250 Western American Literature best, Going for Coffee succeeds in integrating work and the word and, in doing so, serves as a reminder of how vital and exciting poetry is when it stays close to the fundamentals of how people really live, and how they have lived for generations. ROBERT HEDIN Winston-Salem, North Carolina Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Edited byDonald Wesling. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 146 pages, $22.50.) Internal Resistances is the latest volume in the University of California Press’s efforts in the past few years to make available in attractive editions primary texts by and criticism about poets looselyassociated with Black Moun tain College, a project which has given us a complete Olson Maximus (along with George Butterick’s fine Guide), as well as a collected Creeley. The cur rent volume features six solid essays on the full range of Dorn’s poetry by editor Wesling, Robert von Hallberg, Paul Dressman, Michael Davidson, William J. Lockwood, and Alan Golding; Davidson’sand von Hallberg’sessays have been published previously, while the other four, followed by a reliable index, are written especially for the volume. In his introduction, Wesling clearly outlines what each of the essayists seems to imply, that like both Olson and Creeley, Dorn is “nomadic and marginal in the circumstances of personality and publishing and yet central in his presumption to American culture.” They accept certain of Dorn’s “limitations” as “inevitable—given his deliberate choice to remain an anti establishment figure” working in an art form that at best hovers on the margin of significance of our culture. This honesty at the outset isboth refreshing and effective, and as the essays proceed we find ourselves, prepared for the worst, astonished to be again and again reminded how really good Dorn is. Almost everyone seems to agree that Slinger is Dorn’s central work (though personally I return more often to Geography), and accordingly, two of the essays here are devoted to it. Michael Davidson reads the long poem as allegory, in which “the space of the poem is the West in its largest sense,” while William J. Lockwood focuses on the recognition that Slinger “is pre dominantly grounded in the mode of song and that that mode of song is grounded in Dorn’s sense of ‘intensity’ (in-tensity) of places.” These pieces are bracketed by Wesling’s discussion of the short poetry in terms of Dorn’s “morality of attention,” von Hallberg’s examination of the poet’s “spirited” “accidentalism,” and Alan Golding’s valiant attempt at making Dorn’s latest minimalist work seem somehow interesting. Obviously, anyone interested in Dorn, or poetics, orpostmodern American poetry, or writing in the West will have to get hold of this compact and intelli gent collection. And we can only hope that Internal Resistances might serve Reviews 251 as a model for further such volumes from U.C. Press; similar collections focus ing on the work of Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Jack Spicer, and Robert Creeley—collections which not only laud those poets’ strengths, but recognize their limitations—are sorely needed. LEE BARTLETT The University of New Mexico The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens. By Everett Emerson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. 330 pages, $29.95.) The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography. By John Lauber. (New York: American Heritage. Distributed by Ploughton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1985. 298 pages, $17.95.) In 1865, Mark Twain wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks, “I have a ‘call’ to litera ture, of a low order—i.e., humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit.” In The Authentic Mark Twain, Everett Emerson asserts that Twain’s “strongest suit” was not only humor but authenticity, for, after all, insisted Twain in 1868, “the end &aim of my ambition is to be authentic— to be considered authentic.” It is Emerson’s thesis—a thesis which makes for a good hook on which to hang a literary biography—that the “old, original, and authentic Mark Twain was a humorist” (273) who drifted from authenticity. Emerson, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel...