The H.D. Book was not the only major critical project that occupied Robert Duncan’s attention in the 1960-63 timeframe, a period in which he was both in touch with Hilda Doolittle up until her death in the fall of 1961 and writing Roots and Branches, especially its second half "Windings." As had been the case with The Opening of the Field, which had undergone title and publisher changes prior to being issued, Duncan contemplated issuing this new as two shorter volumes, one with the Roots and Branches title, the second as Windings. Duncan was also working on what he took to be a major statement of poetics for The Nation, whose poetry editor at the time, Denise Levertov, had become one of his closest confidants. It’s not clear to me whether or not Levertov herself felt the article was too foggy-headed for The Nation or, more likely, that she couldn’t convince the old lefties who dominated its editorial board then as now, but "Ideas of the Meaning of Form" was never to appear in that magazine’s pages. Instead, it first showed up in mimeograph format for Warren Tallman’s classes at UBC in 1961, with a revised version appearing finally in Kulchur 4 that year.

"Ideas of the Meaning of Form," which now can be found in A Selected Prose (New Directions, 1995), reflects its roots as a piece intended for The Nation, as Duncan takes care to work in discussion of two poets – Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore – who had been close to that journal’s sense of itself as an aesthetic – as well as political – project over the years. Indeed, H.D. appears in it only in passing on its first page.

Instead of addressing "the problem" of H.D. – nobody much was taking her seriously in 1960 – Duncan attempts to make a tactical argument joined between two figures against whom he is anxious to stake out his opposition:

• An otherwise unidentified "Miss Drew (selected by me at random from a library recommended-currents shelf to represent up-to-date academic opinion about form in poetry)" – this presumably is Elizabeth Drew (1887-1965), author of Poetry: A Modern Guide to its Understanding & Discovering Poetry, as well as a study of T.S. Eliot and several other books. During her life, Drew taught at Smith and contributed to The New Yorker.
Cecil Hemley, whom Duncan dismisses casually as "a Cecil Hemley wishes that Donald Allen’s anthology had shown better taste…." Better known as the American translator for Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hemley did publish some books of his own poetry and was loosely associated with the Hall-Pack-Simpson crowd. The Poetry Society of America gives an annual award in his name. Hemley’s review appeared in The Hudson Review & was responded to by other New Americans, such as LeRoi Jones’ editorial in the second issue of Floating Bear.

The argument Duncan wishes to make is this: poetry fails when it seeks only to include the rational. By extension, this also suggests that the criticism of poetry must also fail that solely operates on a rational plane. Thus – although he doesn’t say this explicitly – his use of dream material, including dream dialogs with H.D. need to be understood as necessary components of a full study of her life & work.

Duncan is very much taking on the School of Quietude of his time here. His analysis that it fails not because the likes of Drew & Hemley are bad writers or lovers of mawkish verse, but that they live only by their conscious wits, and thus are only half alive. Thus Drew’s prescriptions for form are mechanistic and her ability to appreciate the best in modernism is incapacitated. He quotes her as follows:

"Pound’s cult of Imagism," Miss Drew goes on, "demanded no rhythmical stress at all, only a clear visual image in lines alleged to be in the pattern of the musical phrase. When read aloud, these pattern’s couldn’t possibly be distinguished from prose. The result was a flood of poems such as William Carlos Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ which proves perhaps only that words can’t take the place of paint."

Duncan’s immediate response is that "It is of the essence of the rationalist persuasion that we be protected by the magic of what reasonable men agree is right, against unreasonable or upsetting information." He goes on to perform a close reading of "Wheelbarrows," proving her factually wrong in addition to her failures of spirit, then segues into his readings of Moore and Lowell, showing Moore represents the best of what is possible in a rationalist writing*, but that both also incorporate elements beyond reason in what Duncan terms to be their finest work. Negative capability is precisely the capacity to incorporate the extra-rational.

Fact and reason are creations of man’s genius to secure a point of view protected against a vision of life where information and intelligence invade us, where what we know shapes us and we become creatures, not rulers, of what is. Where, more, we are part of the creative process, not its goal. It was against such intolerable realizations that these men took thought. The rationalist gardener’s art is his control over nature, and beauty is conceived as the imposed order visible in the pruned hedgerow and the ultimate tree compelled into geometric globe or pyramid that gives certainty of effect.

Against Hemley, Duncan adds:

What form is to the conventional mind is just what can be imposed, the rest is thought of as lacking in form. Taste can be imposed, but love and knowledge are conditions that life imposes upon us if we would come into her meldoies. It is taste that holds out against feeling, originality that tries to hold out against origins. For taste is all original all individual arbitration.

This clearly is the Duncan of Derivations, one whose first movement toward that meadow of the mind is figured as a return, as permission.

Duncan’s equation – that the School of Quietude = rationalism – will betray him more than a decade later when a group of younger writers, conversant in theory but without any surface rhetoric of mysticism, take up the tradition of which Duncan himself was a part. He perceives – misperceives, really – their interest in linguistics, politicals, literary history & theory as a kind of rationalist revival. This must have seemed especially galling, particularly alongside his own inability to bring The H.D. Book to any conclusion.

But if The H.D. Book fails precisely because Duncan cannot make his discourse – this union of theosophy, psychology & poetics – equal to the evolution of theory beyond the modernist thinkers he originally posed himself against, and because he cannot erect an imagined H.D. to stand against what was not foreseen, he might have, instead, looked to this new generation with something more of the benign neglect that enabled him to work alongside the likes of Jack Spicer, a writer who, like Duncan, understood the importance & power of the extra-rational, but who, unlike Duncan the theosophist (or H.D. the Moravian), lacked an inherited vocabulary through which to imaginatively organize it & so constructed one of his own out of radios, Martians & the San Francisco Giants.

