The sequence of eleven poems at the beginning of The Opening of the Field is one of the most remarkable moments – or movements – in the history of contemporary poetry. In it, Duncan does indeed propose an opening of the field in that he dramatically expands his own discursive range, taking on a scale of address equivalent in scope to that of Pound or Olson. While Duncan elsewhere suggests that his work is ordered chronologically, the first eleven poems in Opening move thematically instead. It’s as if Duncan were constructing an argument – he would probably have capitalized that – especially with regards to the poems here that are not from the sequence The Structure of Rime.

Let me crudely sketch out the steps in this argument:

• "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" – it is the field, that dictates, who and what we are, all that is, the rhythms to which we will dance
• "The Dance" is transcendental – it exists before us as something into which we can enter
• "The Law I Love is Major Mover" – the law exists above & beyond both state & individual – "The scale . . . performs a judgment / previous to music" – It is "the Angel that made a man of Jacob / made Israël in His embrace // was the Law, was Syntax."

It is at this moment, having literally deified syntax, that Duncan declares "Him I love is major mover," the absent article the most telling word of all, and thus begins on the next page The Structure of Rime.

In the first Structure of Rime, we find the speaker engaged in what I can only characterize as the most intense & erotic dialog with the diety – that "unyielding Sentence that shows Itself forth in the language as I make it" – I can recall. This edenic sentence is presented as a woman with a "snake-like beauty." That Duncan is address the Other directly is unmistakable:

     O Lasting Sentence
     sentence after sentence I make in your image

Structure II asks the inescapable question, "What is the Structure of Rime?" What occurs next, however, does so less at the level of response than in terms of who responds & in what guise. After the initial speaker, "I," poses this question, we get the following respondents:

• The Messenger in guise of a Lion
• I in the guise of a Lion
  
• A lion without disguise
• I
• The Lion in the Zodiac

There is even, after that second "I" – a pun the cross-eyed Duncan would not have missed – again poses "What is the Structure of Rime?" a response that is not easily placed with any of these speakers, that reads in italics

     An absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance establishes measures that are music in the actual world.

Here Duncan injects the last poem, "A Poem Slow Beginning," into the suite introducing The Structure of Rime. It is a quieter, even personal poem set at the University of California during Duncan’s days as a student there – a scene that he will recount in greater detail in The H.D. Book. Its function in each project is quite similar, to give an historic & personal ground for the larger transpersonal project he has taken on.

The tone shifts again dramatically – "Glare-eyed Challenger! serpent-skin-coated / accumulus of my days!" – with the return to The Structure of Rime III. Narratively, this is an extremely simple piece – the poet, having bathed, is struck by his reflection, ruddy & glowing from the bath. His concern, literally, is that "I grow old. // The numbers swing me. The days that count / my dervish-invisible that time is / up – My time is up?" This same theme that takes him back to the late works of what he calls the generation of the Imagists is posed here close to, if not at the heart of, The Structure of Rime. This is, I think, one of the most compelling and vexing aspects of Duncan’s entire project, the whole notion of setting out to write one’s Late Work while still in one’s thirties. Duncan is, after all, just 34 when he first drafts "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," and only 41 when the entire book is fledged into print in 1960, the same year he engages directly with Doolittle and undertakes this study obsessed with the idea of the redemptive Elder Poem.

Duncan pursues The Structure of Rime through three more movements before abruptly, if quietly, changing directions in "Three Pages from a Birthday Notebook," a bridge or breath, embody it as you will, that must have seemed needed before turning the volume’s second great movement, beginning with "This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom." The Structure of Rime continues to be figured as an absolute, as if Duncan – whose choice of the term structure could not have been more apt – were attempting to speak through what the French call parole to langue itself, as if langue might be figured, have intention, be addressable. Thus, in Rime V, we find:

     The Geometry, I saw, oblivious, knew what? of these sunderings? arranged its sentences intolerant of black or white.

No! No! Say that there are two worlds, a man declared. I shot half my head away.

A woman cried, No! There is but one. I live in one world, and it is black.

This conflict of visions – is there one world, apparent, or two? – leads to one of the most disturbing moments in all of Duncan’s poetry, his portrait in The Structure of Rime VII of the 19th century King of Dahomey that calls to mind Vachel Lindsay and Rudyard Kipling:

Black King Glélé dwells in the diabolical, a tranquil spirit of pure threat, an orb radiating the quiet pool, the black water, to the boundaries of his image. Solitary among demons, he appears to them and to us demonic. We have composed him over again of enlarged terror – claws, teeth, hair, eyes, mouth, broodings of flesh, corruptions of blood, pustulences, wounds, irruptions, horn, bone, gristle, calcifications, scarrings.

Against this figure, and "the counsels of the Wood," we encounter also the figure of the poet, I:

And I stand, stranger to tranquility because I am enamord of song, to sing to Glélé the King as I would sing to relentless history.

After "I" sings, Duncan gives three instances cleaving the partiality of parole from the originating spirit of langue:

• The Rime falls in the outbreakings of speech
• the Character falls in the act wherefrom life springs,
• footfalls in Noise which we do not hear but see

How do we see it? "as a Rose pushd up from the stem of our longing." Desire is that which reconnects the act from its absolute. Tho not, profoundly not, as we necessarily might have it. Thus Rime VII ends:

     The kindled image remains that we calld a Rose. Glélé torn up from what we calld suffering answers:

     I am the Rose.

These eleven poems, the Opening not merely of The Field but of The Structure of Rime as well, form what I would call the theme of Duncan’s major work. It is the argument he seeks to make of the world in his poetry. And it is why, above all else, he turns in 1960 to engage Hilda Doolittle, through correspondence & The H.D. Book, in the hope that of the great poets of the Imagist generation, she might be able to not just appreciate his significant talents as a singer, so to speak, but to get the song as well.