I AM LOOKING AT a picture. It is a large color photograph of Robert Duncan, and it came at just the right time. The right time is the deepest, most pervasive and (to me) the most salvific keynote of Duncan’s poetics. And Duncan’s instrumentality in the world.
The right time. I had been asked to contribute to this assembly of memorials and témoignages, and three poets at once stood forth in my mind (like the past Masters of music who beautifully and eerily address Palestrina in Pfitzner’s great opera, at last to be done this very summer in New York).
Charles Olson. Robert Duncan. Paul Blackburn.
I thought and thought; to those three men I owe so much—stance and sense of work—both because of the fresh new way, dolce stil nuovo, they developed that renewed American poetry in the 1950s, and also because of life experiences in which they engaged me. They were masters for me, and very generous men. As it happened, I had just written a brief memorial of Blackburn for another journal, and wanted to rest with that a while, before writing a study of one of his early poems that stays in mind. I have long wanted to deal with Olson’s later poetry, talk about the way it connected with the man I knew, the talk I heard, the early work it fulfilled—I wanted to talk about the Olson of Volume III, but didn’t yet feel ready. But I felt it was the right time to talk about Robert Duncan; he stood clearest in my mind, and I wanted to thank him out loud.
I am looking at a picture. It is a color photograph and shows Robert Duncan at the side of the picture, holding, not without a certain amusing awkwardness, a large painting. Duncan seems to be restraining himself from smiling, or his face seems in that mode half clairvoyant half giggling that anyone who knew him must remember as his—the face of Mrs. Maybe, maybe, or the playful spirit medium.
The painting he holds is not shown completely, cut off by the photo’s iron rectangular habits. What we do see is plenty, though. It is Jess’s portrait of Robert’s mind—though that seems too pompous a way of describing this delicious registration of Items in the House: a portrait of Robert himself, younger, and looking more serious (youth is a serious business indeed), paintings, a bookcase, a candlestick in flame (shades of Arnolfini’s wedding—for this also is a portrait of the painter’s mind, the house, life, work he shared for so many years with Duncan, his life companion, and hence a portrait of their marriage, where the shy bride is present as the flesh of the painting itself—and no one has ever used impasto with such intimate, domestic sensuality as Jess has). A hanging Tiffany lampshade before a fragmentary window. A bowl of flowers on top of a bookcase, and some books arrayed: Pistis Sophia, the five volumes of The Zohar, two spines of the three volumes of Thrice Greatest Hermes.
Pictures of pictures. And me looking at a photo of it. It or them? Jess has played, as ever, with the representation of representation. He who has made the greatest collages (in my guess) of our century, or sharing that grandeur only with Max Ernst, is delighted in his own paintings to play the same elaborate ludus—never condescending to trompe l’oeil— of image and representation, the one wrapped within the other, level upon level. His paintings, like Duncan’s poems (but just to breathe this, not to carry on about it), delight in embedding texts and references, the bibelots and hand-me-downs of a well-stocked mind. Redeeming the sparks of the Glory. G. R. S. Mead’s Thrice Greatest Hermes stands on the bookcase, the great turn of the century (that century) chrestomathy of the original Hermetic writings, translated and popularized by Mead, the celebrated Theosophist. It is ardent aspiration towards redemption of (or sometimes redemption through) the material world that animates such texts, and that will again and again occur in Duncan’s writings, from Mediaeval Scenes to the last measures of “The Regulators.”
The right time. Forty years ago I was a young man persuaded of myself and my powers, and knew I could do wonders in poetry. At the time, I was caught up in all the last-gasp formalisms of the 1950s—pallid imitations of Hopkins, Eddie measures, Welsh meters, Auden, blank verse monologues. I felt a certain perverse pleasure in those things, but could smell as well as the next person the mouse-droppings on them, and see the dry pale moth take flight. Some vital spark was missing in the poets I liked and imitated, yet in the other contemporary work I got to see of an anti-formalist inclination, while I found some vigor, it was all yawp and coarse, scarcely deep-funded in the lore of poetry. For I wanted all things—the measure and the immoderate, the archaic trove of all high poetry but also the vivid “language of flesh and blood”—itself a phrase as old as Wordsworth. We keep repeating the same experiment, century after century. It’s clear we all and always need what I needed then—the archaic and the instantaneous, the moment no less than Merlin.
I began to do what I could, to work away from the habits I had learned, and see whether I could find some music in other ways. For all my reading I was terribly illiterate in what was actually happening. Then one day, at the right time, my friend Hugh Smith (himself a poet of the determinedly regular, anglophile, exalté) put into my hands a copy of a book by Jonathan Williams. The very title punned its way through my defenses: The Empire Finals at Verona. This was his Catullus, englished, updated, coarsened, lightened, but also refined, alert, vivid. It was the first book I had seen that suggested to me there was life in an American verse, an American language way. It was the right time.
