The Apt Emblem of Robert Duncan

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?

"Where's It Coming From?": Barrett Watten, Robert Duncan, and the New Gnosticism in Poetry

Barrett Watten and Joan Retallack, in murky light at the Mayan Cafe

One of the advantages of living in a city whose airport is a major transportation hub is that there’s a good chance, when on the way to a conference, one will run into others going to the same place.  Last time I set out for the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, I ran across Rae Armantrout in the departure lounge.  This year I was nearly knocked over by Patrick Pritchett, the chair of my panel, whose route to Louisville from Harvard took him through O’Hare Airport.  When we arrived in Kentucky, we were promptly met by Mark Scroggins—another participant in our double-barreled pair of sessions on the New Gnosticism in American Poetry.  We piled into a small yellow Ford Scroggins had rented, and were off to what was, for me, one of the stronger iterations of the Louisville conference.

Much of what I love about conferences takes place outside the official venues, and, indeed, on my first day I didn’t attend a single panel, but shuffled from bar to restaurant to bar, hanging with the usual suspects (Pritchett & Scroggins, conference organizer Alan Golding, Joe Donahue, David Need, Norman Finkelstein, Barrett Watten, Aldon Nielson, Vincent Sherry), and many more, including Ed Foster and Joan Retallack, neither of whom I’ve seen in Louisville before.

All of the above were present at one or both of the New Gnosticism panels, where I also saw Ben Friedlander, Linda Kinnahan, and other Worthies of Poetry.  In fact, there was a full house when Peter O’Leary, fresh out of his car after a blizzard-hampered drive from Chicago, stepped to the lectern to deliver his manifesto, “Seven Tenets of the New Gnosticism.”  These tenets (according to the hasty notes I took during Peter’s fiery delivery) were:

1.  The New Gnosticism is incarnational, where the body is hidden knowledge.
2.  The world into which we are thrown is a broken world.
3. The New Gnosticism is incendiary.
4.  You are initiated into the New Gnosticism whenever you contribute to its incantations.
5.  The New Gnosticism is epistemologically nonplussed.
6.  The coherence of the New Gnosticism is the apocryphon of the fallen… [at this point my notes are unreadable — perhaps  I was unconsciously imitating the fragmentary nature of many surviving Gnostic texts]
7.  The missing tenant [here O’Leary gave a parable of a missing book, underlining the fallen or broken nature of the world in gnostic thought].

After O’Leary’s manifesto (which will, along with the other papers from the two Gnostic panels, be published soon), Ed Foster took the stage to discuss how Harold Bloom’s version of Gnosticism in The American Religion is a terrible misunderstanding, in which Emersonian self-reliance is mistakenly put in the place of gnosis, which relies on reliance not on oneself, but on attentiveness to the world beyond the self.  This was followed by Joe Donahue’s analysis of Gnosticism in the culture—popular and literary— of the 1980s and 1990s.  This was a follow-up on his work for a panel called “Mystics, Gnostics, and Heretics of the Reagan Years” that I organized for the National Poetry Foundation conference last year at the University of Maine, and provided the best reading I’ve yet heard of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” as a gnostic text.   Not that Donahue saw David Byrne and company as members of a self-consciously gnostic sect: in Donahue’s view, “Gnosticism is not an event in religious history, but a way of thinking that springs up everywhere,” particularly in times of political despair.  Mark Scroggins closed out the first panel with a revisiting of Charles Olson’s old essay “Against Wisdom as Such,” which was an attack on Robert Duncan as mystic, and occultist.  Duncan denied belonging to these categories, but Scroggins was quite convincing in showing that Duncan’s protest rings false.  He also made a case for formal innovation as linked to the uncovering of occulted knowledge, and introduced the term “The Da Vinci Code Theory of Modernism.”  The latter applies to an over-emphasis on Ezra Pound’s statement that he felt a light from Eleusis (that is, the gnosis of the Eleusinian mysteries) was preserved in the work of the troubadours and others, and through them passed into modern poetry.

