--
"to look more like my friends."  Why did she do it?
What nose could match the one that she erased?

Aquiline as a Roman arch, it graced
her Tuscan profile.  (Several artists drew it. )
She paid high fees.  To get herself defaced,

she overruled sage counsel and good taste.
Her nose was nature's bounty--but she blew it.
What nose could match the one that she erased

to purchase fools' approval?  In blind haste
she chucked Roman for pug, and she will rue it
She paid high fees to get herself defaced.

My requiem honors what she replaced
with an anonymous lump.  May boyfriends boo it!
What nose could match the one that she erased?

But since the new one is not made of paste
or putty like a clown's, none can unglue it.
She paid high fees to get herself defaced.
What nose could match the one that she erased?



Ballade of Migraine

It wants your head, demands the space
that houses thought.  You groan, you roar,
though Stoic-schooled.  Your gargoyle face
panics the caller from your door.
You chew the carpet on the floor
like John at Runnymede, in vain.
Your thumbscrewed head becomes one sore.
Something must hate the human brain.

When men wore tricorn, wig, and lace,
Pope, a crippled midget, bore
"this long disease," his life, with grace.
When critics skewered him to the core,
they brought on migraine, skewering more--
though he stung back, deflecting pain
with hornet phrase and metaphor.
Something must hate the human brain.

Given another person, place,
and time, what triggered Pope to pour
rage into couplets might erase
foes with a gun--or start a war.
When migraine's voodoo needles gore
a pate as brittle as porcelain,
the truth's too blatant to ignore:
something must hate the human brain.

                Envoy

Friend, have you known the visitor
grinding one's noodle to chow mein?
Head-hunter, Grand Inquisitor--
something must hate the human brain.