Robert Duncan’s concept of the Elder Poem – of the poet who prepares him or herself to embark at a reasonably advanced age – 60 and above for his modernist icons, 37 for himself – on a major project that will not just create a poem of lasting importance, but also force readers (and especially critics) to rethink the poet’s oeuvre may be the most original and important idea put forward in The H.D. Book. It’s consistent with – indeed predicated upon the parallel concept – not unique to Duncan – that one’s writing forms a Life Work and that individual poems must be viewed rather as excerpts or samples of this larger ongoing thing. The result is an implicit narrative to the poet’s life, which one might argue must inevitably form a narrative of progress, or at least of conscious development, but which I suspect Duncan would counter is really a narrative not of progress, but of struggle. Some writers do follow this evolution – Duncan proposes Pound, H.D. and Williams as instances, although the trajectories and specifics of each one is quite different – but other writers might suggest very different results – Wordsworth, for example, or even Stein. What if you’re a poet like W.S. Merwin who hasn’t produced anything of import since The Lice? Or where the history of the poem, the history of the poet and the history of reception are extraordinarily complex, as in the case of Judy Grahn – or for that matter Allen Ginsberg.

 

But The H.D. Book is hardly the demonstration of a thesis. Duncan, in fact, makes the point more than once that he is not, by professional standards, a scholar:

 

For I am not a literary scholar nor an historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions or an occultist. I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics. There are times when my primary work here, my initiation of self as poet in the ground of the poet H.D. and also my working of what is now a “matter of Poetry” (as the Arthurian lore is called the matter of Britain) and in turn an element in the great matter of the Creation of Man, there are times when my work has given way to literary persuasions and arguments, as if I might plead the cause of my life experience before the authorities at Nicaea and have my way, no longer heretical, taken over by those food bishops who control appointments and advancements as established dogma, a place won for H.D. in the orthodox taste and opinion of literary convensions.(sic)

 

But just here I would admit those crossed lines, mixed purposes, almost of a literary scholar, an historian, a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions, overwriting the poet and the figure before us that we are striving to realize.

 

Where now we have only this one way to go, to the knotting and the untying of knots, moving along the line of our moving, the sometimes multiphasic sentence, we follow, trace of this coveted animal or animating power we address, crossing and recrossing its charm as if we could so bring in over into our human lot the form it is of a book we are writing or of a life we are leading, is the nucleus itself of our work which we feel as an impending lure, the turning point where we are, leading us on. (66)

 

Duncan wants to find the terms for his own Elder Epic and, in the same act, he wants to rescue H.D. from those critics who, as late as 1960 – and considerably later as well – took her for a poet who produced her finest writing, possibly even her only writing of note, in the London crucible of Imagism in the period 1912-1915. It’s a project he compares in the passage above to heresy, and there is no question that it was, circa 1960, a major undertaking, especially for someone who appears to have had no foretelling of the second wave of feminism that would soon sweep Western cultures, bringing H.D., Stein and oh so many others along with it.

 

But Duncan has other purposes here that are also important.

 

·        He wishes to establish a solid personal connection with a major high modernist, something that has eluded him up to the time.

·        He wants to articulate a critical writing – a method if you will – antithetical to the dry territorialism of the New Critics, to establish himself alongside Olson & Pound as an alternative in thinking seriously about the poem.

·        He wishes to argue for a particular vision of Organic Form, one in which every element of the poem is defined by the whole, never the part – this differs materially from the work of some of Duncan’s closest peers.

·        He wants to unite two discourses, theosophy and psychology, to create the grounds for a critical discourse for the poem.

 

There are other more local goals as well – for example, Duncan wants to rescue the mystic in Ezra Pound – but these are, by comparison, relatively minor in nature. As Leon Surette has demonstrated in The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult, English-speaking intellectuals during the first decades of the past century were certainly comfortable with the discourses surrounding world religions, mysticism and the paranormal. But it is one thing to be able to employ that vocabulary, the way a contemporary poet might employ technical jargon, and quite another to propagate what Lenny Bruce once characterized as “unscheduled theologies.” That Duncan uses Pound to build a bridge to the various experiences in H.D.’s life, from her childhood in the Moravian Church founded by Count Zinzindorf that first came to America in the 1730s – an instance of William Penn’s decision to seek out religious minorities in Europe to settle in his new colony across the Atlantic (hence the Quakers, Amish and Mennonites all abundant in Pennsylvania to this day – the towns of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Lititz all began as Moravian settlements) – to the “Writing on the Wall” episode in which Doolittle experienced some kind of psychotic break while in Greece, an event explored by the poet when Bryher arranged for her to be treated by Dr. Freud in Vienna, to her use of Greek & Egyptian materials in her work – that Duncan uses Pound really demonstrates that in 1960 Duncan feels a need to build that bridge.

 

I’ve written before of the dramatic decline in the presence of mysticism as a strain in American poetry between the 1960s and the present – it’s most visible in what a poet like Robert Kelly, for example, chooses to reprint from his early books in later selected editions, and in the fact that publications that used to include significant amounts of writing related to the wisdom traditions – from Coyote’s Journal & Io to Caterpillar, Alcheringa & George Quasha’sActive Anthology – not only no longer exist, but have as a category more or less never been replaced. This in part was the “scandal” that Apex of the M attempted to call attention to during its brief moment of notoriety circa 1990.

 

One can point to a number of causes for this process of resecularization (if, in fact, that is what it was) of American poetry, but two in particular strike me as important here. The first is the death of Charles Olson in 1970 at the relatively early age of 60. The degree to which many of the poets who investigated such alternative discourses did so out of a sense of encouragement by Olson, or even out of a desire to in some fashion be Olson, cannot be underestimated. Without his oversized presence, that entire strain of Black Mountain poetics went silent very quickly and very completely.

 

The other was the rise of theory, starting around 1966, right about the moment when structuralism in the human sciences was giving way to post-structuralism. It’s ironic perhaps that it was at that moment many younger poets began to find theory, and especially to find structuralist theory and its antecedents in Russia such as formalism & futurism. Theory had a relevance that the wisdom traditions did not precisely because some aspects of it came out of, engaged with, and attempted to explain the very profound events that were then taking place in the US, Europe, Mexico and Southeast Asia. Whether one followed the Habermas-Benjamin-Gramsci-Althusser line or the Barthes-Greimas-Jakobson tradition, or the newer contrarians led by Kristeva, Lacan & Derrida, all modes of theory also offered one of the primary phenomena that had been associated previously with modes of mysticism – a difficult, convoluted linguistic tradition in which verification often mattered less than authority and prestige.

 

Not coincidentally, chapters of The H.D. Book appeared in publications associated with that earlier trend – one part Olson, one part shamanism, lots of young poets – which so rapidly dissolved. It is perhaps not surprising that of the fifteen journals which carried individual sections of the book, only four – all associated with universities – still exist. But it is also the case that all of the later chapters appeared in journals with less and less of a wisdom tradition subtext – Montemora, Ironwood, Chicago Review, Sagetrieb.