In the second panel, I spoke on neologism and linguistic revivals in O’Leary’s poetry, David Need spoke of anomalous experiences and gnosis in the work of H.D., Alan Ginsberg, Philip K. Dick (the most relentlessly gnostic writer in American literature) and Alice Notley; Patrick Pritchett discussed Fanny Howe’s poetry as something that, in its gnostic complexities, “teaches us how to build a home in homelessness”; and Norman Finkelstein introduced the whole room to the virtually unknown poetry of Paul Brey, whose Terrible Woods is that rarest of things: a collection of poetry both gnostic and comic.

The papers gave rise to all manner of questions, both at the panels and elsewhere—a good sign, I think.  Here are just a few of my favorites:

From Alan Golding, who noted that all eight of the speakers on the panels were men: “what are the gender stakes of the New Gnosticism?”  The answers were various.  Many people referred to H.D., Fanny Howe, and Alice Notley as gnostic poets (and their works were discussed in the panels), and I thought of Pam Rehm.  It was also pointed out that gnostic theology does away with one of the primary pillars of Judeo-Christian misogyny: the idea of Eve as the corruptor of humanity.  In gnostic thought, Eve is a figure of salvation, and her plucking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is the first step on our journey to release ourselves from the illusion that the material world and the world of God-the-father are the horizons of all possibility.

Also from Alan Golding (who always asks at least one of my favorite conference questions, and who, indeed, seems to make an art of them): “where is the comedy in the New Gnosticism?”  People answered variously, often with reference to Jack Spicer, who was surely both comic and gnostic.  I kept silent, but rankled a little at what I thought might be an assumption behind the question—that wit and play are the highest or most worthwhile forms of poetry.  Golding is a great fan, for instance, of Charles Bernstein, and I wondered if the question weren’t loaded a little, and didn’t seek to accuse the New Gnostics of failing to produce work that would succeed by the criteria that value Bernstein.  Was the Cathedral of Notre Dame funny, I wondered?  Was the Pietà a barrel of laughs?  And, if not, were they somehow of inferior value?  But, much as I disliked the spectacle of the panelists saying “no, our stuff is funny, too, sometimes” rather than defending the gnostic work on terms more its own, I didn’t want to start wrangling with Alan on an assumption about his question that may well have been false.

From Ben Friedlander, who cornered me in the corridors, came a question to which I really do have to give more thought: “what’s a materialist like you doing with these mystics?”  He’s got a point about my materialism.  It’s not the materialism of a guy who likes expensive watches and sailboats, but it’s real enough: my book Laureates and Heretics offered a kind of culturalist, and maybe softly materialist, explanation for the contours of American poetic history, and my new book The Poet Resigns begins with an essay that’s all about publishing conditions, economic relations, and the like as an explanation for why American poetry is the way it is.  My next book, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry, Autonomy, Society, is pretty close to dialectical materialism, at least by the standards of a bourgeois like myself.  So why am I hanging with the mystic poets?  Part of me thinks the question indicates that I’m on to something.  I mean, when I heard the question “why are you doing this” from both pro-Prynne and anti-Prynne parties when I was writing about J.H. Prynne and Cambridge poetry, I felt pretty sure I had found a way to discuss things that broke through existing paradigms.  I hope I’m at the beginning of an inquiry into gnostic poetry that will give us something new, too.  Or at the very least, something that will make the dichotomy between historical materialism and mysticism seem less firm.

It was Barrett Watten, though, who asked what was, in my opinion, the most revealing question of the conference.  A bunch of us were sitting at a big round table in the old Seelbach Bar, working our way through the Bourbon list, when Barrett cast a steely glance over at Norman Finkelstein and asked “This New Gnosticism — where’s it coming from?”  It wasn’t a question, I thought, so much as a challenge, and Norman seemed to feel that way too, choosing a beatific smile and amused, raised eyebrows rather than a more direct answer.  It took me a while to work out why Watten would put the question as he did, with more than idle curiosity to it, in fact, with a bit of steel behind it.

