from Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus by Lisa Jarnot
grand collage, I name It, having only the immediate
event of words to speak for It.
ROBERT DUNCAN, Bending the Bow
Robert Duncan's life offers a particular challenge for the biographer. He was a widely respected, if determinedly controversial, poet associated with the Black Mountain school, but his early career is marked by involvement in a number of significant literary communities. He participated in the Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller circle in the 1940s, the surrealist movement around View magazine during the same period, anarcho-pacifist political movements in New York and the Bay Area, and the Berkeley Renaissance of the late 1940s. He maintained close friendships with the objectivists, initially with Louis Zukofsky on the East Coast and then with George Oppen and Carl Rakosi in San Francisco. Although he retained his loyalty to Black Mountain peers, his oeuvre—which includes ballads, children's rhymes, masques, and imitations of Edith Sitwell—often seems at odds with the more self-consciously avant-garde work of his contemporaries. Following the success of his 1960 book, The Opening of the Field, and his powerful antiwar poems in Bending the Bow in 1968, Duncan's reputation expanded internationally: his work was translated into many languages, and his publications extended to mainstream literary journals, academic conferences, and presses. Reading Duncan's life under the narrow mantle of Black Mountain poetics misses the more erratic trajectory of his career and the eclectic nature of his poetics. Lisa Jarnot's biography offers a useful corrective.
If Duncan's literary career occupied multiple sites, his self-mythologizing defies attempts to create a consistent narrative. Duncan thought of his life as an allegory in which everyday events held cosmic and mythic potential. In the theosophical household where he was raised, quotidian reality was regarded as a spiritual revelation. One's reading of Shakespeare or the circumstances of one's birth or world-historical events such as wars or natural disasters were clues to cosmic mysteries, and reading became an act of spiritual hermeneutics. For Duncan's adoptive parents—as for his poetics—the work of poetry was "to arouse in a contemporary consciousness reverberations of old myth, to prepare the ground so that when we return to read we will see our modern texts charged with a plot that had already begun before the first signs and signatures ... were worked upon the walls of Altamira or Pech-Merle."(l) Such attitudes are components of the romantic imagination, to be sure, but Duncan lived the mythopoeic in ways that would have thoroughly perplexed Emerson or Stevens.
Duncan's mythopoeic imaginary helped produce the vatic voice that reached its most profound articulation in "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar" or the later Passages series, but it also gave him an impish permission to adopt multiple roles and postures. By regarding his life as story, he distanced himself from received traditions and codes of behavior, making it difficult for the literary genealogist to create a coherent narrative. He liked to refer to himself as a "derivative poet" who poached from anything he might be reading, whether it was an article in Scientific American or a linguistic textbook or the metaphysical poets. Notoriously eclectic in his readings, Duncan could chat as knowledgeably about the Oz books, E. Nesbit, and Krazy Kat as he could about Schopenhauer or Stravinsky (he had no difficulty talking about writers he'd never read as well). His conversation was legendary for its brilliance and paratactic brio. He tended to suit his address to his interlocutor, and since, due to an ocular condition, he was unable to synchronize his vision, it was often difficult to tell which eye was looking at you and which was looking at something over your shoulder. When he became stimulated by the conversation and the rush of his own ideas, he often confused dates and personalities. I once invited him to give a lecture on Ezra Pound as modernist at which he proceeded to talk about aerial bombardment during World War II, the DNA code, his Jewish ancestry (he had none), his grandmother's life on the frontier, art glass, what is wrong with pop art, the Waite tarot deck, and various sexual experiences during the late 1940s—all without mentioning Pound. If this was disconcerting for the audience, it was for me a brilliant demonstration of Pound's collage method. And if his "seizure of talk" was exasperating to the source-hunting student, it was also magical, carrying the listener along in a kind of verbal trance. Pound's logopoeia, the "dance of the intellect among words," could not have been more vividly realized. Lisa Jarnot has patiently sorted out the facts from what Duncan, in a telling oxymoron, called his "fictive certainties" and has provided us with an invaluable base for reading his poems. At the same time, Jarnot respects the generative force of Duncan's self-mythologizing and treats it as a crucial dimension of his poetics.