And then I found—at that little drugstore on Sheridan Square—the small square book that came as close to being a best-seller as anything Duncan ever published: the City Lights edition of Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems. Then on David Ossman’s radio program “The Sullen Art,” I heard Duncan reading his “Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar.” It struck me then and strikes me now as the richest enactment of poetry I had ever heard with my ears. By ear you could hear new measures of poetry discovering themselves, falling back into traditional metrics, rising into exaltations of formal Shelleyan, Shakespearean language, leveling out into broad powerful music of the sacred ordinary speech of living folk. You could actually hear verse stammer and give way to prose, hear prose in all its difference struggle back towards the towers of verse. It seemed a trove of antique power and a school for sense. Not just the luscious musics of the man, but a music that supported, revealed, exalted the operations of mind.
For I had come to realize that the only gift the poet surely has is to disclose to a patient, quiet, often indifferent audience (the shape God takes in our time) the delicate, complex, total operations of the poet’s mind—and that articulation of knowing is the only music worth attending to. This is what Duncan seemed to be about, and why the “narcissism” and “self-involvement” (that I found people were always quick to blame him for as person and poet) were in fact mere negative labels for an absolutely essential concentration, by the poet, on the only universe the poet truly has to study, observe, report from and come back singing.
What else does the poet have? The world the poet shares with the audience is expressly words. And only by studying the “tones given off by the heart” can the poet have anything worth reporting, worth taking our time. And that is where Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, so utterly different, yet always for me an “ordered pair,” represent the immense possibilities that their masters—Stein, Pound, Lawrence, Williams—had so variously opened.
So there was this Duncan, suddenly, and I realized that (it sounds so dumb to say it, so true, the experience we all have if we are lucky) I was not alone. This man, so unlike me in all his social gesture, his sexual orientation, his sense of order, his poise, his grace—this man was the closest to what I always knew it was possible to become: a poet for whom the old great tradition was still alive, but who still knew the rainy light of Hollywood and the smell of buses, the pervasive, inescapable twist of the beloved through all the day’s conduct, all the chambers of the visual. Who did not busy himself forging fake antiques but allowed the vigor of the old music to hold sway in his mind until he could hear himself think. Who was founding—or was it finding—(who can really ever tell them apart, bird or oboe, tree leaves or rushing water?) our colloquial eloquence.
The right time. I sat down this morning to start writing this homage to my dear friend Robert Duncan. I read the news, and the news told me that the princely Thurn-und-Taxis family was selling their castle at Duino on the Adriatic coast, the castle where Rilke wrote the Elegies. How shocked I was! Not that the family is selling it, but that the castle is actually there, actually surviving. That a castle of the mind is also an object of Italian real estate. That the world exists at all is always the strangest news. That there is, or seems to be, something there when I finally get around to opening my lazy eyes.
I sat down to write about Duncan and stared at the picture. A few days ago, Jonathan Williams (whom I got to know years after The Empire Finals) and Tom Meyer, whose creative union has been a wonder of the commonwealth for thirty years, and whose friendship has been my delight, paid me a visit. They were carrying a red cat from Carolina to Vermont—fit employment for poets in any age. I told them that I had been invited to write this piece, and asked them what they thought. A blessing, I guess I wanted, some kind of go-ahead. I always seem to be asking for permission. Here was I, persistently heterosexual, trying to write a decent homage to the greatest poet I had known, a poet who insisted on being identified as a homosexual, and on locating in his elaborate and excited sexuality the wellsprings of his work. I suppose I was asking them for an idea. Like Mary Baker Eddy, I believe that the real angels are good ideas. Ideas that teach us to go on. To go new.
Jonathan said: I have a picture for you. And handed me a print of his color photograph of Robert Duncan holding a painting of Robert Duncan.
The five volumes of The Zohar are, of course, the Soncino Press edition, translated into English by a team of rabbis including Paul Levertoff, father of the poet Duncan admired so much and felt so warmly towards, Denise Levertov. The translators left out the more arcane tractates of operational magic as unsuitable for the enlightened modern audience to which they brought the classic of Qabbalah—those treatises are the strange meat of MacGregor Mathers’s Kabbalah Unveiled—a book not shown on Duncan’s shelves, though important to the Golden Dawn, and thus to Yeats, of whom Duncan was a singular inheritor.