Here's what I think was at stake: the return of the repressed, or the revisiting of trauma.  

The best way to get at this may be to come back to a moment, now legendary in certain poetry circles, when a young Watten had a very public run-in with Robert Duncan, a kind of godfather of the New Gnosticism (and the primary subject of Peter O'Leary's study Gnostic Contagion).  The late David Bromige told the story well, maintaining, in an interview, that  Watten was “the arch villain” of poetry in Duncan's eyes, because Watten and the Language poets were, for him, “the New Criticism come again. It was everything he, Robert and his gang, had defeated… and now it was going to come back again.”  For Duncan, Watten represented “poetry written by critics, and a very buttoned down kind of poetry too...”  Matters came to a head, says Bromige, at a conference in 1979, when Watten and Duncan were going to speak about Louis Zukofsky.

It was a full house in there, and Robert appeared in his full, Romantic poet regalia, the Spanish cape, the Spanish hat…. He had his manna when he was in that garb. He could fight off evil magic…. Anyway, he spoke about Zukofsky, and of course it was Robert Duncan's Zukofsky. It was a lyrical and mystical Zukofsky, not impossible to find.… And now it was Barrett Watten's turn. And Barrett got up, and Barrett was wearing, maybe a sports coat, and maybe khaki pants, maybe sensible shoes…. He could have been a junior professor somewhere…. Barrett did almost immediately make use of the blackboard. And he diagrammed a stanza of Zukofsky's. And although I have seen Robert do equally painstaking work at other times, on this occasion, he took exception to it. It was making him impatient. He jumped up and he said, ‘Oh for Pete's sake, we might at least have a little fun.’ And Barrett, quite unphased, said, ‘but Robert, this is the way I get my fun.’ It seemed to me unanswerable. And quite unforgivable of Robert to try to swan it like that, and lord it over. And he did form a deep—maybe a shallow anti-thesis is a better phrase—to the Language Poets. He tended to reject them out of hand. 

So, for Watten, gnostic poetry comes with a dubious pedigree, or at least with a trace of a very unpleasant moment, when an old gnostic guard had sought to discredit Language poetry at the outset (I've heard, more than once, that Watten has said that the dispute with Duncan "set us [the Language poets] back ten years").  And now, at a time when Language poetry has become an academic fixture, an established part of literary history, and one of the most powerful influences on American poetry, what did Watten encounter at the Louisville conference, arguably one of the most important venues through which Language poetry entered into academic respectability?  To hijack a phrase from Bromige, it was everything he, Barrett and his gang, had defeated… and now it was going to come back again.  That's just the sort of thing that will put a little steel into your gaze.  I'm glad Barrett handled the situation with more grace than Duncan did.  But the tension did make me think that this wasn't just another pair of panels at a conference: this may have been something of an event.

*

Some links:

"History, Totality, Silence" a paper on John Matthias' gnostic poetry I gave at the National Poetry Foundation conference in Orono last year.

A review of Peter O'Learly's Luminous Epinoia and Norman Finkelstein's Inside the Ghost Factory I wrote for Chicago Review.

Peter O'Leary's essay "Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry," also in Chicago Review.

"The Open Word," a paper on O'Leary's poetics I gave at the Louisville conference this year.

The present humble blogger receiving gnostic wisdom from Vincent Sherry.  Rembrandt-esque photo by Mark Scroggins

“That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological Consciousness

“You know, that’s a real angel you’re talking to.” It was a couple of years ago, at a reception in Chicago’s Green Lantern Gallery, that I overheard that comment. I was sipping cheap wine and talking to an old friend in the crowd that had gathered at an after-party held in the wake of the Chicago Poetry Project’s symposium on Robert Duncan, and someone behind me was recalling the remark as something Duncan had said to Nathaniel Mackey after reading some of the letters to the “Angel of Dust” collected in Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Given the provenance, the remark may be apocryphal, but it’s certainly plausible, since one of the things about which Duncan was most insistent was the reality of myth, and of the figures found in myth. Indeed, the thing about Duncan that’s most challenging to (and most often discounted by) contemporary audiences is just this: that he had, or at least tried very hard to have, a truly mythological consciousness—something utterly alien to most people in our time, even those who see myth sympathetically.

