A Note on Robert Duncan

by Stephen Ratcliffe

To read through the acknowledgment page of Duncan's Roots and Branches, published by New Directions in 1969 in an edition that reprints the 1964 Scribner's Edition (this copy is a third printing) — cover photo by Wynn Bullock, an image and text many of us in this room can conjure up even now — will be to meet the cutting edge of the world of poetry as it was at that point. Duncan thanks the editors whose little magazines Wrst recognized his work: John Wieners of Measure, Diane Di Prima and Le Roi Jones of Floating Bear, Jack Spicer of J, Hugh Kenner of The National Review, Barney Rosset and Richard Seaver of Evergreen Review, Bernard Waldrop of Burning Deck, Richard Duerden of Foot, Gael Turnbull of Migrant, Jerome Rothenberg of Poems from The Floating World, Robert Kelly of Trobar, Denise Levertov of The Nation, Gerrit Lansing of Set, Cid Corman of Origin, Stan Perskey of Open Space, Ron Loewinsohn and Richard Brautigan of Change, among others; along with Donald Allen, whose New American Poetry 1945-1960 brought Duncan's work to the foreground of a consequently larger circle of attention.

Here is the title poem from that book, printed first 30 years or so ago, a view from 1964, California I'd say, a 55 year old native son/poet's view:

          Sail, Monarchs, rising and falling
          orange merchants in spring's flowery markets!
          messengers of March in warm currents of new floating,
               flitting into areas of aroma,
          tracing out of air unseen roots and branches of sense
               I share in thought,
          filaments woven and broken where the world might light
               casual certainties of me. There are

               echoes of what I am in what you perform
          this morning. How you perfect my spirit!
          almost restore
          an imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines
               by fluttering about,
          intent and easy as you are, the profusion of you!
          awakening transports of an inner view of things.

All of Duncan's work is here, at least in little. The measure. The music of the sound of the words as spoken. The space of the words on the page and in the air. The ravishing and disturbing lyric sense of it all — its "echoes of what I am in what you perform / this morning." Its mythic, Homeric, metaphysical, modern sense of what might be possible in poetry — "filaments woven and broken where the world might light / casual certainties of me." Duncan — the visionary — knew of such things, knew them as late as Ground Work, whose attention turns in part to "Childhood's Retreat":

          It's in the perilous boughs of the tree
          out of blue sky      the wind
          sings loudest surrounding me.

          And solitude,      a wild solitude
          's reveald, fearfully, high I'd climb
          into the shaking uncertainties,

          part out of longing, part      daring my self,
          part to see that
          widening of the world,      part

          to Wnd my own, my secret
          hiding sense and place, where from afar
          all voices and scenes come back

          — the barking of a dog,      autumnal burnings,
          far calls, close calls — the boy I was
          calls out to me
          here the man where I am      "Look!

          I've been where you

          most fear to be."

One can't help but think of poets whose ear Duncan has, whose sound continues as it reaches further into the air:

          as if it were a scene made-up by the mind
          that is not mine, but is a made place,

          that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
          an eternal pasture folded in all thought
          so that there is a hall therein

          that is a made place, created by light
          wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Duncan's focus defines itself when he writes, "Go write yourself a book and put / there — in first things that might define a world." A world defined by Duncan himself — in his work and life. A world that reflects, as Michael Davidson puts it, "the myth of an Edenic or Atlantean civilization, the cult of the child, the various permutations of Rousseau's noble savage,' the Hegelian dialectic of the spirit, Blake's reduplicating historical cycles and even Nietzsche's philological revaluation of cultural values."

And as Robin Blaser writes in the afterword of the catalogue to this exhibition, Duncan read the Romantic poets with love and care for their imagination. The Romantics for whom, as Blaser quoting Cavell continues, "both the wish for the exceptional and for the everyday are foci. One can think of romanticism as the discovery that the everyday is an exceptional achievement." As much as making much ado about noting what is going on here and now,

          as if it were a given property of the mind
          that certain bounds hold against chaos
          that is a place of first permission.

The Robert Duncan I remember reading to a full house audience in Dwinelle 100 on the UC Berkeley campus in what must have been the winter of 1973-74 — reading with full register of the sound of and silence between its own world of words — "A Seventeenth Century Suite in Homage to the Metaphysical Genius in English Poetry (1590-1690)," part of which, taking oV on Sir Walter Ralegh's "What Is Our Life?" asks,

          What does this life most seem? but shadows upon
          a moving picture screen,
          often untrue to what we would have them be,
          so that we are in our nature
          like actors who have not been given their lines,
          or having their lines, know
          not the play they belong to, failing the cues,
          or like musicians asking "What's the score?"
          even as the music begins and they must play.

The Robert Duncan at whose feet we sat and listened, in the mortuary become New College on Valencia for instance, or the house on 20th Street for those fortunate enough to go there. The Robert Duncan who bore — and bore into — "the ear sounding sight," "the line of joy," "the songs outside," "the core of your folded hands [that] unfold a feeling in the room of an empty space." The Robert Duncan who knew that "Among my friends love is a wage / that one might have for an honest living." "An answer to a question / that has not been askt." The Robert Duncan who asked that question from the opening of his own field — and later, "in the dark":

          I am talking about the beginning of an age in my body
          light as a mountain hanging in the air
          no one may lift from me.

The Robert Duncan whose work we are here to witness — on the page, in the air and ear.

This talk was presented at "A Symposium of the Imagination: Robert Duncan in Word and Image," held at Mills College on March 13, 1994.

© Stephen Ratcliffe. All rights reserved.