In a 1959 letter to painter Jasper Johns, the poet Frank O'Hara had this to say of Robert Duncan: "I can't stand him myself, but he is their [the West Coast's] Charles Olson-to me he is quite flabby by comparison, but maybe [that's] because I'm on the East Coast."
Robert Duncan: The Collected Early Poems and Plays (The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan)
University of California Press
875 pages
$59.95
The comparison to Olson is not a compliment. In an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, after pausing to find exactly the right word, O'Hara calls Olson a "great spirit," not a great poet, and suggests that Olson is too preoccupied with "saying the important utterance, which one cannot always summon up and indeed is not particularly desirable most of the time."
In her recent biography of Duncan, Lisa Jarnot sees in O'Hara's slight of Duncan a clash of personalities. She notes that Duncan sent O'Hara a letter after he had read his long poem "In Memory of My Feelings" in the 1958 issue of Evergreen suggesting that he and O'Hara shared certain elements of style. Irritated by Duncan's "affected tone," Jarnot writes, "O'Hara returned the letter via Donald Allen without a response."
But there's something more going on here. Duncan was right to note similarities between his work and O'Hara's. Like Duncan, O'Hara regularly used devices indebted to surrealism—parataxical juxtaposition of incongruent images (often of sex or violence), illogicality, and a multiplicity of "voices." And like Duncan, O'Hara was more interested in the process of writing than its product. In terms that could be applied to his own work, O'Hara writes in a piece on Picasso that the painter did not devote himself to a specific style but "explored the possibilities for discovery in himself as an artist, and in doing so he embraced, absorbed, and expanded" the material of his work. This is not too different from Duncan's remark in his long poem "An Essay at War" that "we pick up from a poem / or the sound of a poem the sound / of words saying themselves to us and saying / what we have been wanting to say. / Without a plan?"
The tone of Duncan's work, however, differs sharply from O'Hara's, and this is no small matter. O'Hara aimed for an "authentic" voice—a voice, as he put it, that does not sound "more elegant, more stupid, more appealing, more affectionate or more sincere than the words will allow them to be." For O'Hara, an "affected" voice makes for bad poetry because it undermines the truth-telling aspect of poetry in a world in which there are no Truths, only truths. For the Surrealists, automatic writing was a means of discovering the primordial Self buried in the unconsciousness, but for O'Hara, it was just a tool of composition that allowed one to capture the disparate feelings of a temporal being.
But for Duncan, whose parents were both theosophists and who grew up thinking, as he said in 1982, that he was "of the last generation of Atlantis," deeper meanings were everywhere. His 1968 preface to The First Decade provides one of the clearest early statements of his poetics:
I have sought to liberate in language natural powers of the poem itself. Form came in commanding cadences and rimes, sequences of vowel sounds and consonant clusters that let toward melody; and in the excitement of the music, I was transported beyond the model into the presence of the poetic intention itself—I began to see and hear with the eyes and ears of the poem.
The poet's task, in other words, is to immerse himself in language in order to discover some mystical order or primordial "poetic intention" hidden in language's phonemes. He is a Christ figure who immerses himself in the suffering of the world, as he wrote in 1946: "Glad Christ! of whom partaking I / am—as a universe is crucified in me—/ Christ-crossd upon the body of my world." In so doing, he reveals the source of all that is.
This is what Duncan means when he states on various occasions that his principal concern in his poetry is "formal." He is a mystic, preoccupied with the "mystery of order." "I am a fanatic," he writes in 1964, "not an aesthete."
In The Collected Early Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan, we have Duncan's work from 1939 to 1956. In the 822 pages that constitute Duncan's "early" work (and which covers over half of his oeuvre) we have more than one example of the ponderous tone that O'Hara found off-putting. In "I Am Not Afraid," for example, Duncan announces unblushingly: "I am not afraid of writing a great poem. / I am not afraid of writing a perfect lyric." And in the title poem from Writing as Writing, Duncan intones:
I endeavor in delivering to deliver the speech from all truth spoken into its true form. I strive in inscribing in its different lengths the lengths of description, the lasts of all passages of literal understandings. I arrive in the reiteration of all the relations at lengthy vacations of ordinary prose in poses of poetry.
Compare this with O'Hara's remark in "Personism" that "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.' "
Yet, if Duncan's poetics lead him to indulge in too much self-aggrandizement, The Collected Early Poems and Plays reminds us that he also wrote some of the most stunningly beautiful lines in postwar American poetry.
Like Wallace Stevens, who was (perhaps surprisingly) a model for Duncan, he had a gift for metaphor and cadence. We have, for example, "the beckoning intimation of a love / in which the days like swallows flew, / one by one, from the heart's dim grove / to trace in their flight the lineaments of truth" (from "I Am a Most Fleshy Man") and these lines from "An Elegiac Fragment":
The women in the many chambered dawn
lean their sorrowing heads up their arms
and gaze.
They wait in quiet rooms.
Women I have loved and in the flower of fear
touchd and gazed upon.
They burn at the dream's windows.
My far away brides.
my heart asks for you, asks for you,
and my eyes
seek the deep waters in those wan smiles
The consonant /m/ captures the quiet sorrow and the quiet desire of both the women and the speaker. The comingled hope and despair are expressed wonderfully in images of openings and closings ("many chambered dawn" and "dream's windows"), compounded by alliteration ("flower of fear" and "deep waters in those wan smiles") and repetition that create a sort of crescendo, ending in despair, not exultation. "I have been doomd," he writes in the final stanza, "Woman, / the Egyptian night surrounds you."
This is Duncan at his best. Unfortunately, he was not always this good. He lacked Stevens' logical rigor and interest in the material world, though Peter Quartermain reminds us that Duncan was "an inveterate and at times obsessive reviser of his work." He is Stevens without the blackbirds, oranges, or scenes from Key West. His work too often is nothing but style and form, which, unlike the above lines, simply bores.
Because it is limited to a concrete subject, some of the best work in the volume is from the early chapbook Medieval Scenes. Here Duncan limits his free associations and metaphorical play to objects and scenes of Christian devotion and the medieval period. (He had taken a class on "Civilization in the Middle Ages" in 1948.) In "The Helmet of Goliath," Duncan writes, Goliath "heard his armour creak / and grow alive with its increasing weight / and felt a cooling night creep on the land," and in "The Mirror," he muses on the invention of the mirror, describing the reflection of a woman's smile as "a rose of broken teeth." And in "The Adoration of the Virgin," a poem on a statue of Mary, Duncan writes:
She is not innocent. But, virgin,
she has known God. Her draperies
fly up, unfurl, and are caught,
at war with the surrounding air,
carved in a wonder and brushed with gold.
The volume also contains two plays by Duncan, which are too ponderous to be emotionally compelling, as well as much of his uncollected work. Duncan did not always publish his work directly following its composition, and one great contribution of the volume is a helpful chart of the dates of composition and the dates of publication of all of Duncan's work. Quartermain does an admirable job of introducing Duncan's work and providing helpful contextual notes for all the works included here.
This is the second volume in the superbly produced Collected Writings of Robert Duncan from the University of California Press, following the 2011 publication of The H. D. Book, edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. The Collected Later Poems and Plays, also edited by Peter Quartermain, and Collected Essays and Other Prose, edited by James Maynard, are scheduled for 2014.
Micah Mattix is assistant professor of literature and review editor of The City at Houston Baptist University. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, First Things, National Review, and other publications. He recently launched Prufrock: The Books, Art, and Ideas Newsletter.
Copyright © 2013 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.