What it means to have a mythological consciousness is perhaps best understood with reference to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythological Thought. Cassirer, who goes largely unappreciated in literary circles nowadays, has a lot to offer us: after all, he was to neo-Kantian thought what Adorno was to Marxism, in that he wedded the rigors of his particular discipline to a belief that all of the humanities had something important to contribute to understanding, and took a strong interest in cultural forms. In his work on mythological thinking, he is at pains to distinguish between forms of thought that merely value mythology, and a true mythological form of consciousness, something he finds primarily in pre-modern contexts (though, as his chilling study of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the State, makes plain, it can enter the modern world, sometimes in dangerous ways).

By and large, says Cassier, even those of us who value myths as a source of knowledge engage in some fancy footwork to make those myths compatible with our own, non-mythological worldviews. “We are accustomed to view these contents as ‘symbolic,’ to seek behind them another, hidden sense to which they mediately refer,” he writes. “Thus, myth becomes mystery: its true significance and depth lie not in what its configurations reveal but in what they conceal…. From this result the various types and trends of myth interpretation—the attempts to disclose the meaning, whether metaphysical or ethical, that is concealed in myths.” Those who do not truly believe in mythology as fundamentally real find the value of myth in the way myths can be translated into some other kind of knowledge. Such attempts can be quite elaborate: “Medieval philosophers,” writes Cassirer, “distinguished three levels of interpretation, a sensus allegoricus, a sensus anagogicus, and a sensus mysticus.” Even those with a great deal of sympathy for myth and a strong dose of skepticism for modern rationality tend to need some kind of allegorical or symbolic interpretive method to make sense of mythology. Even the Romantics, says Cassirer, “though they strove… to understand the basic phenomena of mythology in themselves and not through their relationship to something else, did not fundamentally overcome ‘allegorisis.’”

If one truly embodies a mythological consciousness—if one thinks not about mythology, but within it—things look different. Apollo the god, and the ideas represented by the figure of Apollo are distinct to most of us (who may be sympathetic to those ideas, but who don’t expect to wake and see Apollo outside the window), but, as Cassirer points out, “only observers who no longer live in it but reflect on it read such distinctions into myth.” For those whose consciousness is truly formed by mythology, the mythical figure doesn’t stand for a thing: “it is the thing… it has the same actuality”—ideas are “transpose[d] into a material substance or being.” One way to grasp this is to think of what Cassirer calls the “mythical action,” when a “true substantiation is effected” and “the subject of the action is transformed into a god or demon.” That is: if you go to a Catholic mass and experience the transformation of the Eucharistic wafer as a metaphor or a symbol, you may be sympathetic to the meaning of the event, but you do not experience it with a truly mythological consciousness. Only if, in your true and deepest and most fundamental understanding, you actually experience the transformation of the wafer as a real, actual, literal transformation of the object into the body of Christ, into something divine, do you really experience the event with mythological consciousness. That kind of thinking represents a challenge for most of us: but if we want to understand Robert Duncan’s poetry, it’s important to take up that challenge. He wants very much to experience the world with just such a consciousness.

Consider Duncan’s comments on Milton’s Areopagitica in The Truth and Life of Myth. Attempting to explain his own relation to mythology, Duncan quotes this passage:

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.... The light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.

Most of us would read “Truth,” with a capital “T,” as an allegorical figure, and indeed as a figure of speech. But, says Duncan, “the mythological mind—and mine… is mythological—hears this not as fable or parable but as the actual drama or meaning of history, the plot and intention of Reality.” For Duncan, “Truth was a Power, and, in this, a Person in history.” To be absolutely clear: Truth, for Duncan, is not a personification—she is a person. There’s a literalism here that is alien to the modern mind, and native to truly mythological consciousness.