Nor, for that matter, did Duncan ever address, in The H.D. Book or elsewhere, the question once posed by Louis Zukofsky, that of a "scientific" definition of poetry. If anything, The H.D. Book itself appears as an argument against this possibility, yet as Duncan himself seems only occasionally to have understood – following Freud – science & the irrational need not be opposed possibilities. The difficulty that Duncan seems finally unable to address is which might incorporate the other & what might happen if the process were in any way reciprocal. Unless qualified otherwise, science in The H.D. Book always means instrumentalism. For Duncan, the Age of Reason was, in fact, a time of forgetting:

Conventional poetics, which belongs to the Age of Reason that sought to reduce even religion to a consensus of the opinion of reasonable men, had reduced the frame of mind to exclude the supernatural from individual experience, to rationalize genius and make a metaphor of inspiration, to confine reality to what, as Dryden has it in his Preface to All For Love; "all reasonable men have long since concluded." In philosophy, in poetics, in science, and in politics, men strove to make and to hold a world of sense, practical knowledge, ideal relations, logical conclusions, around which what Freud calls the Super-Ego, grown enormous, built its authority, against an enemy world of the irrational —fearful, to be avoided or rendered harmless—the world of fictions (romance, supernatural, vision and dream), of "sheer madness and vagary." Howling hairy madmen and shrieking desolate virgins appeared in the imaginations of Fuseli, Blake, Goya, Hoffman, Potocki, the Marquis de Sade.

The challenge of course to this view, from Duncan’s own perspective, had to be Freud’s Future of an Illusion and it is telling that in The H.D. Book the actual word science occurs most often in two discussions – the first the career of Madame Blavatsky, the second surrounding this book of Freud’s. Duncan takes pains to qualify it, to set the volume aside from the Freudian canon he otherwise wants to claim:

The Future of an Illusion is the book of a haunted mind, of a man divided against himself. "Certainly this is true of the man into whom you have instilled the sweet or bitter-sweet poison from childhood on." But this man is Freud himself, the man who followed his genius, his Sigmund, to lay bare the incest-wish in the psyche, his life work with dream and play, his obsession with the City of God or Rome. "But what of the other, who has been brought up soberly?" he asks. This man is that other person of Freud, who lays down the conditions under which dreams and play can come into the question at all. There was truth, William James saw, in the worlds of fiction—it was the truth of religion and poetry in one. But for Freud that truth might be various was at times intolerable. It was his lasting communication that the heroic struggle for the reality principle took place in the earliest years. In the little scene some intolerable action takes place: the beloved Nurse is banished, the child surrenders childish things and undertakes his father’s ways. But the "prehistoric old woman" that Freud tells us was ugly too is still to be banished from the thoughts of the Master in his seventy-first year. It was never to be done; the father was never entirely to win over the child in Freud. He wrote to Ferenczi while The Future of an Illusion was still in press: "Now it already seems to me childish; fundamentally I think otherwise; I regard it as weak analytically and inadequate as a self-confession." The dramatic fiction remained, the ‘As If’ reality could not be dismissed.

The irony here is unmistakable, for one might write just as easily that The H.D. Book is the book of a haunted mind, of a man divided against himself. In the same moment, it is the project that empowered Robert Duncan to create his finest works of poetry, especially Roots and Branches & Bending the Bow. It represents a deep meditation on the nature of poetry to person, as well as a history not just of modernism but of the intellectual tendencies that contested throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is both beautifully & powerfully written, even though Duncan cannot, finally, make the splendor cohere.

* Duncan does this again, at greater length & far more effectively, in The H.D. Book. Moore, from his perspective is the non-pejorative example of inorganic form, yet inorganic nonetheless, even when Duncan finds her use of the stanza to be very much like the growth of crystals.

Of all the major projects undertaken by the New American generation of poets – which for the sake of definition lets presume consists of the 44 poets included in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology that gave its name to such different tendencies of poetry as the New York School, the Black Mountain or projectivist poets, the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats – only one appears never to have been published in book form, Robert Duncan’s booklength critical volume, The H.D. Book. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but the major blame – if we are to use that word – lies with Duncan himself.

 

Begun in 1960, at a time when Robert Duncan was embarking – and understood that he was embarking – on his major literary project as a poet, commencing with The Opening of the Field and continuing on through two additional volumes before he took a 15-year hiatus from publishing volumes of poetry, The H.D. Book was projected to consist of three parts:

 

·        An nine-chapter first part, entitled Beginnings

·        An eleven-chapter second part, entitled Nights and Days

·        A third part, of unknown length and chapters, to consist entirely of a reading of H.D.’s Helen of Egypt

Duncan worked hard on the first two sections in 1960 and ’61, a time when he was in frequent correspondence with Hilda Doolittle, the one member of the so-called high modernist generation with whom Duncan seems to have had a serious dialog, begun after an abortive attempt to sustain an earlier one with Ezra Pound in the late 1940s.  Doolittle herself passed away in September of 1961 at the age of 75, having had both a long & unusual career as a poet and a surprisingly difficult life for someone who, for the last forty years of her life, never had to worry about either work or money. 

 

Duncan continued to think about, and occasionally to work on, this project so far as I can tell for the remainder of his life. Dates given in the sections published in journals suggest that there was a flurry of writing in 1963 and 1964. The second section of Chapter Five of the second part gives three different years of composition – 1961, 1963 and 1975. Duncan published a selection of excerpts from the second part of this project first in Origin, Second Series, Number 10, in 1963, but didn’t begin to publish chapters systematically until 1966, when the first chapter appeared in Coyote’s Journal, a magazine edited by James Koller & a rotating band of co-editors that included at times Edward van Aelstyn, Peter Blue Cloud, Carroll Arnett, Steven Nemirow, William Wroth and William Brown.

 

[I don’t think it’s possible in today’s world of webzines and phenomena such as Spencer Selby’s list – which includes roughly 370 “experimental poetry/art magazines” – to fully appreciate the scarcity of publishing resources that existed in the middle 1960s, and thus to appreciate the greatness of the best little magazines of that time. In the period immediately prior to the creation of Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar, Coyote’s Journal – on which Caterpillar was loosely modeled – was easily the best little magazine in the United States, including everyone from Richard Brautigan to Tom Clark, Larry Eigner, Anselm Hollo, Ted Enslin, Edward Dorn, David Bromige, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, Douglas Woolf, David Meltzer, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Basil Bunting, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Ronald Johnson, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen. The exclusivity with which the journal focused only on white men was not, as they say, a differentiator in 1963. After eight issues or thereabouts in five years, Coyote’s Journal turned into an occasional project of Koller’s as he bounced around from Portland to the Bay Area and eventually east to Maine.]

