Robert Duncan began publishing poetry when he was just out of his teens in 1939. Yet during the last twenty-five years of his life – not to mention the 15 years since his death – the primary poetry that people were permitted to see was largely restricted to writing that began in the late 1950s with The Opening of the Field. That book, Roots and Branches and Bending the Bow were the trio of volumes that were widely available during most of the last period of his life as he abstained from publishing a book of new poetry for 15 years after Bow.

 

Perhaps most tellingly, Duncan did not permit Lawrence Ferlinghetti to keep his 1959 Selected Poems, published as the tenth volume of the City Lights Pocket Poets series, in print at a time when Ferlinghetti was very diligently doing just that. Duncan, who was notoriously fussy & not always wise about his volumes – his insistence on a typewriter font for Ground Work: Before the War, published in 1984, prevented that book from being anywhere nearly as influential as the three volumes of the 1960s – is almost certainly to blame for the City Lights Selected going out of print.

 

That volume had incorporated his poetry – or at least those portions he felt best about – written between 1942 and 1950. In 1966, when the Selected was already impossible to find, Duncan permitted Oyez, Graham Mackintosh’s press in Berkeley, to issue The Years As Catches, a more complete gathering of his earliest work, from 1939 through 1946. Framed very much as juvenilia – the subtitle is First Poems (1936-1946), Catches was reprinted in 1977. Jonathon Williams’ Jargon Press published a small edition of Letters, Duncan’s poetry immediately preceding the work of The Opening of the Field, in 1958. A Book of Resemblances: Poems 1950-1953, was published in an even more fugitive fine press edition – in Duncan’s handwriting – in 1966, with just 200 copies printed. Duncan’s early work became somewhat more available when Fulcrum, a small press in Britain, published Derivations, capturing the writing between 1950 & ’56, and First Decade: Selected Poems 1940-1950. But Fulcrum was never widely distributed in the United States.

 

Thus it has always seemed evident to me that Duncan saw The Opening of the Field as representing the true start of his mature writing. How Duncan arrived at this writing, what influences entered in, & in which order, has always intrigued me. Reading in The H.D. Book the other day – I was literally having dinner at the Country Kitchen in the Molly Pitcher service center on the New Jersey Turnpike, returning from a conference in Palisades, NY – I came across Duncan’s own account of the major influences during the fateful 1940s & realized that it was, in Duncan’s mind at least, the poetry of war that led him to the kind of writing that emerge in The Field and his later books.

 

Duncan accounts for it as the confluence of two events. One, his introduction to Charles Olson & Robert Creeley, is well known. The second Duncan characterizes as the recognition of the common elements of three works by his elders – Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and H.D.’s wartime trilogy, especially its final volume, The Flowering of the Rod. Duncan describes his relationship to the latter:

 

For a new generation of young writers in the early 50s, the Pisan Cantos and then Paterson had been the challenge. But for me, the War Trilogy of H.D. came earlier, for searching out those first vatic poems of Edith Sitwell that Kenneth Rexroth had shown me in Life and Letters Today I had come across H.D.’s passages from The Walls Do Not Fall. Then came “Writing on the Wall” and “Good Frend”. When the third volume of the Trilogy, The Flowering of the Rod, was published in 1946 I had found my book.

 

Sitwell, whose work Duncan had been seeking when he came across H.D., “was inspired to write in the prophetic mode of high poetry” by the Second World War. Beyond her & this trio of long poems by Pound, Williams & H.D., Duncan sees the scene of the 1940s as very bleak. There is “one lonely ghost light of poetry” in Hart Crane’s The Bridge and “one lonely acolyte of poetry” in Louis Zukofsky, “wrapped in the cocoon of an ‘objectivism’ . . . “a zaddik* hidden in a thicket of theory.”

 

These three — Pound, Williams, and H.D. — belonged in their youth to a brilliant, still brilliant generation that began writing just before the First World War . . . . They alone of their generation — and we must add D.H. Lawrence to their company — saw literature as a text of the soul in its search for fulfillment in life and took the imagination as a primary instinctual authority. The generative imagination Pound called it.

 

Against these musketeers, Duncan contrasts Stevens, Eliot and Marianne Moore, who “remain within the rational imagination and do not suffer from the creative disorders of primitive mind.”

 

As if “in London, in Pisa, in Paterson, there had been phases of the same revelation,” Duncan unites these three works in an algorithm by which war leads to transcendent insight. While H.D.’s surviving the bombing of London & Pound’s imprisonment in the cages at Pisa were, for each, defining experiences,** Williams in this regard seems to me a definite stretch. While the war is evident in the background for Williams, I’ve never thought of Paterson as a “war poem.” Yet Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-12, which at times seems almost an homage to Paterson, most definitely is. Perhaps one needed to be closer to the events at hand for this to be evident, or possibly I’m just sans clue.

 

None of Duncan’s poets were kids during WW2. As he notes, H.D. was 58 in 1944, the year she finished the trilogy, Pound 59, Williams 62. Although he doesn’t argue it as cogently as he might have, the premise behind Duncan’s claim for these three poets & poems is not merely that they had embraced the Romantic “Poet as Hero,” nor that they had opened themselves to influences of the irrational as part of their poetic processes, but also – and you can see why this resonates with me – that they were mature, mid-career (late mid-career at that) artists whose fundamental assumptions about the world & their art were challenged by the events of the war. The war, Duncan implies, proved a crucible in which each had to define their work anew under difficult circumstances. Pound’s situation was the most dire – he was housed literally in a cage out of doors; other prisoners were routinely being sent before the firing squad. But, of the three, it is noteworthy that Duncan looks first to H.D.

 

From the beginning then, certainly from 1947 or 1948 when I was working on Medieval Scenes and taking H.D. as my master there among the other masters, there was the War Trilogy. In smoky rooms in Berkeley, in painters’ studios in San Francisco, I read these works aloud; dreamed about them; took my life in them; studied them as my anatomy of what Poetry must be.

 

The Pisan Cantos represent a disordered mind confronting the wreckage of its presumptions – it’s less of a construction than a record. Its closest literary kin isn’t the work of Dante or Browning, but rather that of Hannah Weiner. Paterson, for all of Duncan’s claims, makes far less use of the intuitive, the “generative imagination,” than did Kora or Spring & All, written two decades earlier. So it is H.D., the esoteric, Freud’s analysand, a gay woman, who truly fits Duncan’s model. Which why this masterwork of plotless prose is called, out of all possibilities, The H.D. Book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Hebrew for miracle worker, leader, or pious man – it’s the same term that, as tzadik, John Zorn uses for his record label. Note that, especially as the H.D. Book was written a decade before Duncan began to attack langpo for its own “thicket of theory,” particularly when applied to Zukofsky, Duncan is charging LZ with the same offense!

 

** Between the bombing of Baghdad & the 600 plus prisoners in cages at Guantanamo, the parallels between the Second World War and the present are more than incidental.