It’s not easy, though, for Duncan to maintain this mythological consciousness in a modern world that looks askance at such consciousness. Indeed, Duncan makes an admission of doubt, saying that poets who attempt mythological consciousness “must ever be troubled by the play of their genius, of true things in fictions and of fictions in true things.” What is more, we find Duncan making what can seem like very willful readings, or misreadings, of other poets, in defense of mythological consciousness. We see this, for example, when Duncan discussed Dante’s famous encounter with “the angel Amor” in the Vita Nuova (given here in D.G. Rossetti’s translation, the version Duncan favored): "I felt a spirit of Love begin to stir/ Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;/And saw Love coming towards me, fair and fain.../Saying “Be now indeed my worshipper!” Dante "is speaking literally here, not figuratively," says Duncan, he “is not illustrating some thought of his but telling us of an actual presentation in the crux of the reality of the poem.” Dante’s poetry, says Duncan, “insists upon the primal reality of the angel Amor” as actually real—as far as Duncan is concerned, that’s a real angel Dante’s talking to.

Those familiar with the medieval modes of interpretation might object that the spirit of love is no real angel, here, no record of a literal seraphic vision, but a figure of speech that fits neatly into the allegorical and anagogical modes of literary composition and interpretation with which Dante was familiar, and around which his Divine Comedy is structured. They may even cite no less an authority than Dante himself, who describes the angel as figurative. But Duncan will not have it. Even though Duncan admits that “Dante pleads poetic license, that this is no more than a figure of speech,” he chooses not to accept this part of Dante as sincere. Rather, Duncan decides that Dante’s description of the angel as figurative is merely a self-protecting lie. “Joan [of Arc] will be tried by ecclesiastic court and burned at the stake for talking with such demonic powers as Dante’s angels in the Vita Nuova are,” says Duncan, and “Ficino and Pico della Mirandola will come to trial for their practices of a theurgic magic to call up such personifications.” In light of this climate of fear, Duncan decides that we must see Dante’s denial of literalism in a new light, as a “pleading of insincerity [about] just what in the poem has to be sincere.”

The willfulness of this reading is hard to ignore. Not only does Duncan ignore Dante’s extensive use of allegorical and anagogical figures throughout his work, but he cites as evidence of a climate of fear and intimidation events that won’t occur for 130 or even 150 years (the Vita Nuova was written in 1295; Joan of Arc went to trial in 1431; Ficino and Pico della Mirandola had their run-ins with Papal authority in the 1480s, and merely endured exile, a punishment we know from history that Dante was quite willing to undergo for his beliefs). But my point isn’t to say that Duncan was right or wrong: my point is to say that his desire for a mythological consciousness put him on the defensive, and could even lead him to make claims that were more emotionally satisfying and philosophically authorizing than they were defensible. We might not learn much about Dante from Duncan’s comments, but we learn something about Duncan: that he badly needed allies in his battle to maintain mythological consciousness in a milieu resistant to such consciousness, and may even have invented some of those allies out of his need.

Laureates, Heretics, and More on Robert Duncan

There's a nice note about my book Laureates and Heretics up on the Boston University creative writing program blog. In other L & H news, thanks to a certain eagle-eyed editor of a well-respected literary journal, I now know about the first two of what I expect will be several errors in the book. The ones the esteemed editor found are on pages 32 and 221 — so, next time you're sitting around with your fellow literati, crack open a copy of L & H, flip to the appropriate pages, and see if you can spot the howling errors! Oh, the fun you'll have...

And in news from our non-L & H desk, Josh Corey has blogged about the second day of the recent Robert Duncan symposium in Chicago.

