The Presence of Robert Duncan

Go write yourself a book and put

therein first things that might

define a world:

In 1985, Robert Duncan received one of the strangest literary prizes ever offered: the National Poetry Award. It was strange because it was created specifically for Duncan in recognition of his long and distinguished career. And instead of a large cash award, the poet was presented with a small Goya etching purchased with funds contributed by poets from around the world. Accompanying the prize was a booklet containing hundreds of testimonials from those poets, including remarks from longtime associates like Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and William Everson but also from poets whose work would seem the opposite of Duncan’s. Marvin Bell, for instance, testifies that for him, Duncan is “. . . the poet of ardor, encompassing the sheerest beauty, the widest myth, and the most exactly drawn intimacies.” Robert Bly states that “In Robert Duncan’s best poems we feel an intelligence alert to every event he has lived.” Marge Piercy speaks of Duncan’s “. . . deep sense of the history of poetry and of the spoken word, a consciousness that reveals itself freshly again and again in his work.” And the 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner, Carolyn Kizer, states that had she been on the jury, “I would have given it (the Pulitzer) to Robert Duncan.”

Kizer’s remark was particularly significant given the fact that Duncan’s major new collection from New Directions, “Groundwork: Before the War,” had failed to win any prestigious national prize that year, nor did it receive extensive coverage in the press. “Groundwork” had broken a self-imposed 16-year silence during which time the poet refused to publish a new collection. In an era when literary reputations are hard-won and fiercely protected, such a decision seemed bizarre to say the least. Duncan’s gesture, made in 1968, came at a moment when his international reputation was at its height, due to the appearance of “Bending the Bow,” a work that criticized American involvement in Southeast Asia in an oracular rhetoric worthy of Blake:

Now Johnson would go up to join the great simulacra of men,

Hitler and Stalin, to work his fame

with planes roaring out from Guam over Asia,

all America become a sea of toiling men

stirrd at his will, which would be a bloated thing,

drawing from the underbelly of the nation

such blood and dreams as swell the idiot psyche

out of its courses into an elemental thing

until his name stinks with burning meat and heapt honors

But along with such jeremiads could be found passages of great lyric beauty:

We’ve our business to attend Day’s duties,

bend back the bow in dreams as we may

til the end rimes in the taut string with the sending.

As the book makes clear, the bent bow of the warrior is also the stretched string of the poet’s lyre, an unlikely likeness that could well stand for Duncan’s work as a whole.

Until the appearance of “Bending the Bow,” Duncan had been primarily associated with Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov and with the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s. But this new book with its complex mythological poetics and its powerful anti-war polemic spread his fame well beyond such group identifications. Given this belated recognition, Duncan’s decision not to publish seemed like a form of literary suicide. Why did he do it? His stated reasons were that he wanted a period of time to write without thinking about “the book” and the market considerations attendant to publishing. But implicit in his response was a long-held belief in poetry as a vocation in which one is “called” to write beyond any consideration of individual artifacts or objects. If, to his readers, such justification seemed overly theoretical, it was not uncharacteristic for a poet known for unpredictable gestures, a poet whose definition of “responsibility” was “the ability to respond.” For Duncan not to publish was to keep himself open to possible responses.

Duncan stuck to his word and, outside of occasional poems in magazines or small chapbooks, he did not publish a new collection until “Groundwork.” This book, printed on oversize pages and copied directly from the author’s original typescript, gathers together powerful new works like “The Dante Etudes, a Seventeenth Century Suite” and new sections from his ongoing series, “Passages.” These long series continue his earlier mytho-poetic concerns but in a rhetoric somewhat chastened by self-reflection:

I do not as the years go by grow tolerant

of what I cannot share and what

refuses me. There’s that in me as fiercely beyond

the remorse that eats me in its drive

as Evolution is in

working out the courses of what will last.

Such lines, unhappily, must be set in the context of Duncan’s physical ailments which, beginning around the time of “Groundwork’s” publication, have taken their toll on the poet, now in his 68th year. A severe kidney ailment has necessitated a daily regimen of dialysis, a process that has weakened the poet and made it virtually impossible for him to read and write. Given this unhappy circumstance, it was all the more disappointing when “Groundwork” failed to gain Duncan the national attention he deserved.

The reasons for Duncan’s neglect are worth pondering for the larger shape of American poetry in general, a poetry that was born in contention and risk but that is increasingly rewarded for its discretion and tact. Duncan’s work is characterized by an uncompromising romanticism, an unabashed love of the heightened rhetorical gesture and the vatic voice. That voice, fired in the kiln of Shelley, Blake and Whitman, may have sounded less strange in the apocalyptic 1960s during the period of Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Robert Bly’s “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last” or Denise Levertov’s “Relearning the Alphabet,” but in the literary climate of the 1980s, with its cult of the plain style and the minor domestic epiphany, Duncan’s voice sounds oddly antique:

It is across great scars of wrong

I reach toward the song of kindred men

and strike again the naked string

old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake!

that cried:

“The theme is creative and has vista.”

“He is the president of regulation”

I see always the under side turning,

fumes that injure the tender landscape.

From which up break

lilac blossoms of courage in daily act

striving to meet a natural measure.

Duncan claims allegiance here with Walt Whitman and other “kindred” poets who refuse to narrow their vision of human possibility. Their “glorious mistake” is the belief that America could be a great poem, as Whitman claimed it could, and that “lilac blossoms of courage” could be manifested even in an American President. The poetic tradition that Duncan invokes is necessarily heretical--politically, sexually and poetically--one which sees “always the under side turning” in a search for the fullest definition of social order. Or to return to my earlier theme, such poets tune bow and lyre to the same tone in order that the contentions of war might be acted out in the “natural measure” of a new poetry rather than on the battlefield. Duncan’s great contribution to American literature is not, oddly enough, his avant-gardism but, rather, his faith in “first things that might define a world.” A truly original poetry for him is one that restores origins, one that rescues archaic and outmoded traditions in which the full complexity of human self-representation may be available. For nearly 50 years, this utopian possibility has been the primary occupation of Robert Duncan, a poet in whose resistances we discover our permission and in whose neglect we hear our poetry’s greatest need.