There is a photograph of Robert Duncan touches on something
central to the man and his poetics. Two
things, actually. When Michael Anania
showed me the photo, taken by David Lenfest when Duncan was reading to Anania’s
students at the University of Illinois—Chicago, he described the movements of
Duncan’s arms, which made Duncan appear almost as if he were in flight. “One hand played the rhythmic beat,” said
Anania, “the other kept the longer cadence.”
And here, already, is the first fact of interest: the fact that Duncan
was not only a strongly rhythmic poet, but that he thought of his poems in
polyrhythmic terms, so much so that he enacted those rhythms for his audiences.
Just as interesting as the figure of Duncan ‘conducting’ his
own reading, though, is the contrast of the figure with its ground. The background does not, at first, seem
particularly promising, and from a visual standpoint, it isn’t striking, although
those two long blackboards do provide a nice dark field against which Duncan’s
light shirt can pop. What’s interesting
about the background are less the visuals than what they represent—if we taken
them as metonymic, as parts representing a larger whole. What are blackboards, after all, but nearly
universally recognized signs of the educational system of which they are instruments? They show us that this is a university, an event sponsored by an
English department, by the rationally organized, administered, modern
institution that has become the major venue for American poetry’s reception
and, increasingly, its creation. Many
poets and lovers of poetry cringe a little at the word “academic,” even though
(or perhaps because) so many of them bear advanced academic credentials, and
have, at the end of their email addresses, the letters “edu.”
Duncan, too, was uneasy with the academic institution as a
venue for poetry—and, indeed, with the much broader cultural and historical
movement of which the university is but one minor emanation. He was uneasy with—no, that doesn’t go far
enough—he waged war against modernity itself, inasmuch as modernity can be
defined as the triumph of the rational over the irrational, the positivist over
the mystical, and the disenchanted over the magical. The university lecture hall hardly seems a
fitting place the broad, dramatic gestures caught in Lenfest’s photograph of
Duncan. Don’t they belong
elsewhere? Perhaps in a sacred grove, a temple, or a catacomb where the members
of a sect have gathered for their rites.
Duncan’s mysticism and irrationalism are, of course, in his
blood: his adoptive parents were Theosophists, believers in the occult, who
selected him as their child based on astrological projections. He was raised with a deep respect for the
mystical, and we find this background very much alive in his conception of the
poet as magus, as the sorcerer-priest of a heterodox spiritual tradition.
"There is a natural mystery in poetry," wrote Duncan in one of his notebooks, "a poem, mine or another's, is an occult document." Metaphors matter: any reader of poetry knows that. And Duncan's metaphor is a far cry from, say, William Carlos Williams' when he writes that a poem is a machine made out of words. Come to think of it, though, Duncan doesn't intend this notion of the occult document as a metaphor. He means it, earnestly, seriously, literally.
Duncan’s war with modernity was deadly serious, a matter of
passion, even rage. In one of the many
documents collected as The H.D. Book,
Duncan tells us of his own incipient attachment to poetry, first to the
Romantic poets and then to the tradition of the troubadours. “There has been a fire,” he writes, “ a fire
of anger that rose, as I found the Romantic spirit and back of that the Spirit
of Romance and back of that the cult of life as a romance of the spirit
belonged to an order that was under attack or under boycott.” The world of
scientism and rational disenchantment—the world of modernity—was for Duncan
what it was for William Blake: an iron age, a cage confining us, a set of
mind-forged manacles. Poetry was a
counter-attack upon our enemies, a tunnel dug beneath the walls of reason in
which our wardens confined us, a weapon in the only war that mattered.
And make no mistake, it was a war, to Duncan. Here’s what he says in the essay “Man’s
Fulfillment in Order and Strife”:
For men who declare
themselves partisans of the rational mind at war with all other possibilities
of being, the pre-rational or the irrational appears as an enemy within…. In
the extreme of the rationalist presumption, the nursery is not the nursery of
an eternal child but of a grown-up, a rational man. Common sense and good sense
exist in an armed citadel surrounded by the threatening country-side of
phantasy, childishness, madness, irrationality, irresponsibility... In that
city where Reason has preserved itself by retreating from the totality of the
self, infants must play not with things of the imagination nor entertain the
lies of the poets but play house, government, business, philosophy or war.
The theory is grand, even grandiose—imagination, irrationalism,
and innocence putted against reason, materialism, and war—and the poetry that
is both explained and fuelled by the theory is some of the most powerful in the
American poetic canon. But the actual
manifestations of this great historical struggle in the events of Duncan’s life
are, as one might expect, rather less Titanic in scale. One thinks of an event in front of another
blackboard, in 1978.
It was at a gathering to celebrate the poetry of Louis
Zukofsky. Duncan spoke first, and, by
all accounts, manifested very much as the poet-magus, in a broad-brimmed
Spanish hat and cape, praising the mystical side of Zukofsky and looking, as
David Bromige recollected, like he was there to “ward off evil magic.” Then another speaker took the stage—Barrett
Watten, then just 30 years of age, looking every inch the junior professor in
his sport coat, khakis, and buck shoes.
He began by drawing a diagram of a Zukofsky stanza on the blackboard,
and proceeded with a clear, rational analysis, to which Duncan took immediate,
vocal exception. He heckled, he cajoled,
and ultimately he pushed Watten from the stage.
The moment was many things: an older poet worried about the Oedipal
drama of rebellion, and a generational conflict, Black Mountain vs. Language
Poetry, among other things. But it was
also, and definitively, a moment in which the magus of the irrational turned
against the Apollonian representative of reason. The breach of decorum and the incivility are
entirely explicable, if not necessarily excusable. Here, at a celebration of poetry from beyond
the mainstream—in what to Duncan’s mind must be a center of resistance to
modern rationality—was a representative of our enemy, rationality. Indeed, from where Duncan stood, the breach
of etiquette was all Watten’s, and “breach of etiquette” hardly touches the
seriousness of the offense. Poetry,
charted, mapped, and analyzed theoretically? We murder to dissect! It was
heresy, blasphemy, a desecration of the temple. The great and domineering enemy
has found us in our catacombs, and must be cast out!
Greer Mansfield once observed that for Duncan, the study of
poetry was a version of a lost, primitive religion—how could he react to the
young Watten with anything but a sense of outrage? And how could his gestures
when reading in a university, in front of a blackboard and behind a lectern, be
anything but incongruous? The incongruity, though, is its own explanation.
Duncan’s mysticism, like that of his Theosophical parents, is very much a
product of modernity—the modern theosophical movement, which draws on many
ancient traditions, was founded in New York in 1875. Duncan’s beliefs—his poetics and his mysticism—are
fundamentally reactive, attempts to correct a culture gone too far in the
direction of positivism, materialism, utilitarianism.
So when we see Duncan in a gesture like that in which
Lenfest’s camera caught him, against a background so out of keeping with the
grand drama of the physical movement, the jarring juxtaposition is in fact quite
revealing. It shows not only Duncan’s
sense of himself as magus, but the rationalized, institutionalized social
environment that gave birth to that sense.
The photo, then, is an apt emblem of Duncan as a counter-cultural
figure, a man in rebellion against his world.
And where else would we encounter a mystical poet of Duncan’s time but in a
university, the modern institution that is so frequently, but with such
fragility, the site of modernity’s self-critique—as well as modernity's preservation,
and perhaps co-optation, of its others?
