Style is an en effort to exorcise or to control the magic or glamour of sound in music, stone in sculpture or evocation in words. The effort in style is to increase our awareness of the rationale of the work. Thinking now of the lure of women’s hair and dress, we see that in periods of style women cut their hair or keep it most in place, and that style in dress means the effortful projection of effect – all aims at increasing our awareness of how the thing is done what is there as a thing in itself. Sorceresses wear their hair wild and loosened, their robes flowing and with scarves and bracelets, pinpoints of jewel-light and beads, for they do and undo their hair and dress weaving their spells. Desire is the opposite of style; the sentence and thought must wander to distraction before the reader becomes hopelessly involved. And hopeless involvement is the underlying psychic need of the magician. Had magic intended power over all things it would have found power, but the deep desire the magician hides from himself is the bewilderment he seeks. Lucifer does not betray, he brings to light our secret wishes to be undone.¹

 

Reading “Exchanges,” the unpublished third section of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book, I am reminded just how resistant Duncan is to so many of the received “truths” of writing – there is not only no “make it new” here, the idea of originality is closely aligned with that of control or the rational. Similarly, any preference for writing’s equivalent of Occam’s razor – dichtung = condensare – is countered by the idea that “thought must wander to distraction.” If we return to Duncan’s attack on Cecil Hemley (& thus implicitly the whole Hall-Pack-Simpson crowd with which Hemley was associated) in “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” we recall that Duncan’s objection to the School of Quietude is not that they are tedious or uninteresting, but rather that they are rationalists, they believe only in a universe of verification.

 

What then of Duncan’s relationship to the Objectivists? What must he have thought of Zukofsky’s prediction that “Someone alive in the years 1951-2000 may attempt a scientific definition of poetry.” It is not, so far as I recall, a line he discusses anywhere. Indeed, outside of The H.D. Book, Duncan appears to have mentioned Zukofsky critically only four times & addressed his writing directly only once, in “As Testimony: Reading Zukofsky These Forty Years,” first published in Paideuma’s Zukofsky memorial issue in 1978. Oppen he appears not to have discussed at all. Nor Reznikoff, Niedecker or Rakosi. Yet of Zukofsky, Duncan writes, speaking of the early years of the 1950s, of his trip to Mallorca & days at Black Mountain College,

 

He was, now, for me, with Charles Olson, one of two contemporary poets whose work I knew to be clearly directive of my own attentions.

 

Indeed, Duncan takes credit for making “converts” of Robert Creeley & Jonathan Williams both, two poets who would prove critical in Zukofsky’s move over the next twenty years from profound obscurity to canonic status among the post-avant, a reputation that has only grown in the 27 years since Zukofsky’s death. Duncan’s own next comments in that same Paideuma piece are instructive:

 

In relation to each I was to be heretical – for in the face of Zukofsky’s process of stripping to essentials, I was working toward a proliferation of meanings; and in the face of Olson’s drive toward the primordial roots, I was working from interpretations of the text. The two could not read each other, but it was my sense early in the 1950s that the test of our sources in Poetry must be in the reading of them both as primaries. (Selected Prose, 138-9)

 

Zukofsky’s own characterization of science is worth noting here, or at least his characterization of a scientific definition of poetry:

 

Its value would be in a generalization based on past and present poems and always relevant to the details of their art. All future poems would verify some aspect of this definition and reflect it as an incentive to a process intended to last at least as long as men.

 

Later in “Poetry,” Zukofsky will write

 

To think clearly then about poetry it is necessary to point out that its aims and those of science are not opposed or mutually exclusive; and that only the more complicated, if not finer, tolerances of number, measure and weight that define poetry make it seem imprecise as compared to science, to quick readers of instruments. It should be said rather that the most complicated standards of science – including definitions, laws nature and theoretic constructions – are poetic, like the motion of Lorenz’ single electron and the field produced by it that cannot “make itself felt in our experiments, in which we are always concerned with immense numbers of particles, only the resultant effects produced by them are perceptible to our senses.” Aware of like tolerances the poet can realize the standards of scientific definition of poetry. (Prepositions, 7-8)

 

Contrast this with Duncan’s radically dystopic view of scientific method, which he gives in “The Truth and Life of Myth,” a work tellingly subtitled “An Essay in Essential Autobiography”:

 

Modern science, my parents believed, would come upon secrets of Nature, as science had come before in Atlantis upon such secrets, and, spiritually arrogant and ignorant, intoxicated by knowledge, destroy America – the New Atlantis – in a series of holocausts, an end of Time in my life time that would come in fireblast, as the end of Atlantean Time had come in earthquake and flood. (Fictive Certainties, 3)

 

Duncan never distances himself from his parents’ position & certainly this would have resonated as well with the experience of Duncan’s spouse Jess, who had worked on the Manhattan Project not knowing what the larger picture of the project itself entailed until, after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, he quit science altogether in horror & became an artist instead. Duncan in The H.D. Book can cheerfully call Madame Blavatsky a fraud &, in the same gesture, adopt elements of her theosophical worldview into his own. At bottom, Duncan’s position is a difference predicated on a concept of knowledge & the capacity of a human to know. Zukofsky is concerned with thinking clearly about poetry. Duncan, “working toward a proliferation of meanings,” isn’t concerned with thinking clearly at all. Indeed, he distrusts the idea. “Myth,” he writes

 

is the story of what cannot be told, as mystery is the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known.

 

It is worth noting, in that passage at the head of this piece, just how closely Lucifer of all figures mimes the role that elsewhere Duncan assigns to Freud. And it is Freud – or at least Freud minus The Future of an Illusion – that figures so critically in the theoretical construction he is making in The H.D. Book, linking Freud & the whole of modernist critical discourses to theosophy through Hilda Doolittle’s truncated sessions with the Viennese analyst.

 

Reading Lance Phillips’ HereComesEverybody interview blog, I am struck by just how many poets admit to an interest in philosophy, but primarily in philosophy as a discourse, as a source for language & on occasion as a source literary devices as well. I am likewise struck by how, for Robert Duncan & for Louis Zukofsky – and for Charles Olson as well – the relationship of philosophy to poetry was far more central. One cannot write for readers without a theory of knowing, which necessarily must entail not just the what but also the how of knowing & the limits of knowledge along both these axes. For our own poetry, we figure it out or else we simply receive it unquestioningly. Understanding this dimension of work of poets like Duncan, LZ or Olson is not just a “nice to have” aspect of reading, but an absolute prerequisite to any possible comprehension. But it does not follow that we need to agree, any more than they agreed with one another, it matters far less whether any one might be right, Duncan or Zukofsky or any third position, than that this dimension of the writing be recognized as active, questing in the language (& world) as it unveils itself before our very eyes.

 

 

¹ from “Exchanges,” by Robert Duncan, no pagination. © Estate of Robert Duncan, 2005