–by Michael Palmer Essay, Research Paper
Let’s begin with the thought that Duncan, in his poetics,
embodies a series of paradoxes that at once reflect and reflect upon the
antecedent poetics of what he called his "modernist masters." Such paradoxes
were what struck me when I first encountered Duncan at the Vancouver Poetry Conference,
staged at the University of British Columbia in 1963. I had come to know Duncan’s work
initially through Donald Allen’s pathbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry,
then through The Opening of the Field, published by Grove Press in 1960 and
finally through a copy of the long out-of-print Poems 1948-49 which I’d
found on the back shelves of Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge. I had
been greatly impressed by the exploratory audacity of the work, by the manipulation of
complex, resistant harmonies, and by the kinetic idea of what Duncan called
"composition by field," whereby all elements of the poem are potentially equally
active in the composition as "events" of the poem:
The artist, after Dante’s poetics, works with all parts of the poem as polysemous,
taking each thing of the composition as generative of meaning, a response to and a
contribution to the building form . . . . So the artist of abundancies delites in puns,
interlocking and separating figures, plays of things missing or things appearing "out
of order" that remind us that all orders have their justification in an order of
orders only our faith as we work addresses. Were all in harmony to our ears, we would
dwell in the dreadful smugness in which our mere human rationality relegates what it
cannot cope with to the "irrational," as if the totality of creation were
without ratios. (from Bending the Bow, Introduction, p.ix)
Statements such as this appeared to lay the ground for a prosody and poetics in radical
opposition to the institutionally dominant Anglo-American formalism of the time, to
propose a prosody and a poetics responsive to the most recent developments in music and
the visual arts, yet anchored, through Dante and many others to a "spirit of
romance" animating human history.
As an engaged, twenty-year old student of modernist principles, however, I was
disturbed by Duncan’s free use of ornament, of archaic diction and grandiose rhetoric, and
by the neoplatonic aura surrounding much of the work. (Such "disturbance" is an
intentional function of Duncan’s poetics as he challenges assumptions and boundaries both
to the right and to the left.) At Vancouver, in the freewheeling discussions with Denise
Levertov, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Margaret Avison, Duncan would continually
queer the pitch. Into a consideration of projective verse, he would introduce Mallarm?;
at the mention of Whitehead’s Process and Reality, he might offer Boehme, William
Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell; to Ginsberg’s proposition of "spontaneous bop
prosody" he would counter with the "Law we are given to follow." Thus, even
among sympathetic peers (though Ginsberg and Duncan were not often in sympathy), Duncan
felt the need to assert the force of heretical opinion, which in turn for him was grounded
in the authority of timeless heretical gnosis. The poem was to stand as a
"grand collage," a constellation of myriad myths and voices from an eternal
counter-tradition, as well as of impulses, accidents and intrusions, disciplined and
informed by an attention to the poem’s ratios or measures. Into its field, "where
sympathies and aversions mingle," closed and open forms, harmonies and disharmonies,
the mythic and the mundane, the hieratic and the demotic, were to be equally welcomed.
Whence Pound’s plaint, during a visit by Duncan to St. Elizabeth’s, that Duncan had put
back in everything they had labored so long to take out.
Duncan’s project can be seen in part as an effort to make place once again for the
artifice, affect, and lore modernism had repressed. However, this was achieved not in
reaction against modernism (and certainly not for the sake of decor), but as an extension
of its exploratory impulse and a reading or revealing of its progressive, Romantic
philosophical and aesthetic origins.
