Skip to main content
University of California Press

Robert Duncan

The Collected Later Poems and Plays
by Robert Duncan (Author), Peter Quartermain (Editor), Peter Quartermain (Introduction by)
Hardcover Paperback
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Oct 2019
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 924
ISBN: 9780520324862
Trim Size: 7 x 9
Illustrations: 1 b/w photograph
Series:
Endowments:
Request an Exam or Desk Copy(opens in new window)RightsLink(opens in new window)

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Discovery Making

Duncan's Middle and Late Years: Life and Work 1958-1988

I belong to a community that has never come into being, that thruout history I find just "coming into being" ... I am not my character, my personality, my mind, my psyche, my spirit, my body, but as in the writing.

Robert Duncan

The division of Duncan's mature writing life, from 1958 to 1988, into the two periods, "middle" and "late," is in some respects too neat, but the publication record, with Duncan's 1968 vow to publish no books of new work for fifteen years following the appearance of Bending the Bow, makes such a break seem natural, and even inevitable. He did, of course, publish new work in various places in the course of those years, some of it privately (like his Prospectus for the prepublication issue of "Ground Work," which included the first section of "Santa Cruz Propositions"), some of it in limited-edition pamphlets (like Achilles Song), as well as in magazines and broadsides. All of it was issued in short print-runs, none of it with a trade publisher, and the limited availability of that work suggested to many readers of poetry that Duncan had after 1968 more or less given up writing poems in order to explore other forms and genres-sundry essays and reviews, as well as installments of The H.D. Book, which began to appear in July 1963. Nevertheless, in 1968 Duncan's position as poet was far more secure (and even for that matter far more public) than it had been ten years earlier, when he published Letters. In the putatively unproductive years preceding the publication of Ground Work: Before The War in 1984 he was not, despite some bouts of ill-health, any more idle than he was silent, what with his busy schedule of lectures, symposia, readings, teaching commitments, essay writing, and extensive tours.

If Letters (1958) marked an important new departure for Duncan, as I suggested in the Introduction to The Collected Early Poems and Plays (CEPP), the 1960 publication of The Opening of the Field put Duncan on the map, and marked a crucial expansion of the possibilities the earlier book had opened up. The writing of the poems in the two books, indeed, overlaps. As Duncan observed in 1974: "There's no total book in process in Letters.... I started out from the very first poem in Opening of the Field to compose a book,"-he initially planned it as fifty poems (the finished book actually has fifty-three)-"so process is at work in the whole book." "Composed" is the key word in Duncan's hindsight comment: while he attempted in The Opening of the Field and the two subsequent books, Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), to compose each poem as a "projection" both from the poems in the collection already written and of those to come (and thus a projection of the total book), he was of course unable to anticipate major shifts in his own capabilities. His excited discovery in late January 1957 of Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality (through Charles Olson; discussed in some detail below) significantly amplified and modified his poetic practice. He was unable to resolve to his own satisfaction the formal challenge this shift posed to the book as a whole: if the poem must, as testimony, be true to its own history, then the rules of the game did not permit the wholesale rewriting of the poems he'd already written (and published). Rules, of course, are to be broken, and a year after he started reading Whitehead, in the summer of 1958 Duncan laboriously reworked "Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow," which had already appeared in Ark II/Moby I (1956-1957): 10. Since the poem was to be the first in the book, setting up the themes, the tone, the feel of the book, the need for re-vision of this visionary poem was clear, and the result was one of the best-known and perhaps most anthologized of all Duncan's work.