That poetics—what Charles Olson called "open field" or "projective" verse—is indebted to modernists like Pound and Williams and was forged among conversations with Duncan's contemporaries: Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robin Blaser, and Jack Spicer. We are fortunate that he lived at some distance from his peers, thereby necessitating extensive correspondence and providing the biographer with an invaluable record. "Open form" casts poetry as a participant in, not a container for, realms of value that lie obscured from view. Where Pound hoped to erect a dynastic edifice against social decay or Eliot sought an objective correlative against solipsism, Duncan's peers emphasized the role of the body, perception, and cognition in reengaging art with the human and natural world. Duncan's favorite metaphor for this embodied relationship to that larger world is the children's circle dance, which appears centrally in The Opening of the Field, albeit linked to a recurring "Atlantis" dream.(2) The dance, like the poem, is a "place of first permission" where one returns to biological and cultural origins—the lost continent of Atlantis or the lost mother of the birth trauma—through the physical act of responding to music. If this dance of discovery is innocent, its origins are heretical—sexually polyvalent, polytheistic, communalist—threatening the holy family and the capitalist state. For Duncan, in the dance and the dream, we become "creatures without imagination, as if moved by a plot or myth told by a story-teller who is not ourselves. Wandering and wondering in a foreign land or struggling in the meshes of a nightmare, we cannot escape the compelling terms of the dream unless we wake, any more than we can escape the terms of our living reality unless we die."(3) The open field is both an imperative about poetry's unfettered exploration of image, sound, and logos and a stance toward the organic unfolding of biological and social life. Unlike the work of many postwar poets, Duncan's is not self-expressive or confessionalist but rather a "structure of rime" that repeats in its architectonics the history of mimetic acts. "I create in return," Duncan says, suggesting that his art achieves novelty by responding to what surrounds him.
In developing his poetics during the 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the cold war and the New Criticism, Duncan rejected the era's belief that modernism was a return to the "hard dry verse" of neoclassicism (Hulme, Babbitt) or that it needed to be purged of its avant-garde excesses (Clement Greenberg, the New Critics) or, indeed, that it needed to serve as a buttress against ideology. Duncan saw modernism as a much longer and more eclectic tradition. His work reads the contributions of Pound, Eliot, H. D., Stein, and Williams as an expansion of romanticism that predates its European, post-Enlightenment version and claims heritage with pre-Socratic and mystical traditions. Much of his great, unfinished poetic memoir, The H. D. Book, testifies to modernism's evolution from Pound's "spirit of romance" and shows how the syncretic religions and philosophical traditions of preclassical Greece and Egypt were carried forward in Apuleius, the Provençal poets, Dante, and the British romantics, culminating in Victorian writers (Lewis Carroll, Browning, Rossetti) and the era of Yeats and the Golden Dawn. No less heretical is The H. D. Book's reading of a gynocentric modernism, the product of powerful women writers, editors, and activists: Virginia Woolf, Laura Riding, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Mary Butts, Dorothy Richardson, and Edith Sitwell. Significant women mentors in Duncan's life—Miss Keough in Bakersfield, his theosophical Aunt Fay, and subsequent friends such as Mary Fabilli, Denise Levertov, Virginia Admiral, and Helen Adam—reinforced the centrality, for Duncan, of a female modernist tradition while allowing him to write his autobiography through their example.
Duncan's learning and erudition could be intimidating, and his interest in the occult and theosophical caused Olson to speak somewhat dismissively of the poet's Bay Area scene as "an école des sages ou mages."(4) Yet this almost medieval sense of poetic coterie is the animating force in many of his poems. Adapting Dante, Duncan apostrophized his poet colleagues in "Sonnet 3":
Robin, it would be a great thing if you, me, and Jack Spicer
Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal heads so turnd
That life dimd in the light of that fairy ship
The Golden Vanity or The Revolving Lure. (5)
If Duncan was esoteric and cosmopolitan in his cultural interests, he was also—proudly—a Western regionalist who linked the anarchic, independent spirit of a new poetry to his Western forebears. Jarnot renders California's rich and colorful history of alternative communities and political movements as well as the landscapes in which Duncan lived—from the hot Central Valley where he grew up and the windy landscape of Mono Bay where his family spent holidays, to the cultural richness of the Mission District and the rugged beauty of Western Marin County where he and Jess established households. In doing so, she not only chronicles the life of a major U.S. poet but contributes to western cultural history.