Field Report: The Truth and Life of Myth, A Robert Duncan Symposium

You know me, people: I like to hole up in my study and paw through the pages of obscure texts in solitude as much as the next soft-handed, grumpy, poet-critic-professor type. But last week I was dragged from my cave by the lure of not one but two unusual poetry-oriented events just a Metra ride away in downtown Chicago.

The first of these events was a focus group meeting in the offices of the Poetry Foundation to discuss the future of copyright practices for poetry. As many of you know, there's a bit of a crisis just now, in that the law is unclear on just what constitutes fair use — that is, legal quotation without permission — and publishers can get a bit jumpy about letting poets and critics quote from the poetry they publish. The lack of clarity about the extent of fair use has had a bit of a chilling effect, and has allowed guys like Paul Zukofsky to behave like bullies, threatening people who want to quote from copyrighted works even when the law allows for such quotation. If you want to see just how bullying Zukofsky can be, check out his list of demands to those who would quote from his father's poetry. This is probably not the place to go into detail, but suffice it to say that his view of his rights is a bit singular. He's aggressive and tenacious, though, and has intimidated a number of people, including the editors of Jacket magazine, who removed a group of essays on Louis Zukofsky after Paul snarled and yelped at them. Anyway, a group of concerned lawyers is working on setting up some guidelines for publishers that will, it is hoped, keep the poetry world from falling into the kind of litigious nightmare that has afflicted the world of popular music. It was good to be consulted.

As interesting as it was to be a part of the copyright discussion, though, it was a lot more exciting to drop by the Chicago Poetry Foundation's main event for the year, "The Opening of the Field," a seminar on the work of Robert Duncan. The energy kicked in even before I made it in the front door of the School of the Art Institute: as I paused on the street to make a phone call, Peter O'Leary came loping up to me, looking, as always, like a handsomer version of the young Robert Lowell. "You know where you're going, right?" he asked, grabbing me by the shoulder and hustling me inside. I haven't been steered into a building like that since the last time I was in New Orleans and wandered down Bourbon Street past the tourist bars and strip clubs. Once inside I found myself in a crowd that was both numerous and surprisingly familiar: in the seats immediately around me were the poets Reginald Gibbons, John Tipton, Ed Roberson, Joseph Donoghue, and Norman Finkelstein, the critics Richard Strier, Robert Von Hallberg, and Stephen Fredman (an old prof of mine from my Notre Dame days), and the Brazilian consul general, the writer João Almino (who — unlike any American consul to anywhere — has written on Duncan). I also ran into two poets I've read but never before had the pleasure of meeting — Siobhán Scarry (busy putting transparent sheets of poetry over one another to create multi-layered compositions) and Brian Teare. I heard Jennifer Scappetone, too, but didn't actually see her in the sea of literati.

The event I'd arrived at was a curious hybrid — the first half a poetry reading by Nathaniel Mackey, the second half a paper on Robert Duncan and childhood given by Michael Palmer. The event was actually the second part of the Duncan symposium, but I'd been unable to make it to an earlier panel of papers by Siobhán Scarry, Steve Collis, and Steve Fredman.

Anyway: it was the first time I've actually heard Mackey read in person, and it was impressive. He's got a good reading voice, and a cool, slightly distant delivery. As he dipped into various books of his, it became clear to me why he was such a good choice for an event honoring Duncan: not only did Mackey know Duncan personally, his work is deeply indebted to Duncan's poetry. Like Duncan, Mackey works in serial form, writing long, open sequences akin to Duncan's The Structure of Rime, and doing so with a sense of the spiritual possibility of poetry, a sense much akin to Duncan's own. Like Duncan, Mackey refuses to close down the possibilities of any part of his composition: a word or phrase that seems subordinate in one section of a poem may turn out to be the opening into a larger theme in another section, and the ongoing nature of the composition means the poem remains replete with infinite possibility at all times and in all parts. I think this connects with the spiritual aspirations of Duncan and Mackey, too: this kind of composition is a way of seeing the world in just one grain of sand, and of knowing that any other grain may also open up to a similarly large world at any time.