That opening poem is balanced by "Food For Fire, Food For Thought," which closes the book. There is a wide range of poems between them, of which perhaps the most celebrated is the much anthologized and influential "A Poem Beginning With A Line By Pindar"; with its combination of ancient mythology and contemporary politics the whole poem arises, as he said in The Truth and Life of Myth, from puns: "my mind lost hold of Pindar's sense,... so that the words light, feet, hears, you, brightness, begins, moved in a world beyond my reading, these were no longer words alone but also powers in a theogony, having resonances in Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies where the foot that moves in the dance of the poem appears as the pulse of measures in first things." The work in The Opening of the Field is wide ranging and includes visionary ballads ("The Ballad Of The Enamord Mage" was written before Duncan read Whitehead-he would write others later), elegies (as in "A Storm Of White," written on the death of his cat), homages to masters (Zukofsky, in "After Reading Barely And Widely"), and, perhaps most far-reaching in terms of the evolution of Duncan's oeuvre, the "Structure of Rime" series (discussed below).

Roots and Branches (1964) builds on the ground that Duncan's unfolding mature voice and major themes established in The Opening of the Field, not only through further homages (to Blake, for instance, and to Shelley and Spicer) but returning to and developing forms, themes, and genres initially explored in his earlier work: "Come Let Me Free Myself" for instance revisits a mode first explored in Heavenly City, Earthly City; "Adam's Way" is a theosophical play; "Two Presentations" and "A Sequence of Poems For H.D.'s Birthday" are overtly autobiographical and link H.D. to the lifelong mythological and cosmological predilections of Duncan's poetics, characteristic of this whole book (in April 1960 Norman Holmes Pearson had commissioned Duncan to write The H.D. Book, a project which occupied him throughout the writing of Roots and Branches, and indeed beyond). The poems arise, perhaps more obviously than in The Opening of the Field, from the public as well as the private circumstances of Duncan's daily life: "What Happened: Prelude" was written during a quarrel with James Broughton over the staging, publicity, and performance of Helen Adam's San Francisco's Burning in December 1961 (for details, see the notes to the poem); the casting of Broughton as "Mr Fair Speech" and Kermit Sheets as "his cousin By-Ends"-characters in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress-made the quarrel public, though it was not published until almost four years after the event.

There are two apparent provocations for this intervention in the life of the San Francisco artistic and poetic community, one personal and one aesthetic. There can be no doubt that Duncan felt both possessive and protective of Helen Adam-she had been his "discovery" in his poetry course at the San Francisco Public Library in 1954, he had taken her under his wing and they had maintained close friendship ever since-and he saw the performance as managed by Broughton and Sheets as a complete violation of Adam's art. On the front cover of the Duncan issue of The Artist's View 5 (July 1953), Duncan had written beside his self-portrait sketch: "None of us are →is?-Entirely pleasant RD 52." As the Introduction to CEPP notes, he told Blaser on 2 September 1958 that "I have myself an ambitious shade that can disturb the roots of creative spirit." The conflict with Broughton was not the first of his quarrels with peers and friends. Some of the quarrels were perhaps jealous squabbles, or can be ascribed to a desire for control within the community (as in some of the frequent clashes with Spicer); possibly all of them were territorial. When Blaser read his translation of Les Chimères of Gérard de Nerval at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in August

Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

Profoundly original yet insistent on the derivative quality of his work, transgressive yet affirmative of tradition, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a generative force among American poets, and his poetry and poetics establish him as a major figure in mid- and late- 20th-century American letters. This second volume of Robert Duncan’s collected poetry and plays presents authoritative annotated texts of both collected and uncollected work from his middle and late writing years (1958-1988), with commentaries on each of the five books from this period: The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and the two volumes of Ground Work.

The biographical and critical introduction discusses Duncan as a late Romantic and postmodern American writer; his formulation of a homosexual poetics; his development of the serial poem; the notation and centrality of sound as organizing principle; his relations with such fellow poets as Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, and Jack Spicer; his indebtedness to Alfred North Whitehead; and his collaborations with the painter Jess Collins, his lifelong partner. Texts include his anti-war poems of the 1960s and 70s, his homages to Dante and other canonical poets, and his translations from the French of Gérard de Nerval, as well as the complete Structure of Rime and Passages series.
 