 

Duncan published that first chapter of part one in 1966, the second one the following year (again in Coyote’s Journal) plus the first half of the sixth chapter in the initial issue of Clayton Eshleman’s  Caterpillar. In 1968, the second issue of Caterpillar completed the publication of the sixth chapter, plus chapters three, four, and five. Duncan also published the first chapter of the second part that year, again in the first issue of a new magazine, this one Sumac, a publication edited by baby-food heir Dan Gerber and budding novelist Jim Harrison.

Duncan published chapters two, three and four of the second part of the volume in 1969, plus the first section of chapter five. Then Duncan didn’t publish anything from The H.D. Book until 1975, when he published three additional pages from chapter five of the second part, plus chapters seven and eight in the second issue of Credences. Chapter nine appeared in 1979, chapter 11 in 1981, and chapter ten in 1983. In 1986, Duncan published a reworked version of part two, chapter five in a Sagetrieb issue devoted to his work and chapter six of the second part in the Southern Review.

 

A note that Duncan published in 1983 suggests that at one time there were to have been three additional chapters in the first part, plus a twelfth chapter of the second part:

 

Chapter 5, which addresses the matter of the State and War, remains in large part unpublisht. Chapter 6, which has to do with the transmutations of genital and poetic experience, has not been publisht at all (contrary to the impression given by the checklist in Scales of the Marvelous [New Directions, 1979].

Both this note, and a second one that is appended to the PDF version, suggest that some or all of the unwritten chapters were to have been composed after the completion of the third section, the reading of Helen of Egypt. Presumably because of The Southern Review publication,  Chapter Six is included in the PDF.

The PDF file is worth noting because it is the only version of this project that is readily available in 2004, and thus is the edition most contemporary readers are likely to have come across. It’s not clear just who produced this version – the credit to Frontier Press is an allusion to Harvey Brown’s Buffalo press that, in 1970, brought out the lost classic original version of William Carlos Williams Spring & All, seemingly in a pirated edition. The success of that project – easily the most influential critical text of the early 1970s, if not at the moment of its original publication in 1923, when it more or less sank like a rock from view – was thought by many readers to have forced New Directions to return the great early prose works of Williams the high modernist to print. So this “Frontier Press” edition is rather something of a similar prod, in this instance to the University of California, which must eventually publish The H.D. Book in some version in its collected works of Robert Duncan, and to that series’ general editor, Robert Bertholf. The PDF file has circulated through a number of different sites on the net over the past four or five years, and can currently be found at OneZeroZero, a virtual library of English Canadian Small Presses.

 

The PDF file is little more than a reprinting of the chapters that had appeared in little magazines prior to 1983 and even on that score it has flubbed the job, publishing the fourth chapter of the second part both in its correct position within the manuscript AND as the fourth chapter in the first part as well. (One can still find an occasional issue of TriQuarterly number 12, in which the real fourth chapter of the first part appeared in 1968 – I have a poem in that same edition.)  It’s worth noting that TriQuarterly calls the book as a whole just H.D., not The H.D. Book. Duncan also called it The Day Book in its initial appearance in Origin. In short, this was a project that never fully came together.

Duncan’s second note in the PDF file largely concedes this point:

 

Note: The last three chapters of Part I and the remaining chapter of Part II I think to be dependent upon what happens in Part III, of which no sentence has yet been ventured. The first draft of the Book was done in 1961, considerable over-lays were written in 1964, with dream material entering into the Book as late as 1964. It had been commissioned by Norman Holmes Pearson as a Book for H.D.’s Birthday, but at the time of the commission I had warnd him that I saw H.D. as the matrix of my finding my work in Poetry itself. “I askt him for an H.D. book,” Norman Holmes Pearson said sometime in the 1960s, “and he’s writing an LSD book.”

– RD

By the time Duncan died, some 70 handwritten pages of the third section existed and the first part was now complete at six chapters. But the final chapter of the second part appears never to have been written. What we have, then, if we turn to the PDF as the best widely available resource is a document that is missing two published chapters, plus all that exists of the third section. At best, The H.D. Book we have is shards of a working that Duncan himself was not able to complete even though he worked on it, off and on, for over a quarter of a century. When the UC Press edition comes out, perhaps as early as the end of this year, it will be interesting to see if we can now answer the question as to why a project to which Duncan appears to have given such importance was ultimately left undone.

 

Robert Duncan, in writing to H.D. during the last two years of her life, sought to connect himself to the generation of Imagism (which was, as Duncan would note in The H.D. Book, "not a lost generation," those writers who came into prominence in Paris in the 1920s, precisely because Imagism had been the last pre-Great War poetic tendency*) to help him craft his own master work, a project that, in The H.D. Book, he repeatedly associates with the major late poems of Pound, Williams and H.D.

Yet Duncan’s own writing from this point onward cannot honestly be said to echo the strategies taken by any of the trio of elder poets to whom he continually returns – there is no Patterson, no Trilogy, no Pisan Cantos, as such. One can read Duncan’s major work, beginning with The Opening of the Field in a couple of different ways. In one, all five books might be read & understood as a single project. In another, the fifteen year hiatus between Bending the Bow & the first volume of Ground Work figures a break – placing the trio of volumes from the sixties & seventies into one group, the two volumes of Ground Work into a second. While that may be a major issue for Duncan scholarship in general, it doesn’t, I think, impact a great deal on this work’s relationship to The H.D. Book as currently available – either in the journals of its original publication nor in the pirated "Frontier Press" edition that pops up periodically on the internet. The H.D. Book as we have it was written almost entirely in the 1960s, prior to the hiatus – and the latest actual reference I can find internally to another publication is 1969. While Duncan is known to have had notes to a third "book," to accompany the two sections already available, there is apparently no such additional manuscript extant. All of which suggests to me that we should focus our concentration on the relationship of the Book to the trio of projects Duncan was writing before and during its composition – The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, & Bending the Bow.

