Reading through The Angel Hair Anthology, I come upon a Robert Duncan poem I have never seen before. My heart literally skips a beat. I skim it & rush to my bookshelves to pull down Bending the Bow, Ground Work: Before the War, and Ground Work II: In the Dark. Maybe I’m not looking carefully enough, but I can’t find it in any of them.

Reading the poem more closely, the reasons become immediately apparent: “At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley After the New York Style,” is in many respects an exercise, a deliberate imitation of the New York School style. Here is the third of its five sections:

They are crowding in the doors to hear

Ginsberg. But Duncan

Is writing Sonnets from the Portuguese

For T. Berrigan with run-on

Effusions of love and lines in rime

(which I have to postpone until later)

Allen is saying various things amusing.

I am singing Kenneth Koch even might be here

If they were written by John Ashbery

So turned on by Berrigan going off

towards uptown

He didn’t know I wrote the song

I have choruses of the West sing

Cantos and for Pound’s sake

Envoys and aves buses can have.

Byron Keats and Shelly are our boys abroad.

Sketch of a vista confronting the ocean.

The first time I ever saw Allen Ginsberg read live was at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, in Dwinelle Hall. The large auditorium was packed, so much so that I was able to get in without benefit of ticket and sit on the edge of the stage. Ginsberg had just returned from being rousted in Prague and read, as I recall, what to the audience (including myself) were mostly new poems, including “Kraj Majales,” then only a few weeks old. Even today, 37 years later, it is one of the three most exciting readings I have ever attended, perhaps because it was the first for me that opened up the idea of poetry as spectacle, an aspect of the art I’d not imagined before. I was only 18 years old.

I wouldn’t meet Duncan for nearly another two years, although when I did, through the auspices of Jack Gilbert, I realized instantly that I recognized his face from poetry readings around the Bay Area, unmistakable with his bushy sideburns and eyes that went off in their own independent directions (this was before the purple cape made him really unmistakable in public). Reading this poem now, I realize that I don’t know & rather doubt that I had yet begun to visually pick Duncan out as “one of those adults who write poetry,” the way I already had done with Ken Irby, whom I would see almost daily at a Telegraph Avenue coffee house, writing intently into a notebook.* Reading this poem I realize that, yes, of course he was there that night. As must have been Olson & Spicer,** two other poets at that conference whom I would never get to hear read live. Was O’Hara there too? He’s mentioned in the second section & again in the fourth. It’s almost too much to imagine.

Reading this poem now, I realize something I’ve only been half conscious of all these many years. When I attended the few sessions I could sneak into – I was more successful at the parties than I was at the readings – back in 1965, I was as naïve a teenage poet as one might imagine & so had no sense of the various narratives & dramas that event enacted. It would be polite to suggest that I was clueless. When Louis Simpson, one of the two poets on the Berkeley faculty, announced soon thereafter that he was resigning his position at the University because it was impossible to be a poet of his kind in the Bay Area, the event was reported in the daily papers. & though I’d already read enough about the Pound-Bollingen affair to realize that there were indeed camps in poetry, armies even, I had no sense in 1965 of their movements, tensions or dynamics.

The Berkeley Poetry Conference differed materially from the ones in Vancouver in the 1960s because – Louis Cabri take note – the New York School was prominently on display, really for the first time on the West Coast. Further, & I can recall some of the younger Post-Projectivists at the time grousing about this, members of the New York School’s second generation – at least Ted Berrigan – were being treated as significant writers on a par with their elders, while the youngsters of other New American tendencies were not. The Berkeley Poetry Conference was where Lewis Warsh met Anne Waldman – Angel Hair was a direct consequence of that event.

Robert Duncan soon would become for me one of the default poets, someone whose patterns & proclivities I would deeply internalize, as much as I ever did Williams, more so than Creeley, Olson or Spicer. So when I found this poem this morning, I had precisely the opposite experience from I have when coming across new work by somebody I’ve never heard from before. I have to struggle with all of my instincts & biases just to read the text. My instinct is to fall in love first, and only begin to notice flaws – at least in the geologic sense, the same ones I suspect that might cause Duncan to keep the poem from his later collections – much later.

The scope of these sections, their “not-quite sonnetness,” is as much a part of their “NY School” style as the sprinkling of personal names, the casual use of enjambment (as distinct of Creeley & Olson’s stricter sense of it), the presence of humor. The next to last line of the section quoted above I read as Duncan’s own response to Ginsberg’s “Kraj Majales,” with its sense of the self-appointed ambassador that must have made Ginsberg’s peers cringe every bit as much as Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” would Bernstein’s peers at the  Vancouver Poetry Conference some 20 years later.

Duncan had his own problematic relationships with his peers & especially toward younger writers. There is plenty of evidence to go around that suggests just how difficult it is for older poets to get, in even the most remote terms, what younger poets might be doing, especially if it is not imitating their elders. “At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley After the New York Style” is very much a negotiation not just with the New York School, but with the idea that Berrigan*** will be as powerful a determiner of what that might be as O’Hara, Ashbery or Schuyler.

Here is Duncan’s second section:

Same evening. Can anybody.

Turning on poetry I have not heard

Ham it up so and still get down

From there he takes O’Hara

Who never really went there

where he did not come. From. They said.

He did little girls reading all

This one in a Black Mountain

Berrigan imitation North Carolina

Lovely needed poem for O’Hara

and Ashbery again going towards the Pound

Cantos with ashes and berries for the

Contempt they feel and gratitude and

for the puns sake

Dogs barking along another shore.

You never gave me my road.

What could I do for you?

It is a lovely piece in its way, unusual for Duncan in how it seems deliberately not to go anywhere, as tho he were trying the idea of a plotless poetry for the first time. But that last couplet seems very much a challenge. Whether you read the barking dogs as a reference to either the New York School or the Black Mountain poets may well have more to do with your own orientation toward those issues than anything in this text.

* From which I learned that what poets do is sit around coffee houses writing in notebooks. 2197, part of The Age of Huts, was written almost entirely in coffee houses some dozen years later.

** Spicer’s very last poem, written before he died just a few weeks after the conference, is a very cynical take on “Kraj Majales.”

*** Berrigan’s role as the ex-soldier who didn’t go to a “good school” & was a most out-of-the-closet heterosexual shifted the dynamics of the New York School from the three gay princes of its first generation in ways that, say, Kenneth Koch never did. While Duncan never addresses it directly in the poem, this shift seems never very far from the surface. I hear this most clearly in “He did little girls reading all” in the second section.