About the Author

Robert Duncan (1919–1988) was a foremost figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and is considered one of the most accomplished and influential postwar American poets. He became a leading practitioner of nontraditional open form poetry, his later work shaped by ideas associated with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of poetry. During his lifetime, he published more than a dozen collections of poems, including those in this volume, which remain his best-known works.

Peter Quartermain taught contemporary poetry and poetics at the University of British Columbia for over thirty years. He is the author of Basil Bunting, Poet of the North; Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe; and Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde. He is the editor of Robert Duncan’s Collected Early Poems and Plays (UC Press).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Discovery Making

The Opening of the Field (1960)
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow -
The Dance 
The Law I Love Is Major Mover 
The Structure of Rime I 
The Structure of Rime II 
A Poem Slow Beginning 
The Structure of Rime III 
The Structure of Rime IV 
The Structure of Rime V 
The Structure of Rime VI 
The Structure of Rime VII 
Three Pages from a Birthday Book 
This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom 
The Ballad of the Enamord Mage 
The Ballad of Mrs Noah 
The Maiden 
The Propositions 
Four Pictures of the Real Universe 
Evocation 
Of Blasphemy 
Nor Is the Past Pure
Crosses of Harmony and Disharmony 
A Poem of Despondencies 
Poetry, a Natural Thing 
Keeping the Rhyme 
A Song of the Old Order 
The Question 
The Performance We Wait For 
At Christmas 
Proofs 
Yes, as a Look Springs to Its Face 
Yes, as a Look Springs to Its Face, 
A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar 
The Structure of Rime VIII 
The Structure of Rime IX 
The Structure of Rime X 
The Structure of Rime XI 
A Storm of White 
Atlantis 
Out of the Black 
Bone Dance 
Under Ground 
The Natural Doctrine 
The Structure of Rime XII 
The Structure of Rime XIII 
Another Animadversion 
After Reading Barely and Widely 
Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal 
Food for Fire, Food for Thought
Uncollected Work 1957–1960
A Stray Poem (Notes Reading from Rene Fulop-Miller’s The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits)
Melville after Pierre
Solitude
The Song of the River to Its Shores
Pre-face
I Saw the Rabbit Leap
Roots and Branches (1964)
Roots and Branches
Roots and Branches
What Do I Know of the Old Lore?
Night Scenes
A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s Birthday
A Letter
Nel Mezzo del Cammin di Nostra Vita
A Dancing Concerning a Form of Women
The Law
Apprehensions
Sonneries of the Rose Cross
Now the Record Now Record
Variations on Two Dicta of William Blake
Cover Images
Come, Let Me Free Myself
Risk
Four Songs the Night Nurse Sang
Structure of Rime XV
Structure of Rime XVI
Structure of Rime XVII
Structure of Rime XVIII
Osiris and Set
Windings
Two Presentations
After a Passage in Baudelaire
Shelley’s Arethusa Set to New Measures
After Reading H.D.’s Hermetic Definitions
Strains of Sight
Doves
Returning to the Rhetoric of an Early Mode
Two Entertainments
The Ballad of the Forfar Witches’ Sing
A Country Wife’s Song 
What Happened : Prelude
A Set of Romantic Hymns
Thank You for Love
From The Mabinogion
Forced Lines
A New Poem (for Jack Spicer)
Sonnet 1
Sonnet 2
Sonnet 3
Answering
Adam’s Way: A Play upon Theosophical Themes
Cyparissus
A Part-Sequence for Change