Opening was written before Duncan’s correspondence with H.D. got serious. He had sent a few letters earlier, as early as 1950 – a time when his earlier attempts to connect with Pound (a visit to St. Elizabeth’s in 1947, followed by correspondence) had, by Duncan’s own account, become entropic, tapering into silence. The Field, as Duncan called it when he sent Doolittle a copy of the manuscript, was written thus also before Duncan undertook his "study" of the elder poet.

Duncan had been working on this first book of his new unnamed project for some time. Peter O’Leary, in an email, places the first draft of Opening’s initial poem, "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," as from "a trip to London in 1953." The care with which the volume was not only composed, but prepared for public acceptance, as well as Duncan’s own down playing of his earlier works, suggest the considerable importance that Duncan assigned to this project. Indeed, there was much back and forth over whether to self-publish the book or to place it with a press such as Macmillan – which would ensure a broader readership and force more of a response from the 1960s School of Quietude set. In the end, the book came out from Barney Rosset’s Grove Press, a press that had one foot in the New York trade scene, while the other published the likes of Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.

Within the trio of Opening, Roots & Bow, there exist not one but two long poems – The Structure of Rime & Passages – numbered sequences that might well have been written and published as independent works, much like the Pisan Cantos or Olson’s Maximus. That Duncan never published them that way is telling – the two projects treated independently might well have greatly enhanced Duncan’s reputation and, I believe, Structure’s revolutionary nature – it was in the 1960s the most radical instance of the prose poem in English after William’s Kora in Hell & the works of Gertrude Stein – is more clearly visible when set apart. But Duncan’s view of poetry, much like Duncan’s view of the world, is that it needed to be understood as organic, that there is a structure, larger, more detailed, more complex than we can can derive from details alone. As he will say (writing of Olson) in The H.D. Book, "Structure is not satisfied in the molecule, is not additive; but is fulfilled only in the whole work." If one burning question concerning the American longpoem during its modernist period lay precisely in the crux of the part:whole relationship – with Pound, Williams & even H.D. (tho here we might come back to note differences) all writing numbered works that largely flow one into the other, with Zukofsky envisioned here as the Great Dissenter, at least after the opening six sections of "A, " insisting instead a part:whole relationship that stresses the integrity of the part, Duncan offers instead a third way, reminiscent almost of Whitman’s ongoing growth of Leaves of Grass through perpetual revision across multiple editions. In Opening, Roots & Bow, we find individual named poems commingled with these two long poems to form a continuous writing, a Life Work, to employ Duncan’s phrase (and his caps). It is within this commingled flow that we first find The Structure of Rime. Indeed, the structure of The Field forces us to focus on its critical role. After an initial trio of poems, "Meadow," "The Dance," and "The Law I Love is Major Mover," come the first two sections of Rime. Then follows by no accident "A Poem Slow Beginning," followed in turn by five more sections of Rime.

* Tho one might argue that William Carlos Williams, a late starter as well as The One Who Did Not Move to Europe, did not reach maturity as a poet until the 1920s.

Thinking of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book, which I’ve been mulling over now literally for years, it seems, one of the questions that digs at me is why that book at that moment in Duncan’s life? In 1960, when Duncan began the work, he is 41 years old & has just completed the first of the three great books of his prime years, The Opening of the Field, although – as Lisa Jarnot spells out in her forthcoming biography of Duncan – he had not yet found a publisher, or at least not yet settled on one, turning down Macmillan before agreeing to go with Grove. Grove in 1960 was known as a rather threadbare publisher right at the edge where the avant-garde and pornography crossed over into one another. Macmillan was the New York trade presses personified, the publisher (if memory serves me right) of such establishment bad boys as W.S. Merwin.

 

The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, & Bending the Bow – I think of the three volumes as a single movement or creative arc in Duncan’s life as a poet – also represent a turning away from Duncan’s earlier writing, key poems of which were collected in Selected Poems, the tenth book in City Lights’ great Pocket Poets series – and a book that Duncan apparently never allowed to be reprinted once the initial edition ran out.

 

Selected Poems came out in 1959, but gathers poems only up to 1950, including nothing from a manuscript that Duncan had planned to call A Book of Resemblances, poems from 1950 through ’53, Letters, another planned volume, containing works from 1953 through ’56 and, finally, a manuscript that, in the frontispiece to Selected Poems, Duncan still calls The Field (poems 1956-59). Instead, Duncan’s writing between 1950 and 1956 falls into a sort of limbo, coming out from smaller presses with limited print runs – Letters from Jargon in 1958, A Book of Resemblances from Henry Wenning, a New Haven publisher, only in 1966. I’ve never actually seen either of these editions, nor Writing Writing, published by Sumbooks in 1964, nor Fragments of a Disordered Devotion, published by Island/Gnomon also in 1966. Indeed, it is not until 1968 – the year in which Duncan completes his trio of great books with the publication of Bending the Bow – that a British publisher, Fulcrum, makes all of this writing generally available in an edition called Derivations.

 

My argument, or at least my sense, is that something occurred. In choosing – or perhaps simply becoming able to publish with – a trade press, even one as marginalized as Grove, Duncan is positioning himself as Poet – it is often capitalized with him, in his mind even more than on the page – so that fugitive nature of his earlier writing actually becomes an advantage. The Field thus in a very literal sense transforms into The Opening of the Field. Duncan takes up his correspondence with H.D. proper – he had sent her his suite Medieval Scenes, written in 1947, either as a typescript or in its 1950 Caesar’s Gate edition, plus what he calls his “New Year Poem” in 1950, although it is not clear that H.D. read these or responded at that time. He is starting to compose Roots and Branches, whose fourth work is “A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s 73^rd Birthday.”