The books are in the foreground. The work is always in the foreground. The work is what matters. I’m reading Nathalie Blondel’s new Life of Mary Butts— a writer Duncan spoke of highly, and frequently urged upon his readers and friends. It was Duncan who made me first, and most, aware of Butts, and from him directly or through Ken Irby came the earliest precious tattered xeroxes of her remarkable work now at last coming back into print. Today in the Blondel biography I find Stella Bowen saying, as she reminisces about Mary Butts: “I should have known that the way to enjoy any artist is to attend to his work and not allow one’s self to be confused by that lesser thing, his character.”
Mary Butts. Gertrude Stein. Hilda Doolittle. Duncan gave us these writers, or restored them to us. His serious Stein Imitations understood Stein not as an influence but a School in which a poet might study and learn the craft. The craft of speaking, of letting writing go on. Stein was a mere celebrity, H. D. a vanished imagist or faded luminary, Butts not even a name, according to the accepted wisdom of the 1950s. Duncan did more than his share in restoring Stein to her rightful, mother-of-us-all status, the Queen of Language, by which all telling is made possible. Duncan aimed us firmly at these women’s work, by whom writing and its various registers and genres could be restored. Robert Duncan was more than generous. He gave us not only himself, he gave us others as well—and that is a rare generosity in a poet. The one time I heard Dylan Thomas read, in the flesh as we so rightly say, he spent the first half of his program reading late Yeats—I had never known “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” till I heard him read it—and only then his own work. An amazing arrogance, an amazing humility conjoined—and to this day I am grateful to Thomas for himself and for opening another door on Yeats. As we are grateful to Duncan not only for his huge symphonies and demanding chamber music, but for his clear bardic eye that caught, sensed and restored the writers who came before him.
The poet’s worst enemy is bitterness. Envy and jealousy of other poets are the sickening, blighting hazards of a calling with few obvious rewards. And often those who have, from Muse or Society, won true rewards, rewards like sweetness of life or life companions, do not recognize their own good fortune, do not grasp that they have been rewarded by the same principles to which their work gave voice. Duncan always saw his good fortune, grants or no grants, even though most of his life and most of his work was spent with the smallest presses, the most exiguous—and exigent—audiences. Knowing his good fortune, he had the grace of kindness. While he could be catty, or venomous as a surukuku, when the mood took him, his generosity towards the living and the dead was phenomenal. More a generosity of spirit (like a fan letter he wrote to James Dickey about a poem he’d read and respected—unanswered, tu sais) than of deed, it allowed him to praise, welcome, take delight (and therefore creative energy) from the good work of others. If energy is a product of delight, then all the pleasure we take from the good work of others will surely feed our own.
Once when Duncan was staying in my house for a few days, I found him one morning gazing at my stacks of paperback mystery stories arrayed in a great copper-lined cavity meant for firewood. He walked over to the kitchen table and began talking about our affinity, the only time he ever spoke of any such thing, an affinity grounded in the joy of reading. He felt at home in my house, he said, with these piles of thrillers, of sacred trash, since he too read and took pleasure from such things. We discussed them a little while, noting the way certain pieces of our work had been subtly affected by this thriller or that—Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Michael Innes. Then he went on to say how sad he found it to meet so many younger poets, or would-be poets, who took no pleasure in reading, no pleasure in books. How can you write if you don’t read? How can you create a powerful new work if the power of such actual works is closed to you? We read, he said, we like to read. We take pleasure, we know how to take pleasure from reading. We learn how to give pleasure through writing. The important thing is the energetic act of reading, of pleasure welcomed through the engagement with the text.
I thought of Duncan’s drawing of the Ideal Reader—he’d drawn it I think for that limited edition of Letters. It showed what seems to be a woman of middle years, comfy of disposition, seated in her garden, a great sunhat shielding her features, her whole posture “bent to her book.” That picture is one of the most shocking avant-garde proclamations of its day. A book is to read.
This was 1963. I was starting to understand the way writing spilled out of reading. But that sounds bookish and mandarin—not the worst things in the world, but I wanted more. In Duncan I grasped the balance, a balance I tried to specify in a book title of my own a few years later: flesh, dream, book—all the sources of our poetry: experience, vision and reverie, and reading. How could we ever write a poem if we did not know that there was such a thing to be written? And yet we always, always look for it, the poem that presupposes no previous poetry. That seems the aim of every manifesto, every new school. A child without a mother. A poem that is an absolute. Perhaps a hunger for such a poem predisposes humans to imagine a moment of creation ex nihilo, a word spoken out of nowhere.