Structure of Rime XIX
Structure of Rime XX
Structure of Rime XXI
The Continent
Uncollected Work 1961–1964
A Play with Masks
Weaving the Design
Old Testament
New Testament
Bending the Bow (1968)
Introduction 
Sonnet 4 
Structure of Rime XXII
5th Sonnet 
Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing 
Bending the Bow 
Tribal Memories Passages 1
At the Loom Passages 2
What I Saw Passages 3
Where It Appears Passages 4
The Moon Passages 5
The Collage Passages 6
Envoy Passages 7
Structure of Rime XXIII 
As in the Old Days Passages 8
The Architecture Passages 9
These Past Years Passages 10
Shadows Passages 11
Wine Passages 12
Structure of Rime XXIV 
Structure of Rime XXV 
Reflections
The Fire Passages 13
Chords Passages 14
Spelling Passages 15
A Lammas Tiding 
My Mother Would Be a Falconress 
Saint Graal (after Verlaine) 
Parsifal (after Wagner and Verlaine)
The Currents Passages 16
Moving the Moving Image Passages 17
The Torso Passages 18
The Earth Passages 19
Structure of Rime XXVI: For Kenneth Anger An Illustration Passages 20
The Multiversity Passages 21
In the Place of a Passage 22 
Benefice Passages 23
Orders Passages 24
Up Rising Passages 25
The Chimeras of Gérard de Nerval 
El Desdichado (The Disinherited)
Myrtho 
Horus
Anteros
Delphica 
Artemis 
The Christ in the Olive Grove 
Golden Lines 
Earth’s Winter Song 
Moira’s Cathedral 
A Shrine to Ameinias 
Narrative Bridges for Adam’s Way 
The Soldiers Passages 26
An Interlude 
Transgressing the Real Passages 27
The Light Passages 28
Eye of God Passages 29
Stage Directions Passages 30
God-Spell 
Epilogos 
Uncollected Work 1965–1968
At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley after the New York Style
We heard it as a cry. It was the Word.
Keeping the War Inside
Yes I care deeply and yet
Christmas Present, Christmas Presence!
From a Poem by John Ashbery
If I Had Kin
Ground Work: Before the War (1984)
Some Notes on Notation
Achilles’ Song 
Ancient Questions 
A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings
Despair in Being Tedious 
The Concert Passages 31 (Tribunals) 
Ancient Reveries and Declamations Passages 32 (Tribunals) 
Transmissions Passages 33 (Tribunals) 
The Feast Passages 34 (Tribunals) 
Before the Judgment Passages 35 (Tribunals) 
Santa Cruz Propositions 
A Glimpse 
And If He Had Been Wrong for Me 
For Me Too, I, Long Ago Shipping Out with the Cantos
And Hell Is the Realm of God’s Self-Loathing 
Childhood’s Retreat 
Fragments of an Albigensian Rime 
O! Passages 37
Bring It Up from the Dark 
Structure of Rime XXVII 
Structure of Rime XXVIII: In Memoriam Wallace Stevens
Over There
The Museum 
Interrupted Forms
Poems from the Margins of Thom Gunn’s Moly 
Preface to the Suite 
The Moly Suite 
Near Circe’s House 
Rites of Passage: I 
Moly
Rites of Passage: II 
A Seventeenth Century Suite in Homage to the Metaphysical Genius in English Poetry (1590–1690) 
1. Love’s a great courtesy to be declared
2. Sir Walter Ralegh, What Is Our Life? 
3. Go as in a dream 
4. Robert Southwell, the Burning Babe
5. “A pretty Babe”—that burning Babe 
6. George Herbert, Jordan (I) 
7. George Herbert, Jordan (II)
8. These Lines Composing Themselves in My Head as I Awoke Early This Morning, It Being Still Dark, December 16, 1971  Passages 36
9. Ben Jonson, Hymenæi: Or the Solemnities of Masque, and Barriers 
10. John Norris of Bemerton, Hymne to Darkness 
Coda  
Dante Études
Preface
Book One 
We Will Endeavor 
Secondary Is the Grammar 
A Little Language 
To Speak My Mind 
Everything Speaks to Me 
In the Way of a Question 
Speech Directed 
Enricht in the Increment 
The Individual Man 
Of Empire 