Duncan interprets this Romantic impulse as an eternal one, alive in the perverse,
resistant voices of poets, but equally so in the syncretistic impulse of Hellinistic
philosophy, the songs of the Cathars, gnostic texts, Oz, Alice, Freud,
George MacDonald, George Herriman, and others. All are threads in the fabric of mythic
lore. "Myth," states Duncan at the beginning of The Truth and Life of Myth,
"is the story of what cannot be told, as mystery is the scene of what cannot be
revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known." At another
poin
Myth, for Dante, for Shakespeare, for Milton, was the poet-lore handed down in the
tradition from poet to poet. It was the very matter of Poetry, the nature of the divine
world as poets had testified to it; the poetic piety of each poet, his acknowledgment of
what he had found true Poetry, worked to conserve that matter. And, for each, there was in
the form of their work–the literary vision, the play of actors upon the stage, and the
didactic epic–a kind of magic, for back of these forms we surmise distant origins in the
rituals toward ecstasy of earliest Man. Once the operations of their art began they were
transported from their sense of myth as literary element into the immediacy of the poem
where reality was mythological. (from The Truth and Life of Myth, p.39)
By implication, each poem comes in response to this Traditio and is a kind of
"listening in," as well as an ec-stasis or standing outside oneself. It
is in this sense that Duncan will refuse the claim of originality and insist that he is a
"derivative" poet, a poet of near infinite derivations. The statement is a
provocation–another assault on the Modernist credo–but it is also evidence of Duncan’s
subversive playfulness, and his delight in demolishing expectations. It would be difficult
to imagine a more willfully idiosyncratic position for such a poet at such a time. Yet it
is grounded, ultimately, and perhaps once again paradoxically, in his conviction regarding
poetry’s responsibility toward and derivation from the immediate world, that is, a world
of multiple immediacies, socio-political, sexual, psychic and imaginal.
Robert Duncan grew up, the adopted son of a theosophical family, in the town of
Bakersfield, California. As Michael Davidson has noted in his book, The San Francisco
Renaissance, the interpretive methods of theosophical reading of both text and world
deeply influenced the poet’s sense of the ways meanings inhere and things correspond:
This charged, participatory act of reading gains definition through contemporary
theories of "open field verse," to be sure, but for Duncan its origins can be
found in the theosophical tradition that he inherited from his adopted family. For his
parents, "the truth of things was esoteric (locked inside) or occult (masked by) the
apparent . . . ." Within this environment every event was significant as an element
in a larger, cosmological scheme. Although Duncan has never practised within any
theosophical religion, he has easily translated its terms into works like Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams . . . Within both theosophical and Freudian hermeneutics,
story is not simply a diversion or fiction, but an "everlasting omen of what
is." (from The San Francisco Renaissance, p.132)
This childhood also brought Duncan early knowledge of his homosexuality, which would
play a central role in articulating the complex thematics of his work. Long before it was
safe to do so, Duncan "came out" in both his personal and public lives. In 1944,
Dwight Macdonald’s Politics published Duncan’s still-controversial article,
"The Homosexual in Society." This caused John Crowe Ransom to withdraw Duncan’s
"African Elegy" from its scheduled publication in the Kenyon Review.
Many lines of battle were being drawn at once.
My own friendship with Duncan, and with his companion, the painter Jess, dates from the
early 1970’s. By then the days of the Berkeley Renaissance, with its youthful community
around Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, and the latter days of the much more public
San Francisco Renaissance, were over. Jack Spicer had died in 1965. Robin Blaser had moved
to Vancouver, where his work in poetry and poetics continued to thrive and deepen. Robert
became the central figure in a new, activist poetic community that would emerge in part
from the New College of California Poetics Program, of which he was the head. He taught as
he spoke as he wrote, leading students on a wild, non-linear ride "in search of the
subject." He was much the same in personal conversation, insistently enthusiastic,
combative, heuristic, making associational leaps and challenging you to follow across the
open field and, at times, through the dark wood. He waged, intermittently, a visceral, not
always coherent battle against the Language Poets, suspecting them of hidden orthodoxies
and of repressing the dimension of Spirit, with that troublesome, rebarbative capital
letter. The last afternoon I visited him, the day before his death in 1988, I mentioned
that my daughter and I were reading the third volume of the Oz tales together. He paused
for a moment, then his face lit up, "Oh! The one with the heads!"
Originally published in American Poet (Spring 1997) Copyright ? 1997 by
Michael Palmer. Online
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