It was blogging that finally brought me to Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. Or perhaps it was the other way around. I was spending a couple of weeks in a cabin off an unmarked trail on the far side of Brier Island off the southwest coast of Nova Scotia. Because I was on vacation, I didn’t have a laptop with me, although I had some periodic access to email & the web through the Westport library, the little three-street town that makes up what this island knows of civilization, or through a PC made available through Canada’s federal computer access program at the whale watching station across from lone store and just down the street from the fish processing plant.

 

I’d loaded The H.D. Book in the “Frontier Press” PDF file format onto my Palm Pilot. And if I had any time left on my turn at the PC once I finished my email, I turned to the Blogger site, where I’d begun fiddling around with a format that looked like it might feasible. In my memory – and even at the time – the two projects feel inseparable.

 

In 2002, when this occurred, it had been some 36 years since I’d first come across a selection of Robert Duncan’s critical prose in Origin, Second Series, No. 1, where it was entitled The Day Book. While I’d begun reading Duncan seriously, perhaps even obsessively, by then, I found this work off-putting. Its density as prose was heightened (if not largely generated, at least as a surface effect) by my own lack of resources at the age of 20 to come to terms with this work. As new chapters of the project came out over the next few years – two in The Southern Review, for example, which called the project H.D., another in Caterpillar 7, using the name finally of The H.D. Book – I was never able to get with the program. Not only were they dense, but their order of publication was jumbled. After the selection from the second part appeared in 1963, Aion published the fifth chapter of the first section in 1964 – a poetry journal taking its name from a work by Carl Jung was very 1964 – then two years later, the first chapter appeared, this time in Coyote’s Journal.

 

It was at about this point that I discovered the Origin issue in the library at San Francisco State – and I was devoted reader of Coyote’s Journal, which I would have not hesitated to characterize as the best poetry publication around – but these disparate and disjointed excerpts gave me a sense of the work’s difficulty that, in 2004, seems hard to defend.

 

Duncan’s prose was nowhere nearly so convoluted or idiosyncratic as the critical writing of Charles Olson or the later Ezra Pound, two of my favorite poet-critics at the time. If Duncan’s tone struck me as personal, even private, it was nowhere nearly so intimate, say, as that of Robert Creeley’s critical prose – this during a period when Creeley short notes in journals were appearing with some regularity, tho nobody I knew at the time seemed to understand (as I most assuredly did not) just how substantial a critical oeuvre Creeley was putting together in those years – when Don Allen published A Quick Graph in 1970, it and Williams’ Spring & All (reissued after being out of print for four dozen years) transformed the critical environment surrounding the New American Poetry.

 

My own problem with The H.D. Book was mostly that I was unread at the time, trying to follow the prose of a polymath on a subject that occasionally – tho not consistently – seemed to be about a modernist poet whose work I didn’t know well – and whose aesthetic bond to Duncan I did not comprehend. There are roughly ten references, ranging from allusions to direct quotation, per page, some 5,000 in all, give or take. In the middle 1960s, it was fair to suggest that I didn’t recognize, know, or understand perhaps 80 percent of them.

 

For Duncan had not one, but several simultaneous agendas in writing this book. What makes Hilda Doolittle unique is that, at least in the eyes of Duncan, she is that part of the great Venn diagram of influences where such things as modernism, mysticism, homosexuality, and a concept that I will call The Elder Poem all come together. Gertrude Stein, who is curiously absent from this project, fails for want of an epic composed as an older writer. Pound was dangerously heterosexual, or maybe just dangerous, though Duncan did make an attempt in the late 1940s to establish a connection to him and does his best to yoke Pound to mysticism, mostly through his apprenticeship to Yeats. Crane didn’t live long enough. Duncan seems not have approached Williams & expresses to Denise Levertov that what he had found – and publicly advocated – in the later work of Williams had “not felt as a way opening for me in form.”* Zukofsky and the Objectivists were peers, not masters, particularly during that long period between World War 2 and the early 1960s when they had mostly dropped from sight.

 

Thus multiple agendas in units presented in good part out of order – presuming that the order of the actual book would have made its argument, its internal logic, somehow more clear, which as it turns out is only half true – focused around a poet whose work I didn’t know well and bringing in a seemingly infinite cast of obscure references. At some point, I must have decided, “Oh hell, I’ll just wait for the book.” And so I did.

 

Duncan himself made an effort in the late 1960s to bring individual chapters out more or less in their order of appearance, with only a reworked version of Part One, Chapter 5 and “Rites of Participation,” Part One, Chapter 6, appearing noticeably out of order as he brought forward six chapters of the first part, and five of the second.

 

Then there is nothing for another six years. At this point – and up until at least 1983 – Duncan is telling people that ultimately Part One will have nine chapters, Part Two twelve chapters, and that there will be a Part Three, a reading of H.D.’s final long poem, Helen of Egypt. At this point also, Duncan has begun a publicly announced – there is some question as whether this was planned or accidental – 15 year hiatus from publishing books of new poetry.

 

In 1975, Duncan publishes three additional pages to Part Two, Chapter 5 and adds the next two chapters in the magazine Credences. Then another silence of four years. In 1979, Duncan publishes the next chapter in of all places The Chicago Review. Two years later, Part Two, Chapter 11 appears from Montemora. Two years later, Ironwood brings out Chapter 10. Finally, in 1985, Duncan brings out a revised version of Part Two, Chapter 5 in Sagetrieb.

 

The H.D. Book is unfinished, even after at least 25 years of work. At around 500 pages total – using the Frontier Press format, which flows 187,000 words into 421 pages, inserting instead the correct fourth chapter for the first part in lieu of the one that is erroneously used for both the first and second parts of the PDF file, and adding the pages that exist in Duncan’s notes from the third section, none of which has yet to appear in print – that’s just 20 pages per year. The scale is not vast. Rather, one has a sense that Duncan worked hard on it for a time – 1961 through ’63 – then in bursts thereafter, the bursts at least partly involved in plowing through old ground, adding new elements – such as dream sequences in 1964 & ’65.

 

So I envision Duncan even during his most concentrated years producing roughly 60,000 words per year. A significant amount, but not necessarily a lot as a daily activity when alongside what will mount up for a dedicated blogger – in the first year of my own web log, I wrote over 330,000 words, in the second 240,000. Duncan’s production, as a daily writing practice, averages just 164 words. But what I see – I think what I saw at the very beginning – and why that first alternate title, The Day Book – resonated with me so, is the concept of a critical writing project as a means of thinking through the issues in one’s poetry, whatever they might be.

 

Since the book itself never actually appeared, as such, The H.D. Book over the years became more and more an object not of criticism (Duncan’s), but of memory (my own). So it was this concept of the function of a critical project that lasted with me more, in some ways, than the project itself, especially as time went by and I lost track of the original magazine issues in which it appeared. (I had, I believe, at one time or another owned all but the original Origin issue, the Aion number and the 1985 issue of The Southern Review; I’m not sure that I ever even saw these latter two.)  In my memory – and to some degree in the book itself – Duncan’s critical prose comes as close to Viktor Shklovsky’s utopia of a plotless prose as any I can think of by an American poet in the Pound/Stein/Williams-Objectivist-New American-Langpo tradition.

 

So when I began to think seriously about the idea of blogging, it felt like the most obvious thing to me to do to finally attempt to read – seriously read – The H.D. Book.

 

 

 

* Williams had in fact been a point of contention between himself and Madeline Gleason. He quotes her as saying, circa 1950, “do you really think anyone will be reading him ten years from now?”