 

The H.D. Book thus begins at a critical – possibly even the most critical – juncture in Duncan’s progress as a poet. He has had a recognition that he is now embarked upon his mature writing, and that this writing gets under way first with The Opening of the Field and he is just turning 40. Jarnot is surely right when she suggests that a good part of the connection between Duncan & H.D. can be traced to his sense of her upbringing as a religious minority, a Moravian, not so distant from his own childhood as the adopted son of theosophists in the harsh San Joaquin Valley farm town of Bakersfield. In addition, there is a second coincidence Duncan finds as well. His birth mother died when he was born in 1919. H.D. herself very nearly died in London in the flu epidemic of that year, in part because she too was giving birth to her daughter, Francis Perdita. H.D. however was rescued by Bryher, a young lesbian admirer of her imagist poetry, who also just happened to be the heir to one of the great fortunes in the United Kingdom.

 

Also important, however, is that H.D. fits not just into Duncan’s pantheon of hero-poets, those he recognizes and announces as Master, again with the capital letter, but of the modernists she is one of three who, for Duncan, achieve their greatest writing not during their modernist years of the First World War or immediately thereafter, but literally during or after the Second World War – which is to say a time when Duncan himself is already a publishing poet. Duncan himself will note this in the H.D. Book:

 

In December of 1944, H.D. had finished her War Trilogy; she was 58. At Pisa, Pound was 60 when he finished the Pisan Cantos. William Carlos Williams at 62 in 1944 was working on Paterson I. For each there was to be ahead, in the last years of their lives, a major creative phase.

 

For Duncan, a critical feature of modernism is not simply its challenge of the habitual forms of centuries of the School of Quietude, but also – at least by 1959 & ’60 – for the possibility of a new model for the poet’s career, one that need not be a long narrative of decline a la Wordsworth, or of the short-wicked candles of Keats, Shelley or Rimbaud, burning out well before the age of 40. Duncan is explicitly searching for a figure of the Older Writer. Further, what is distinct about all three – at least in Duncan’s eyes – is that their later work is characterized by a deeply personal quality. The H.D. of The War Trilogy or of Helen of Egypt is something completely apart from Pound’s somewhat fictive creation, H.D. Imagiste. Pound, living in cages at Pisa not unlike their more recent kin in Guantanamo Bay, is figured here not as the writer of The Cantos, but of The Pisan Cantos, notable not just for their extraordinary beauty but because, to a degree unprecedented in that epic’s earlier sections, they include Pound – his life at last becomes the focus of the poem. Williams likewise Duncan reads as coming to a new level of maturity – for Robert, it is the turn he locates in The Desert Music where, for the first time really, Williams has begun to compose by the phrase & is fully freed at last from counting syllables in his lines. Paterson in this reading – which is Duncan’s, not mine – makes this possible again by making the poetry personal.

 

The H.D. Book, like the poems to H.D. & like his correspondence at last with his modernist hero, which fully gets underway only in July, 1959, just 27 months ahead of her death, all occur at a moment when Robert Duncan is newly conceptualizing the project of his writing, extending out from a book he has already written toward others that at some level he must already apprehend he will write. The 1960s will be Robert Duncan’s decade. Indeed, after Bending of the Bow, Duncan will take a 16 year hiatus from publishing his new work in book form, with just two volumes to account for the final two decades of his life, a sharp & final contrast with the three great books that occupy this 12-year-arc. It is worth asking just what makes a poet of 40 turn to the conjunction of three writers who, in his narrative of the modernist myth, take on major projects in their late 50s or 60s. But it seems to me inescapable that this animates his poetry, but the H.D. Book as well. Robert Duncan is consciously seeking out how to be an older poet.

Intellectual fashions tend to wash over poetry. Robert Duncan, in The H.D. Book, marvels at the secular imagination of the Imagists even as he prepares to undermine it:

The immediate persuasion of Imagist poets was against the fantastic and fictional as it was for the clear-seeing, even the clairvoyant, and the actual, for percept against concept. The Image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in time” or “the local conditions’’ could open out along lines of the poet’s actual feeling. The poem could be erotic and contain evocations of actual sexual experience as I have suggested in the poem Orchards. And then, the image was also something actually seen in the process of the poem, not something pretended or made up. It was the particular image evoked in the magic operation of the poet itself—whatever its source, and it usually had many sources. In reviewing Fletcher’s poetry in 1916, H.D. may be speaking too of her own art: “He uses the direct image, it is true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer images—a pebble, as it were, dropped in a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of sound.”

H.D., of course, turns out to be anything but a proto-Objectivist. Between Freud & her imagined classic landscapes, she creates a world that is perfect for a young man committed to the idea that “the authors are in eternity.” & it is to Ms. Doolittle that Duncan focuses the gaze of his “Day Book,” proto-blog that it is, plotless prose as critical meditation. Of all the high modernists, H.D. is the one whose orbit Duncan shows no desire whatsoever to attempt to escape. Not Pound & certainly not-Eliot, that perfect middle-brow tucked under all those layers of pretension. Nor Stein, though Duncan had more to do with her resurrection than any other poet of his generation. Nor Zukofsky, though – again – Duncan had more to do with his resurrection than any other poet of his generation.

Given that Duncan himself is not so widely perused these days – there are few Duncan clones manqué out there, not a one under the age of 60 – it is interesting how much of our own literary landscape today proves to be the one that Duncan willed: Spicer, Stein, Zukofsky: all are much more widely influential now than in the 1960s. H.D., Helen Adam – Duncan’s enthusiasms have proven to be contagious. And if not all of his enthusiasms have succeeded equally – the impact of Lenore Kandel is not easy to discern – his overall track record stands up well. Combine Duncan’s vision of poetry with that of Ted Berrigan & accommodate for shifts in demography & technology and you get a world of poetry that seems remarkably like the one we all inhabit today.