Jarnot's account of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s is particularly vivid, reminding us of the importance of community in forging a new art. But "community" by no means implies "consensus," and the period was marked as much by animadversions and sectarian conflicts as by efforts to find a common aesthetic. Contentions around issues of gay community, political activism, literary censorship, racism, alternative religious practices, and popular culture were generative in challenging the consensus model of intellectual life, linking politics and aesthetics in ways that were anathema to most Cold War intellectuals. Jarnot provides an excellent account of the sites where the San Francisco Renaissance took place: the King Ubu Gallery, which Duncan co-organized with Jess and other artists (and where, renamed the Six Gallery, Allen Ginsberg gave his first reading of "Howl"); Jack Spicer's Magic Workshop at the San Francisco Public Library; the East-West House, where Joanne Kyger gave Sunday readings; Kenneth Rexroth's house on Scott Street; and Duncan and Jess's De Haro Street home. Supplementing the more private events at these locations were public occasions in North Beach bars like The Place or Gino and Carlo's, and formal readings by out-of-town visitors at San Francisco State University's nascent Poetry Center, where Duncan coordinated readings. Except for the latter, these venues—and the many little magazines and publishing ventures that extended haphazardly from them—were unaffiliated with academic or civic art institutions.
At the same time that Duncan participated in the formation of the poetry community, he maintained a domestic distance from it through his long relationship with Jess, an artist and collagist whom he met in 1950 and with whom he shared a household until his death. That household provided a beacon for many younger gay friends and poets, who, in a pre-Stonewall world, sought alternative models for a synthesis of domestic and artistic life. "Willingly I'll say there's been a sweet marriage," begins Duncan's Passages 10, yet quickly he equivocates: "In the beginning there was weeping, / an inconsolable grief."(6) If there were tempests in their domestic life, their love for each other provided a stable center and safe haven amid literary contentions and controversies. For all of Duncan's extensive travels, readings, and lecturing, he valued the rituals of the household—shopping and cooking, working on jigsaw puzzles, entertaining visitors, watching television (Hogan's Heroes and Upstairs, Downstairs were favorites), listening to records, and collaborating on art projects. The incomplete jigsaw puzzle that was a fixture in the couple's various households is a metaphor for the "grand collage" that the two men pieced together daily out of art and affection.
Throughout his multiple lives, Duncan remained a political poet whose work—from the early, courageous essay "The Homosexual in Society" of 1944 to his late Passages poem against the Viet Nam war—confronted social oppression and state-sponsored terror. The Viet Nam war, to which he, like most American poets, was opposed, became a test of loyalties between Duncan and his old friend Denise Levertov, who partook of a more overt social activism. At the heart of their disagreement was the extent to which poetry could be the vehicle for political views. Although Duncan's antiwar poems of the 1960s—"Up Rising," "The Multiversity"—are strident and even didactic, subsequent Passages poems treat the war in Viet Nam in mythic terms, as a sign of cosmic disorder. Duncan saw the war as a national allegory, the return of America's "unacknowledged, unrepented crimes" (the persecution of antinomians, Indian genocide, slavery) in present history. To record these seismic changes, poetry must be a place where the war, in all its contradictory power and confusion, can be experienced: "the poet's role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoevsky opposed Raskalnikov [sic]—the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskalnikov."(7) Speaking of "Uprising," Duncan says, "[It is] not that the war was or was not important to me, but how come it was of import to the poem."(8) To contemporary ears, these remarks may seem an overly aestheticized response to human pain and suffering, but for Duncan, they were a way to yoke his aesthetics of responsibility to an ethics of witness and testimony. He had a distinctly postmodern understanding of the discursive character of moral and ethical claims, but his stance created a barrier between himself and more activist friends, a stance that became hard to sustain in the early 1970s.(9)
Jarnot's account of Duncan's last years is a moving testimony to his intellectual vitality despite increasing physical weakness and pain:
When I come to Death's customs,
to the surrender of my nativities,
that office of the dark too I picture
as if there were a crossing over,
a going thru a door, in obliteration
—at last, my destination Time will not undo—(l0)
His coming to "Death's customs," imagined in a poem for Baudelaire, became fact when he experienced massive kidney failure in 1984. Although he continued to teach, travel, and give readings, his body was severely weakened, and his busy schedule was invaded by a regular regime of dialysis and visits to hospitals for tests. A group of young friends in the community formed a support system to take him for walks, read to him, and transport him to his doctors' appointments. The poet who had gleefully anticipated his creative "late period" was not to enjoy that status. The poems that he wrote for his last collection, Ground Work II, are especially moving as he revisits his favorite themes—the old mysteries of light and dark, soul and body, truth and war—now experiencing them through his ailing body as lived realities. In his last poem, "After a Long Illness," he describes in graphic detail "the failure of systems" and the "break-down of ratios" that finally claimed him in February 1988.(11) At the same time, he turns to Jess, recognizing that the fear "of not seeing you again" is more powerful than the fear of Death—whom he regards as a power of poetry, "Lord of a Passage that unites us." These final poems are resilient, reflective pieces in which the poet, who had always seen "the underside turning," faces the full implications of the permission he describes in The Opening of the Field.
