Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan has been widely venerated as one of America’s most essential poets: Allen Ginsberg described his poetry as “rapturous wonderings of inspiration,” Gwendolyn Brooks called it “a subtle spice,” and Susan Howe pointed to Duncan as “my precursor father,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti said he “had the finest ear this side of Dante,” and Robert Creeley called him “the magister, the singular Master of the Dance.” Now Duncan’s magnum opus, Groundwork, is available in one groundbreaking edition. The first volume, Groundwork I: Before the War, was published in 1984, after a fifteen-year publishing silence, and received immediate acclaim: it was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the first National Poetry Award for Duncan’s “lifetime devotion to the art of poetry and his grand achievement….” The second volume, Groundwork II: In the Dark, was published in February 1988, the month of Duncan’s death. The internationally renowned poet Michael Palmer has written a marvelous introduction for this new edition, where “the singlemindedness of [Duncan’s] life’s work shows itself in the confident energy of every line” (The Village Voice Literary Supplement).

“Robert Duncan had the finest ear this side of Dante,” wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti after Duncan’s death in 1988. And Duncan, like Dante, was a poet of cosmic imagination, intensely aware of his and poetry’s role in the ever-expanding logos of creation. His Selected Poems, first published in 1993, is a “useful and portable compilation,” says critic Tom Clark, that “provides the most comprehensive available look at the career of the Bay Area’s greatest lyric poet.” Editor Robert J. Bertholf has enlarged the original collection to include eleven additional poems and excerpts. The second edition of the Selected Poems fully fleshes out the retrospective of works chosen from the whole of Duncan’s writing life. From his early poems through his final Ground Work volumes, as well as his serial poems, “Structures of Rime” and “Passages,” composed over the course of thirty years, there emerges a prophetic voice of great perception. “Duncan insisted,” wrote Bertholf, “on the value of the poem, the force of love in the human community, and the revelation of mythological presences in everyday dreams.”

Robert Duncan (1919-88) was a lyric poet with a universal vision whose knowledge of art and poetics ran as deep as his humanity. He once wrote: “The storehouse of a human experience in words is resonant too, and we have but to listen to the reverberations of our first thought in the reservoir of communal meanings to strike such depths as touch upon the center of man’s nature.” A Selected Prose represents the most wide-ranging collection to date of his essays and talks and is a companion volume to the Selected Poems (1993). Editor Robert J. Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan’s writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer.

“Robert Duncan had the finest ear this side of Dante,” wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti after Duncan’s death in 1988. And Duncan, like Dante, was a poet of cosmic imagination, intensely aware of his and poetry’s role in the ever-expanding logos of creation. His Selected Poems is an essential retrospective of works chosen from the whole course of his writing life as primary examples of his guiding attention as a poet. From Duncan’s early poems through his final Ground Work collections, as well as his serial poems, “Structures of Rime” and “Passages,” composed over the course of twenty-five years, there emerges a prophetic voice of great perception. In the words of editor Robert J. Bertholf, “Duncan insisted on the value of the poem, the force of love in the human community, and the revelation of mythological presences in everyday events.”

Ground Work II: In the Dark is the concluding volume of Robert Duncan’s later poems. The collection taken as a whole was proposed by the author in 1968 but withheld from publication for fifteen years in order, as he has said, for the poetry of his maturity to gestate. The first volume, Ground Work: Before the War, was published in 1983 to immediate acclaim: it was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won for Duncan the first National Poetry Award, “for his lifetime devotion to the art of poetry and his grand achievement..” Like Before the War, this second volume is built upon thematic groups of poems: “An Alternate Life,” “To Master Baudelaire,” “Veil, Turbine, Cord, & Bird,” “Regulators,” and “The Five Songs”––the latter two further “Passages” and “Structures of Rime,” sequences that resonate throughout Duncan’s work of the last thirty years. In the Dark, however, echoes a special note of intimacy, rung by the self against eternity, as the poet contemplates “this state/that knows nor sleep nor waking, nor dream…”

For Robert Duncan, the language of poetry is the field of encounter between the human and the universal, and to read his work is to touch an intelligence ablaze with the visionary enchantment of his art. Though best known for his poems, he has produced over the years an impressive body of prose. Drawing from it, he has assembled his first comprehensive book of essays on poetics and mythopoesis. Fictive Certainties moves toward a definition of the poet’s ground in contemporary consciousness. The catholicity of Duncan’s concerns is conveyed by the titles of some of the book’s thirteen essays: “Poetry Before Language,” “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” “The Self in Postmodern Poetry,” and “Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman.” Poetry as a striving for cosmic balance, the meeting of the eternal and the personal, is propounded in “Rites of Participation” and “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife.” Duncan’s opening statement, “The Truth of Life and Myth,” relates the creative process to Christian experience and theology as a whole, as well as to the study of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology.

Speaking of his own work, Robert Duncan (1919-1987) said: “I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my faculties at large.” The Opening of the Field, his first major collection, was originally brought out in 1960; in it, Duncan introduced his “Structures of Rime,” the open series he continued in his subsequent collections, Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work: Before the War (1983), and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). “Structures of Rime” affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language. Thus in “The Structure of Rime I” he declares: “O Lasting Sentence, / sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be.”

Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan’s second major book of poetry (first published in 1964) is now reissued. The poet has said of himself and his work: “I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters––Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov.”

In Bending the Bow, which presents his work in poetry since Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan is writing on a scale which places him among the poets, after Walt Whitman, bold enough to attempt the personal epic, the large-canvas rendering of man’s spirit in history as one man sees it, feels it, lives it, and makes it his own. In “Structures of Rime,” the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself––the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of “Passages,” which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––“My Mother Would Be a Falconress,” “A Shrine to Ameinias,” and “Epilogos”––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as “Up Rising” and “The Soldiers” are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

In Bending the Bow, which presents his work in poetry since Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan is writing on a scale which places him among the poets, after Walt Whitman, bold enough to attempt the personal epic, the large-canvas rendering of man’s spirit in history as one man sees it, feels it, lives it, and makes it his own. In “Structures of Rime,” the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself––the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of “Passages,” which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––“My Mother Would Be a Falconress,” “A Shrine to Ameinias,” and “Epilogos”––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as “Up Rising” and “The Soldiers” are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.