On Robert Duncan

–by Michael Palmer Essay, Research Paper

Let’s begin with the thought that Duncan, in his poetics,

embodies a series of paradoxes that at once reflect and reflect upon the

antecedent poetics of what he called his "modernist masters." Such paradoxes

were what struck me when I first encountered Duncan at the Vancouver Poetry Conference,

staged at the University of British Columbia in 1963. I had come to know Duncan’s work

initially through Donald Allen’s pathbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry,

then through The Opening of the Field, published by Grove Press in 1960 and

finally through a copy of the long out-of-print Poems 1948-49 which I’d

found on the back shelves of Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge. I had

been greatly impressed by the exploratory audacity of the work, by the manipulation of

complex, resistant harmonies, and by the kinetic idea of what Duncan called

"composition by field," whereby all elements of the poem are potentially equally

active in the composition as "events" of the poem:

The artist, after Dante’s poetics, works with all parts of the poem as polysemous,

taking each thing of the composition as generative of meaning, a response to and a

contribution to the building form . . . . So the artist of abundancies delites in puns,

interlocking and separating figures, plays of things missing or things appearing "out

of order" that remind us that all orders have their justification in an order of

orders only our faith as we work addresses. Were all in harmony to our ears, we would

dwell in the dreadful smugness in which our mere human rationality relegates what it

cannot cope with to the "irrational," as if the totality of creation were

without ratios. (from Bending the Bow, Introduction, p.ix)

Statements such as this appeared to lay the ground for a prosody and poetics in radical

opposition to the institutionally dominant Anglo-American formalism of the time, to

propose a prosody and a poetics responsive to the most recent developments in music and

the visual arts, yet anchored, through Dante and many others to a "spirit of

romance" animating human history.

As an engaged, twenty-year old student of modernist principles, however, I was

disturbed by Duncan’s free use of ornament, of archaic diction and grandiose rhetoric, and

by the neoplatonic aura surrounding much of the work. (Such "disturbance" is an

intentional function of Duncan’s poetics as he challenges assumptions and boundaries both

to the right and to the left.) At Vancouver, in the freewheeling discussions with Denise

Levertov, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Margaret Avison, Duncan would continually

queer the pitch. Into a consideration of projective verse, he would introduce Mallarm.;

at the mention of Whitehead’s Process and Reality, he might offer Boehme, William

Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell; to Ginsberg’s proposition of "spontaneous bop

prosody" he would counter with the "Law we are given to follow." Thus, even

among sympathetic peers (though Ginsberg and Duncan were not often in sympathy), Duncan

felt the need to assert the force of heretical opinion, which in turn for him was grounded

in the authority of timeless heretical gnosis. The poem was to stand as a

"grand collage," a constellation of myriad myths and voices from an eternal

counter-tradition, as well as of impulses, accidents and intrusions, disciplined and

informed by an attention to the poem’s ratios or measures. Into its field, "where

sympathies and aversions mingle," closed and open forms, harmonies and disharmonies,

the mythic and the mundane, the hieratic and the demotic, were to be equally welcomed.

Whence Pound’s plaint, during a visit by Duncan to St. Elizabeth’s, that Duncan had put

back in everything they had labored so long to take out.

Duncan’s project can be seen in part as an effort to make place once again for the

artifice, affect, and lore modernism had repressed. However, this was achieved not in

reaction against modernism (and certainly not for the sake of decor), but as an extension

of its exploratory impulse and a reading or revealing of its progressive, Romantic

philosophical and aesthetic origins.

Duncan interprets this Romantic impulse as an eternal one, alive in the perverse,

resistant voices of poets, but equally so in the syncretistic impulse of Hellinistic

philosophy, the songs of the Cathars, gnostic texts, Oz, Alice, Freud,

George MacDonald, George Herriman, and others. All are threads in the fabric of mythic

lore. "Myth," states Duncan at the beginning of The Truth and Life of Myth,

"is the story of what cannot be told, as mystery is the scene of what cannot be

revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known." At another

point he writes:

Myth, for Dante, f

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