Bending the Bow, by Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan must certainly be our most difficult active poet. Bending the Bow is for the strenuous, the hyperactive reader of poetry; to read Duncan with any immediate grace would require Norman O. Brown's knowledge of the arcane mixed with Ezra Pound's grasp of poetics. Though Duncan avows himself a purely derivative poet, his capacities are monstrous and have taken a singular direction: in Duncan the range of affection is great and nothing is barred entrance into the “field” of composition. The structure of Bending the Bow is the “grand collage.” It is for this reason that his poetry has been called cluttered and self-defeating, even swollen and diversive by his admirers.

These qualifications are only relevant if we are unable to transcend our purely linear sense of what a poem should be. In the “Passages,” a sequence that makes up the bulk of Bending the Bow, there is a total lack of the usual sociological and geometric hints, the “top to bottom” sensation that usually leads us through the most wantonly modernist poem. Rather, the impression is like a block of weaving, if that is possible. In Duncan the poem is not the paradigm but the source, the competitor and not the imitator, of nature.

Form in the “Passages” is a four-dimensional process, constantly active, never passive, moving through time with the poet. The poems are music-based rather than ideational, the rhythms concentrated in time, avoiding any strict sense of measure. Duncan's poems may be gnomic and expansive, simultaneously aerial and kinetic, though never, as in the work of so many contemporary poets, solely concerned with the fact of a process whose only virtue is to describe itself accurately. Instead of concluding in the orthodox sense, the poems unfold in gradations or seem to reach toward the end of a natural arc.

Another more obvious stumbling point for the reader is Duncan's aggressive syncretism: he is personal rather than confessional and writes within a continuity of tradition. It simply helps to be familiar with Dante, Blake, mythography, medieval history, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Pound, Stein, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and Levertov.

The difficulties in Duncan are mitigated somewhat by his fine introduction. He explains: “The poem is not a stream of consciousness, but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it . . . the poet works with a sense of parts fitting in relation to a design that is larger than the poem. The commune of Poetry becomes so real that he sounds each particle in relation to parts of a great story that he knows will never be completed. A word has the weight of an actual stone in his hand. The tone of a vowel has the color of a wing.” The largesse exists for the capable reader—we have the salve, too, of the lyric. Here are the last two stanzas of “My Mother Would be a Falconress”:

My mother would be a falconress,

and even now, years after this,

when the wounds I left her had surely heald,

and the woman is dead,

her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart

were broken, it is stilld.

I would be a falcon and go free.

I tread her wrist and wear the hood,

talking to myself, and would draw blood.

But to emphasize Duncan's lyric poems is to avoid our responsibility. We have done the same in the past by reading Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to the exclusion of the Prophetic Books. The finest of Duncan's “Passages,” numbers 24 to 30, give a sense of war and bleakness that is at the same time physiological and metaphysical. They are neither doctrinaire nor programmatic; we have simply not had their equal as poems in the past several years, not, anyway, since Theodore Roethke's Far Field or Robert Lowell's Life Studies or Charles Olson's Maximus Poems.

I have not done much here but anticipate objections to a splendid book. I don't feel it necessary to inherit all the literary prejudices of a previous generation, whatever the convictions. The failure of readers of poetry to come to terms with Duncan's art is shameful and lazy; as Duncan has said in “Roots and Branches”:

Foremost we admire the outlaw

who has the strength of his own lawfulness.

1968