Permission, for Duncan, was the trust that the world of the poem would yield significant form. Writing was a form of reading the book of the world for what "It" had to tell us—the capitalization of "It" indicating a second order of creation, the event raised to sacrament or epiphany yet necessarily bound to language. "Working in words I am an escapist; as if I could step out of my clothes and move naked as the wind in a world of words. But I want every part of the actual world involved in my escape. I bring the laws that bound me into an aerial structure in which they are unbound as outlines of a prison unfolding."(12) Unlike the orthodox religious believer, Duncan was not much interested in transcendence but, rather, in the intensification of the moment, "everlasting omen of what is," as he concluded in "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow."(13) And unlike the orthodox formalist, Duncan was an "escapist" into language, not its jailer. That the open field provides access to limits or boundaries that commit him to the "structure of rime" is a persistent paradox in his poetics. The error, as he made clear in his antiwar poems, was to mistake limits for barriers to be overcome—to view war as a test of who has more power or see God as a somewhat bigger version of ourselves. To read the book of the world for its meaning, Duncan lived as though he would be its subject, the prodigal son who recovers the lost continent and family, Childe Duncan to the dark tower comes.
I remember seeing a photograph of Duncan at age two looking seriously at the camera as he stands in the yard of his family home in Alameda. It is an uncanny photograph, showing the steady stare and intensity of concentration that characterized the grown man. He appears already aware of his own story, the romance of the child chosen to be, as Jarnot subtitles her book, "the ambassador from Venus." If Duncan read his life as myth, Jarnot patiently unweaves the dense skein of that myth to show the multiple strands of which it is made. It is a testimony to her diligence and scholarly rigor that Jarnot is able to keep the multiple stories alive in her story, so that we may live in the passages that Robert Duncan has laid out for us.
* * *
1. Robert Duncan, "Two Chapters from H. D.," Tri-Quarterly (Spring 1968): 67.
2. Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Duncan discusses his Atlantis dream in "The H D. Book. Part I: Beginnings. Chapter 5, Occult Matters," Stony Brook Review 1/2. (Fall 1968): 18.
4. Charles Olson, "Against Wisdom as Such," in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 260.
5. Robert Duncan, "Sonnet 3," Roots and Branches (New York: Scribners, 1964), 124.
6. Robert Duncan, "These Past Years, Passages 10," Bending the Bow (New York: New Directions, 1968), 29.
7. The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 669.
8. Ibid., 666.
9. I have discussed Duncan's response to Levertov in "A Cold War Correspondence: The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov," Contemporary Literature 45, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 538-56.
10. Robert Duncan, "To Master Baudelaire," Ground Work: Before the War/In the Dark, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and James Maynard (New York: New Directions, 2006), 198.
11. Ibid., 271.
12. Duncan, Bending the Bow, v.
13. Robert Duncan, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," The Opening of the Field, 7.
About the Author
Michael Davidson is Professor of American Literature at UCSD, the author of many books, and a member of the editorial board for UC Press's series The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan.
University of California Press