I’ve commented before on the decline of mysticism, those “other and vaguer images,” as an active element in poetry. Not that it has entirely disappeared; merely that it is not the omnipresent phenomenon that one saw in the 1960s. Its presence in anthology’s like George Quasha’s Active Anthology or in magazines such as Coyote’s Journal or Caterpillar was unmistakable. What intrigues me at the moment, still basking in the wake of the Social Mark Poetry Symposium as well as Brian Kim Stefans’ Creep anti-manifesto, is the question of what might now be filling that social role in poetry, what might constitute the wisdom discourse of otherness for younger poets now.

That’s a tricky question. One can certainly talk about discourses that appear important to writers in the 21^st century – technology & the anti-globalization movement are two obvious ones, with some interesting interrelationships. But neither discourse as discourse – with the possible exception of something like the remarkably fuzzy-headed Empire by Hardt & Negri – seems overly prone to the most problematic aspect of mysticism as practiced in the poetry of the 1960s: as a domain in which the poet held special knowledge that was then being revealed to (& likewise concealed from) the reader. Such a discourse has less to do with its content, which could, frankly, be anything, and more to do with the unequal distribution of power between writer & reader that it enacts. Today such a one-sided discourse would seem wildly anachronistic. That to me feels like one of the best aspects of contemporary poetry.

An interesting variant – a doctoral dissertation for someone combining literature & a social science, whether history or sociology or even psychology – might be to take a closer look at those poets over the years whose approach to some given discourse to some degree overwhelmed their poetics:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Eli Siegel taking what would later generations would have called the guru path, becoming a “healer” who focused on “curing” homosexuality under the rubric of Aesthetic Realism

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Trim Bissell going from the pages of Poetry to the Weather Underground & the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in the 1960s

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Robert Sward & Richard Tillinghast each taking some years out from their careers to follow spiritual journeys

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Perhaps the most extreme instance ever of this last path, the writing of L. Ron Hubbard, whose spare poems from the 1930s reflect a reading that certainly must have included Williams, cummings & Langston Hughes but which never got the attention of his sci-fi novels before the founding of Scientology

There were, of course, others who never volunteered for such journeys, but were invited into them, usually by the state, such as Margaret Randall’s having to flee to Cuba after rescuing her children back from the Mexican police who were after her for her support of the 1968 anti-Olympic games demonstrations there, or John Sinclair’s adventure with the authorities, ostensibly over cannabis sativa but really more for his support of various elements of the Detroit rebellion in the 1960s, a phenomenon that joined everything from street riots & the White Panther Party (not a typo) to the music of the MC-5.

The question of music itself might well be raised – one might add another bullet to this list for Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith & Jim Carroll.

I would distinguish all of these folks from writers such as Thomas Merton or Norman Fischer or Phil Whalen or Gail Sher or Brother Antoninus/William Everson who take a distinct – in their cases, spiritual – life path & combine it with poetry. This is where the question of the path overwhelming the poetry comes in. I would similarly distinguish someone like Amiri Baraka from those on my list, even though it is apparent in his poetry how dramatically powerful the impact of his political evolution has been. Ditto Diane DiPrima, although you can see in her Revolutionary Letters precisely the dynamics of special discourse as proprietary wisdom.

And I would also distinguish this phenomenon from those writers – especially thick around the music industry – who suddenly come forth with poetry, from Jewel to Henry Rollins to the late Jim Morrison.

If/when the serious shooting begins – we’re already sporadically bombing some Iraqi defensive positions – in America’s next imperial war, and all does not go just swimmingly & very quickly for Rummy, W & the gang, significant threads in the social fabric are going to unravel. I would love to think that younger poets today are smarter than they were in the 1960s, because the risks involved are so extreme.

Reading through The Angel Hair Anthology, I come upon a Robert Duncan poem I have never seen before. My heart literally skips a beat. I skim it & rush to my bookshelves to pull down Bending the Bow, Ground Work: Before the War, and Ground Work II: In the Dark. Maybe I’m not looking carefully enough, but I can’t find it in any of them.

Reading the poem more closely, the reasons become immediately apparent: “At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley After the New York Style,” is in many respects an exercise, a deliberate imitation of the New York School style. Here is the third of its five sections:

They are crowding in the doors to hear

Ginsberg. But Duncan

Is writing Sonnets from the Portuguese

For T. Berrigan with run-on

Effusions of love and lines in rime

(which I have to postpone until later)

Allen is saying various things amusing.

I am singing Kenneth Koch even might be here

If they were written by John Ashbery

So turned on by Berrigan going off

towards uptown

He didn’t know I wrote the song

I have choruses of the West sing

Cantos and for Pound’s sake

Envoys and aves buses can have.

Byron Keats and Shelly are our boys abroad.

Sketch of a vista confronting the ocean.

The first time I ever saw Allen Ginsberg read live was at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, in Dwinelle Hall. The large auditorium was packed, so much so that I was able to get in without benefit of ticket and sit on the edge of the stage. Ginsberg had just returned from being rousted in Prague and read, as I recall, what to the audience (including myself) were mostly new poems, including “Kraj Majales,” then only a few weeks old. Even today, 37 years later, it is one of the three most exciting readings I have ever attended, perhaps because it was the first for me that opened up the idea of poetry as spectacle, an aspect of the art I’d not imagined before. I was only 18 years old.

I wouldn’t meet Duncan for nearly another two years, although when I did, through the auspices of Jack Gilbert, I realized instantly that I recognized his face from poetry readings around the Bay Area, unmistakable with his bushy sideburns and eyes that went off in their own independent directions (this was before the purple cape made him really unmistakable in public). Reading this poem now, I realize that I don’t know & rather doubt that I had yet begun to visually pick Duncan out as “one of those adults who write poetry,” the way I already had done with Ken Irby, whom I would see almost daily at a Telegraph Avenue coffee house, writing intently into a notebook.* Reading this poem I realize that, yes, of course he was there that night. As must have been Olson & Spicer,** two other poets at that conference whom I would never get to hear read live. Was O’Hara there too? He’s mentioned in the second section & again in the fourth. It’s almost too much to imagine.