The Meaning of Each Particular 
The Whole Potentiality 
The Work 
The Household 
Let Him First Drink of the Fountain 
And Tho They Have No Vowel 
Letting the Beat Go 
Book Two 
A Hard Task in Truth 
Lovely  
The One Rule 
Our Art but to Articulate 
In Nothing Superior 
Enacted 
On Obedience 
Zealous Liberality 
We Convivial in What Is Ours! 
Mr. Philip Wicksteed Stumbling into Rime in Prose in Translating Dante’s Convivio 
Go, My Songs, Even as You Came to Me 
Book Three 
My Soul Was as If Free 
Nor Dream in Your Hearts 
For the Sea Is God’s 
Where the Fox of This Stench Sulks 
In Truth Doth She Breathe Out Poisonous Fumes 
Then Many a One Sang 
In My Youth Not Unstaind 
And a Wisdom as Such 
Four Supplementary Études 
Of Memory 
Hers
I Too Trembling 
But We, to Whom the World Is 
The Missionaries Passages
The Torn Cloth 
Songs of an Other 
Empedoklean Reveries Passages
Jamais Passages
An Interlude of Winter Light 
“Eidolon of the Aion” 
The Presence of the Dance{ths}/{ths}The Resolution of the Music 
Circulations of the Song 
Uncollected Work 1969–1982 
O tree of lights! tree of colors
Childless
After Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76
Second Take on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76
She
Something Is Moving
A Fantasy Piece for Helen Adam
Feb. 22, 1973
I have{ths}/{ths}nothing to go on
A Prepucal Face for Nigel Roberts
Johnny’s Thing
An Epithalamium
Poe et Cie
Let Me Join You Again This Morning, Walt Whitman
Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987)
An Alternate Life 
In the South 
Homecoming 
Supplication 
The Quotidian 
To Master Baudelaire
Toward His Malaise 
Among His Words 
The Face 
At Cambridge an Address to Young Poets Native to the Land of My Mothertongue
Le Sonnet Où Sonne la Sonnette dès Dernières Jours Toujours Fait Son Retour
Pour Souffrir l’Envie Jusqu’à l’Amour en Vie 
Sets of Syllables, Sets of Words, Sets of Lines, Sets of Poems Addressing: Veil, Turbine, Cord, & Bird 
Preliminary Exercise
Notes during a Lecture on Mathematics
The Recall of the Star Miraflor
The Naming of the Time Ever 
I Pour Forth My Life from This Bough 
The Turbine 
What the Sonnet Means the Sonnet Means 
For the Assignment of the Spirit 
The Cherubim (I) 
The Cherubim (II) 
Styx 
The Sentinels 
An Eros/Amor/Love Cycle 
Et Passages
In Wonder Passages
Constructing the Course of a River in the Pyrenees 
In Waking 
From the Fall of 1950, December 1980 
Two Sets of Tens: Derived from Confucian Analects 
Regulators Set of Passages
The Dignities Passages
The First Passages
Stimmung Passages
Enthralld Passages
Quand le Grand Foyer Descend dans les Eaux Passages
In Blood’s Domaine Passages
After Passage Passages
With In Passages
Seams Passages
You, Muses Passages
Structure of Rime: Of the Five Songs
The Five Songs 
Whose Passages
Close 
At the Door 
Illustrative Lines 
After a Long Illness 
Uncollected Work 1983–1988 
In Passage
Hekatombé 

Appendix: Table of Contents for Roots and Branches
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index of Titles and First Lines

Reviews

"Includes some of Duncan's finest essays . . . a great help to all readers."
— CHOICE
"The Collected Later Poetry and Plays represents the assured completion of the vital gathering already underway with The Collected Early Poetry and Plays. With these two volumes the canon of Duncan's poetry is fully established and readily available to a broad audience."
— Bookslut

Awards

  • Special Mention in 2014 NCIBA Book of the Year Awards 2014, Northern California Book Award
  • 2014 Pegasus Award for Criticism 2014, Poetry Foundation