Thinking about how Structure of Rime sort of peters out in Bending the Bow (there is an exception, a piece that turns up right at the end of Duncan’s career, in Ground Work II, but it is just that, visibly an exception) precisely as Robert Duncan’s other long project Passages gets under way, I’m reminded as to how different Bending the Bow is both from Robert’s earlier books and from the two volumes of Ground Work that were to follow Bow after the 15-year hiatus. Bending the Bow is Duncan’s one book that a reader could characterize as topical, and it is especially the sections of Passages in it that most completely fulfill that role. “The Fire, Passages 13” & “The Multiversity, Passages 21” are two of the great political poems of a decade that was filled with great political poems, & one could make a case for “The Fire” as conceivably the finest antiwar poem ever written.

 

Yet, in the two volumes of Ground Work, only one poem, “Santa Cruz Propositions,” could be characterized as similarly related to events in the “real” world. Dated 1968 in Ground Work II, “Propositions” begins as a series of meditations on the relationship of sea to land, composed while Duncan was teaching at the then-newly-built UC Santa Cruz, before it turns to a series of events that occurred not in 1968, but in 1970, the murder of Victor Ohta, a prominent Santa Cruz ophthalmologist, his wife and children, and his secretary, by one John Linley Frazier, a local crazy who had been living in a shack uphill from the Ohta family home. As I recall, Frazier had been upset about the encroachment of suburban development into the “virginal” mountains. Where the Manson Family murders a year earlier had left behind simplistic messages on their crime scenes (and on their victims), e.g., “Piggy,” Frazier left behind a note stuck in the windshield wiper of the Ohta family Rolls Royce. Duncan quotes from the note in “Propositions.”

 

Some four years later, I found myself working as a casework at the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice, where, as the new kid in the office, I was assigned the cases nobody else wanted to handle. Which is how I found myself that year corresponding with Frazier & Charlie Manson, both of whom the media had dubbed as “hippie murderers.” The only thing the two had in common was that neither ever used the first person in their correspondence, Manson always referring to himself in the third person as “Little Manson,” Frazier simply drawing the smile of a Cheshire cat where an “I” normally would have gone.

 

In 1972 & ’73, Santa Cruz was also struck by two other serial killers who, between them, murdered a total of 21 people before they were caught. The combination of three mass murders over such a short period of time caught the media’s attention even in those pre-Geraldo, pre-Fox News days. This sleepy surfing town had, at least on a per capita basis, become the murder capital of North America.

 

It may seem odd to imagine Duncan turning his attention to such tabloid fodder, even though it was occurring close to home, so to speak. But the fact that it turns up as Duncan’s final focus on the topical, and that it should be dated 1968, is perhaps even odder. Of course the poem could have been begun that year, with the Frazier material added later. And there’s nothing about the other poems in the book to suggest that it’s presence is out of the largely chronological order Duncan was now practicing. Indeed, it appears that the book took 12 or 13 years to write, for all of its 175 pages, suggesting that Duncan’s poetry during this period had slowed to a trickle.

 

This is the other aspect of The H.D. Book that I haven’t thus far mentioned, that it may have run not only into a series of internal conflicts as Duncan’s dream ran headfirst against the brick wall of the real, but also that Duncan, like so many other authors before him, especially poets, may well have had a slowing down as he aged. Consider, for example, the oeuvres of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, other members of the same loosely defined generation who died fairly young. If you look at the complete poems of each, the first thing that strikes you is that they produced very little indeed over the last two years of their lives. Indeed, several of the surviving New Americans have been silent for years, even decades. It is the Robert Creeleys & John Ashberys who are the great exceptions, not the other way round.

 

When Ground Work Before the War was first published in 1984, it had almost none of the impact of his earlier books. The world – including the world of poetry – had changed dramatically since 1968, but there was little evidence that Duncan’s own poetry had evolved during that same period. If anything, the disastrous decision to produce the book’s type on an IBM Selectric typewriter not only made the texts difficult to read, but the attempt to faithfully reproduce the author’s own process & page seemed now remarkably antiquarian. When The New York Times finally got around to reviewing it in August, 1985, it turned to new formalist Mark Rudman, who gave it a thumbs up for all of its pre- and anti-modern gestures.

 

This is not to suggest that some of the poems from that book, such as “Seventeenth Century Suite” or “Dante Études” are not important poems in the career of Robert Duncan – they are easily that. But as both their titles suggest, they are the projects of a man who is no longer concerned with extending the world of the poem, whether or not one thinks of it in terms of Pound’s dictum to “make it new.”