Reading this poem now, I realize something I’ve only been half conscious of all these many years. When I attended the few sessions I could sneak into – I was more successful at the parties than I was at the readings – back in 1965, I was as naïve a teenage poet as one might imagine & so had no sense of the various narratives & dramas that event enacted. It would be polite to suggest that I was clueless. When Louis Simpson, one of the two poets on the Berkeley faculty, announced soon thereafter that he was resigning his position at the University because it was impossible to be a poet of his kind in the Bay Area, the event was reported in the daily papers. & though I’d already read enough about the Pound-Bollingen affair to realize that there were indeed camps in poetry, armies even, I had no sense in 1965 of their movements, tensions or dynamics.

The Berkeley Poetry Conference differed materially from the ones in Vancouver in the 1960s because – Louis Cabri take note – the New York School was prominently on display, really for the first time on the West Coast. Further, & I can recall some of the younger Post-Projectivists at the time grousing about this, members of the New York School’s second generation – at least Ted Berrigan – were being treated as significant writers on a par with their elders, while the youngsters of other New American tendencies were not. The Berkeley Poetry Conference was where Lewis Warsh met Anne Waldman – Angel Hair was a direct consequence of that event.

Robert Duncan soon would become for me one of the default poets, someone whose patterns & proclivities I would deeply internalize, as much as I ever did Williams, more so than Creeley, Olson or Spicer. So when I found this poem this morning, I had precisely the opposite experience from I have when coming across new work by somebody I’ve never heard from before. I have to struggle with all of my instincts & biases just to read the text. My instinct is to fall in love first, and only begin to notice flaws – at least in the geologic sense, the same ones I suspect that might cause Duncan to keep the poem from his later collections – much later.

The scope of these sections, their “not-quite sonnetness,” is as much a part of their “NY School” style as the sprinkling of personal names, the casual use of enjambment (as distinct of Creeley & Olson’s stricter sense of it), the presence of humor. The next to last line of the section quoted above I read as Duncan’s own response to Ginsberg’s “Kraj Majales,” with its sense of the self-appointed ambassador that must have made Ginsberg’s peers cringe every bit as much as Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” would Bernstein’s peers at the  Vancouver Poetry Conference some 20 years later.

Duncan had his own problematic relationships with his peers & especially toward younger writers. There is plenty of evidence to go around that suggests just how difficult it is for older poets to get, in even the most remote terms, what younger poets might be doing, especially if it is not imitating their elders. “At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley After the New York Style” is very much a negotiation not just with the New York School, but with the idea that Berrigan*** will be as powerful a determiner of what that might be as O’Hara, Ashbery or Schuyler.

Here is Duncan’s second section:

Same evening. Can anybody.

Turning on poetry I have not heard

Ham it up so and still get down

From there he takes O’Hara

Who never really went there

where he did not come. From. They said.

He did little girls reading all

This one in a Black Mountain

Berrigan imitation North Carolina

Lovely needed poem for O’Hara

and Ashbery again going towards the Pound

Cantos with ashes and berries for the

Contempt they feel and gratitude and

for the puns sake

Dogs barking along another shore.

You never gave me my road.

What could I do for you?

It is a lovely piece in its way, unusual for Duncan in how it seems deliberately not to go anywhere, as tho he were trying the idea of a plotless poetry for the first time. But that last couplet seems very much a challenge. Whether you read the barking dogs as a reference to either the New York School or the Black Mountain poets may well have more to do with your own orientation toward those issues than anything in this text.

* From which I learned that what poets do is sit around coffee houses writing in notebooks. 2197, part of The Age of Huts, was written almost entirely in coffee houses some dozen years later.

** Spicer’s very last poem, written before he died just a few weeks after the conference, is a very cynical take on “Kraj Majales.”

*** Berrigan’s role as the ex-soldier who didn’t go to a “good school” & was a most out-of-the-closet heterosexual shifted the dynamics of the New York School from the three gay princes of its first generation in ways that, say, Kenneth Koch never did. While Duncan never addresses it directly in the poem, this shift seems never very far from the surface. I hear this most clearly in “He did little girls reading all” in the second section.

Tom Bell writes:

Ron,

     Is there room on your blog for a consideration of “asyntactical tactics of Language poetry?” (p. 13 in O’Leary’s Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness?). This struck me as a misapprehension that is probably common but I’m not sure why as I can’t tell if the ‘a’ in asyntactical is to be read like the ‘a’ in agnostic or the ‘a’ in atheistic. Actually, I don’t think either applies?

I can’t say that I know Leary’s text, but I’ve heard that charge before. It’s one of my Top 10 Myths about Language Poetry:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry is non-narrative

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry is a- (or anti-) syntactical
(alternate version: language poetry = word salad)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry is academic

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry is poetry written to prove a theory

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry is New Criticism with a human face

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry has no humor

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry has no interest in people

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry began in 1978

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry is anything written since 1978
(alternate versions: since 1970; since 1990)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Language poetry is anything “I don’t understand”

Some of these of course are simply silly. Of the 40 writers included in In the American Tree, exactly eight have (or have had) tenure track positions in college-level literature programs. Of those eight, three (Watten, Perelman, Davidson) were hired as modernists rather than as poets, while David Bromige was hired onto the Sonoma State faculty before anybody there had ever heard the dread phrase “language-centered writing.” This leaves exactly four human beings who could plausibly have been hired in part for their accomplishments as poets related to the social phenomenon that is langpo: Bernstein at Buffalo, Hejinian only very recently at Berkeley, and Susan & Fanny Howe, both now retired. More language poets work in the computer industry, frankly.*

But to tackle the non-narrative & word salad canards, lets take a look at some recent work from Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service, a “recasting” of Dante’s Paradiso. This passage comes from “Moon I,” the first piece in the second section of this book:

     Charm Master, let’s say I repeat mere outline of
somehow pumps
                                   look I lose in looks
’to become’ & ‘to appear’ are the same
                                   a contrario goof, a spell behaved
souvenir pinch painted wardens
scared to fake redress by projective graphic lids
laid eyes on – what opals, what clovers, eye-level stress
imagery sale cipher fitted to inwards as if
                                                                     into the distance:
                                      simulcrayon scopafidelity.

