Robert Duncan

The free verse style of Robert Duncan's poetry provides a new framework for the use of classical and biblical imagery.

The Opening of the Field

In Structures of Rime," the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself - the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series - a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson, Zukofsky's "A," and Olson's Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan's belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine's Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gerard de Nerval's Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam's Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems - "My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos" - among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience. "

Bending the Bow

Robert Edward Duncan

Robert Duncan's Groundwork, the American poet's unparalleled final masterpiece, is now available in a single volume. I am speaking now of the Dream in which America sleeps, the New World, moaning, floundering, in three hundred years of invasions, our own history out of Europe and enslaved Africa.Robert Duncan, from Groundwork Robert Duncan has been widely venerated as one of America's most essential poets: Allen Ginsberg described his poetry as "rapturous wonderings of inspiration," Gwendolyn Brooks called it "a subtle spice," and Susan Howe pointed to Duncan as "my precursor father," Lawrence Ferlinghetti said he "had the finest ear this side of Dante," and Robert Creeley called him "the magister, the singular Master of the Dance." Now Duncan's magnum opus, Groundwork, is available in one groundbreaking edition. The first volume, Groundwork I: Before the War, was published in 1984, after a fifteen-year publishing silence, and received immediate acclaim: it was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the first National Poetry Award for Duncan's "lifetime devotion to the art of poetry and his grand achievement...." The second volume, Groundwork II: In the Dark, was published in February 1988, the month of Duncan's death. The internationally renowned poet Michael Palmer has written a marvelous introduction for this new edition, where "the singlemindedness of [Duncan's] life's work shows itself in the confident energy of every line" (Voice Literary Supplement).

Before the War, In the Dark

Ground Work

"What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) developed into an expansive and unique quest for a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work into the 1960s and 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the writings of H.D., Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging work is especially notable for illuminating the role women played in creating literary modernism"--Publisher description.

The H.D. Book

An Essay in Essential Autobiography

The Truth & Life of Myth

Duncan discusses the role that myth plays in the life of contemporary consciousness.

Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan's second major book of poetry (first published in 1964) is now reissued.

Poems

Roots and Branches

This study of contemporary culture discusses how rock 'n' roll reveals a unique understanding of attitudes in America, and includes interviews with politicians, rockers, the media, a Catholic theologian, and others.

Notes from a Rock 'n' Roll Era

The Noise

The Cat and the Black Bird

The Rock and Roll Book of the Dead

Only the Good Die Young

This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan’s wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work—at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan’s quest toward a new poetics—is at last complete and available to a wide audience.

Tribunals: Passages 31-35

Robert Duncan was introduced to photography as a child. His interest began to grow while he was a student at Northwestern University. Later, he fit the pursuit around the edges of his travels for pleasure and for Duncan Aviation business. With the additional time retirement has offered, Robert's enthusiasm has mushroomed. He has amassed over 100,000 images. Robert's interest in photography parallels and, in fact, is integral to his passion for collecting art. He loves the discovery of a visual surprise and is compelled to acquire it. He photographs intuitively, yet, a perusal of his images shows that he responds to unusual plays of light, whether shadows, surface washes, reflections or atmospheric ambience. It is no wonder, then, that the opportunity to tour several Mexico City sites designed by Pritzker Prize winner, Luis Barragán, was like Christmas morning for the Nebraskan. This book was an outcome of that experience. Robert took the images at Cuadra San Cristóbal, an equestrian estate Barragán designed for a friend and fellow horseman, and at Casa Gilardi, a home conceived as a bachelor pad for young partners in an advertising agency. The 20th century architect's projects are quiet and contemplative, yet they confound visual perceptions. Robert's images reflect his own aptitude for seeing and building on Barragán's compositional conundrums.Artist Merrill Peterson recognized Robert's adroitness as soon as he looked at the Barragán photos and collaborated with Robert on the book. They are images of beautiful sites, but they are also studies of crisp geometric shapes, pitch-perfect linear compositions, washes of blindingly radiant light, rhyming forms and transcendent color. These images tickle our longing for a balance of order and spontaneity, human connection and solitude, seriousness and quirkiness, simplicity and complexity, dynamism and stillness. Robert wishes for these images to be a gift to those who delight in the pursuit of interminable visual possibilities.

Barragán a Spiritual Master

Heavenly Eity. Earthly Eity

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.

The Collected Later Poems and Plays

Diana Lea

Victoria Bull

Suzanne S. Webb

The Oxford Learner's Dictionary of Academic English helps students learn the words and phrases used in academic writing, and how to use them in their own academic written work. With Oxford Academic iWriter on CD-ROM.

Oxford Learner's Dictionary of Academic English

Essays examine the life and work of this modern American poet, and his influence on contemporary writing.

Robert Duncan, Scales of the Marvelous

Achilles' Song

Jack Spicer

An Ode and Arcadia

A Selected Prose represents the most wide-ranging collection to date of Robert Duncan's essays and talks and is a companion volume to the Selected Poems (1993).

Robert Duncan

Books

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