The right time. Duncan knew what it was. Punning on the French word bonheur, he called happiness the good hour. And what made it good? It was the hour that called us to work, the hour that issued through the instrumentality of the poet an articulation of all that was going on in the world. In the mind. A scientist of the Whole, is what I’d called the poet, back in some ravings in the sixties. Duncan explained the exact instrumentality of that science—the poet writing is itself speaking to itself, while we listen. So of course (he was clear) there could be no traffic in greatness, in calling so-and-so a Great Poet—there was only one great poet, the poet of whom we are all variously, crazily, fingerprint individually, metabolically, literally, tunefully instrumentalities. So our goodness lay not in what, but in the fact that we were able to declaim. And that sweet doctrina rescued poetry, for me, from the clashing teeth of the confessional and the propagandaic, the two molochs of the time I was growing up, when Duncan was the sudden clear voice of poetry I heard speaking in our idiom.
The right time. In the Pindar poem, after telling of Psyche’s hard tasks, and all the creatures that had come to help her out, Duncan turns to himself, the deed or task it is to write a poem, this very poem, a word the hour calls out to be written:
… So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listend to a tower that said Listen to me!
So Jonathan Williams wrote a book that fell into my hands, and jabbed a little chink in my armor, and I began to take notice. Forty years later he comes by, when I need a push, and slips me this photograph he took of Robert Duncan holding the painting of Robert Duncan by Jess.
The photo was taken probably in 1968 or 1969, which is about when I visited Duncan and Jess for the first time at their house in San Francisco. I saw the painting then, and studied it, and my memories of it then aid my seeing of it now. I saw the whole of it, but memory has ruined the picture even more than the cropping of it by the photograph. I am left with what I feel. And a little bit by what I see. So I am looking at Duncan—he wears a striped shirt, clean and neat over a white T-shirt. His sideburns are full, even bushy, and his almost-smiling face is a little plumper than I remember it, content seeming, well-fed, but with some haunting under the eyes. His arm comes up and crosses over his head to support and balance the top edge of the painting. In doing so, it happens that the hand shields his eyes. The painting reveals a world of art and artifact elaborately indoors (John Muir said to Emerson, Mr. Emerson, yours is an indoor philosophy), but the photo is otherwise—from the weathered gray wood behind Duncan and his painting, we see we’re in the back yard, not yet a garden, of the house on Twentieth Street.
He needs to shade his eyes from the California sun. His damaged eyes, the great eagle wandering eyes of him, so disconcerting, so penetrating. Is it the left one, is it the right one, that is the wanderer? I look at the photograph, and can’t tell—because the second thing one notices when you look at the photo is that it has been printed backwards: the titles of the books are mirror-style, left is right and Duncan’s slightly unfamiliar plumpness is the inversion of nature, the “accidental” contra naturam that is so close to the essence of art. And no doubt my own memories have polarized, magnetized, trivialized, kellyized, many fine specifics of what I see. Of what I saw.
Right time? 1919 when he was born, a year after the war. 1988 when he died, at sixty-nine. In the days when he was blocking out Groundwork as the summa of his life work, he had planned out, with some explicitness, the work of his seventies, the work of his eighties—the work of my senility, he said, planned already. Perhaps planning such things is enough. How can one plan for an hour that has not come, when what our best work is really is the voice, tone, tell, tale, told of that hour? It was his jest, a bold jest, with time. It pleased him to plan ahead, as it pleased him to conduct his own performances of his latest poems, using a strange cheironomy, his hand waving like Leonard Bernstein’s conducting his own music, but by no means indicating beat or evident rhythm. Instead the hands were more Picasso’s hands, inscribing the moment of the poem’s out loud onto the visual air. When Duncan was teaching at Bard College in 1982 and 1983, I watched as he read aloud, over several evenings, perhaps twelve hours of his late work—always the hand moved, a bird beside the text, a shadow sometimes taking on solidity.
Elsewhere I have written, but that is my story and not his, how twice, in the most literal manner, Duncan saved my life. Save me he did, from wanhope and foolish hauteur and dumb desperation, when I too was “poised to leap.” He was the tower who spoke, and like the tower in Apuleius’s story, there is no life in the question of whether or not the tower “liked” Psyche. I have no idea if Duncan liked me—he said more than once that my constant harping in those days on women, on making love, was tiresome—but maybe that was just a playful gay way of telling me he didn’t like my work, while generously giving me a way of enduring that displeasure without too much pain. What I do know is that his generosity of work and presence enriched that whole generation of poets who wanted to do the hard thing, the salmon-folk of language, who wanted, like Arnaut Daniel our master (Dante’s, Pound’s, Duncan’s, Wieners’, Rattray’s, Lansing’s, Stein’s, Irby’s master) always to swim against the stream, to leap upstream against the falling water so as to release their own starry influence up there, where we come from. Duncan’s pressure still moves in the language poets, in the new romantics, in the neoformalists, in the many contradictory squabbling heirs of his mind and his song. I feel a gratitude to him I can hardly yet begin to speak.