Andrews describes his process on the back cover of the Coach House volume in very straightforward terms:

Its ‘christmases of the heart in syllables’ take Dante’s thematic cues & path through ten concentric planetary bodies to rechoreograph several years’ worth of poetic raw material of mine – on love, erotic intimacy, gender socialization & the body. Dante’s topics & tercents & punctuation give its 100 parts their internal shape, with a drastic constructivism of syntax, with denotations & fluidities magnetizing its word-to-word attractions or pushes & pulls as ‘valedictory honeymoon burns in the pagination’.

What Lip Service is not, then, is either free writing or a homophonic translation of Paradiso. Its actual relation to Dante’s work is at the level of structure – akin perhaps to Joyce’s use of Homer’s poem in Ulysses but with one eye toward the exoskeletal features of the text. Without going into the thematic correspondences between Dante’s work and Lip Service, the passage above – picked primarily because I want to think a little about that remarkable last line – seems to me perfectly readable. It is neither asyntactic nor non-narrative. Built out of Andrews’ reservoir of “poetic raw material,” one could conceivably argue that it is a hodge-podge of found language, jumbled together into an aesthetically pleasing shape. But a closer reading reveals – constantly, throughout the entire text – that more is going on.

The opening line of this passage is an address to a named Other & addresses, in fact, the form of the poem itself (with the articles removed a la Ginsberg). The next line appears to shift context entirely & in fact does. Doing so, the language moves away from comment toward prosody, thus it also pumps. But that is as much a comment on the form as was the prior line. The third line shifts again. As it does, it invokes two other aspects of language – its role as embodiment of voice, thus insinuating character, and as depicter of the visual. The line is a good example, actually, of Andrews’ sense of humor, which generally has a lighter or more mellow touch in Lip Service than the biting sarcasm of his earlier writing. The humor is couched precisely in the alliteration of the line itself: “look I like lose in looks.” Looking here may lead to a sense of presence – we hear a voice, perfectly identifiable with that first line to the Charm Master – but we don’t see so much as we hear. The fourth line in the passage can be read as a direct comment on the problem: you appear, therefore you are. The italicized phrase in the sixth line is a metacomment on the entire passage, joining (by no coincidence) Italian to a noun associated with Allen Ginsberg. Andrews is invoking multiple lines of simultaneous heritage here. The phrase that is not italicized (i.e. in roman type) is itself further metacomment – with a soft pun echoing out from spell to an absent spelling.

Metacommentary, the use of one line as a kind of an equivalence with its predecessor, but composed in such a fashion as to also (déjà toujours) further the argument, is a fundamental poetic process, proceeding forward by operating precisely along what Roman Jakobson used to characterize as the vertical axis of language. While it is not identical to metaphor, the process is not far removed.

The four terms of the next line “souvenir pinch painted wardens” can be read as a single complex noun phrase and as four characterizations of a writer’s relation to the use of appropriated language. A halfway attentive reader will even hear the joke in the term wardens, that old double meaning of parole. The line which follows is also a complex phrase, one that invokes multiple approaches to contemporary writing:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>as trauma testimony (scared)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>as sincerity (to fake), a concept that insinuates both Zukofsky’s test of poetry as well as the mock humility of American Poetry Review free verse

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>as identarian advocacy (redress)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>as both – and the contradiction here is not accidental – persona (by projective) and voice-as-breath-as-persona (Black mountain projectivism)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>as sight, depiction (graphic)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>as object, closed containers of content (lids), with of course that back-pun towards sight hidden in the suggested “eyelids”

The following directly addresses language’s relationship to sight – one of the most interesting and still under-theorized linguistic dimensions we have – but ends it with a term (stress) that also invokes metrics & does so after bringing in the visual domain not a specifics but as categories (what X, what Y). The line after this – “imagery sale cipher fitted to inwards as if” – is the most polemic in this passage, suggesting as it does that visual details are in fact mechanisms by which the language of the written pulls the reader into a mode of subjective acceptance. The next-to-last-line here, “into the distance,” follows, suggesting that this interiority is thus projected outward as if real or objective.

Which brings us to our pair of neologisms: simulcrayon scopafidelity. The first jokingly characterizes the omnipresence of immanence’s lush visuality – it’s just there, everywhere. The second suggests that the allegiance of the visual world is to a state that could be characterized as psychotropic or drugged. It projects us, and is as much an element of ideology in the Althusserian sense of that term as any aural or vulgarly political paradigm. It constitutes the field of our interior lives.

None of this is rocket science. I haven’t even broached the question of Dante and the layers of meaning waiting at that level. But I’ve performed this sort of reading exercise before with texts by writers as diverse as Charles Bernstein & Rae Armantrout. Andrews is using poetry to make an argument here, quite like Dante, and the exposition is hardly impenetrable. Nor is his thesis so revolutionary that it should cause a reader to stumble. None of it requires the kind of mind-numbing detail that I’ve laid out here – a casual reader should be able to sense almost all of this just perusing the text. Any college senior, regardless of major, who can’t pick up 80 percent of it just by reading the passage above ought to demand a refund of his or her tuition – because this isn’t scholarship, it’s literacy. And the inability to do this suggests a pretty sad state of affairs.

I am amazed, therefore, and invariably depressed, whenever I see – as I do too often in even our most famous literary critics & in more than a few poets – that this basic level of reading competence appears to be missing. It’s almost a form of aphasia, as though the reader were a citizen of the cinematic city of Pleasantville before the advent of color. Thus I take Andrews’ suggestion that the vocabulary of color itself, and all the other linguistic minutiae of the “reality effect,” including voice, projection, even character, are a part of this conspiracy to make idiots of us all quite seriously. How else explain how someone like Richard Wakefield cannot see what is wonderful, say, in the work of Jena Osman? How else explain the idea that language poetry is either asyntactical or non-narrative?

  

* Count them: Kit Robinson, Alan Bernheimer, James Sherry, Tom Mandel and myself.