When Mackey writes about the oud (the north African ancestor of the lute), we get a sense of how he sees discrete moments of music, separated by time and space, as connected, as parts of some larger, historical song:

Some

ecstatic elsewhere's

advocacy strummed,
unsung, lost inside

the oud's complaint...
The same cry taken
up in Cairo, Cordoba,
north
Red Sea near Nagfa,

Muharraq

The kind of connection over distance he describes here seems to me to be something like a formal principle for his serial composition: the parts of the poems constantly reach backwards and forwards to each other; and they yearn to be adequate to some larger spiritual vision that can't quite be grasped, an "ecstatic elsewhere" that we sing of, and to, forever, without quite embodying it in song.

By some odd coincidence, I'd just been reading another African-American poet who works in serial forms, C.S. Giscombe (I'm reviewing his book Prairie Style for The Cincinnati Review). The chance to compare and contrast Giscombe's work to that of Mackey, with Mackey appearing in person, was a real privilege. I think the main point of comparison is the sense of the infinite possibilities of parts of the poem, and the desire to build onto passages that might not have seemed important when they first appeared in the serial sequence of poems. But the difference is this: while Mackey comes out of Duncan's kind of poesis, Giscombe comes out of Charles Olson, whom he's clearly read with care. Like Olson, Giscombe turns to particular landscapes (Canadian, Midwestern, what have you) as his bases of inspiration. Mackey is more free-form, I think.

But I digress. Mackey's reading was followed by Michael Palmer's presentation of a paper called "Robert Duncan and the Invention of Childhood." It began with a collage of familiar writing from the perspective of childhood: James Joyce's famous baby-talk opening to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both versions of Blake's "Nurse's Song" (the one from Songs of Innocence and the one from Songs of Experience), and a great passage about a princess who could change her head, and kept dozens of alternate heads in elaborate cabinets in her palace (this was from Frank Baum's Ozma of Oz). Palmer went on to discuss how childhood is a period of linguistic openness, where sense and nonsense coexist, with nonsense always lurking just below the surface of sense-making (think of the opening to Joyce's Portrait, where the toddler Stephen Dedalus tries to sing the songs he hears, and comes up with an almost-in-English lispy jumble of syllables, "O the green woth botheth" — it's a liminal case of sense and nonsense existing together). This, said Palmer, is the kind of thing Duncan valued — language, and especially poetry, not as a matter of statement-making, but as a constant hovering at the verge of significance, a hovering that maintains the potential of going off in another direction, or already having a significance that we haven't yet realized was there. Duncan, said Palmer during the Q and A that followed his paper, believed that the poet's ecstasy was like the infant's ecstasy, as the infant tries on all potential syllable combinations and waits to see which few the slow-minded adults can understand. As the father of a fifteen-month old kid, I felt the truth in this.

Palmer's paper must have built on something from earlier in the symposium, since he called us back to some earlier comments about the potential of language. Indeed, "potentiality" seems to have been a big word at the panel I missed earlier in the day: Palmer mentioned that Steve Collis had name-checked Giorgio Agamben, and potentiality is a big theme in Agamben's work. I'm not sure which direction Collis was going in, but I bet it had something to do with Agamben's notion that we should regard all works as gestures toward a larger potential, which can never be fulfilled in its entirety. "Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned," wrote Agamben in Infancy and History, "and is destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks." My guess is that Duncan would regard this sense of the unending, and ever-unfulfilled, nature of writing as a positive thing, an opportunity to keep talking and aiming one's words at something like Mackey's "ecstatic elsewhere."

As the event wound down I trudged outside for some fresh air, thinking about how glad I was that events like this — with papers as well as readings — were going on outside the auspices of academe (albeit in an academic room). But I didn't get far with these thoughts before running into Zach Barocas, poet and punk rocker extraordinaire, with whom I compared notes on the glories of working in used bookstores (the Strand for him, the long-gone Aspidistra for me), before I hopped into a crowded cab for the next part of the symposium. This time we were extra-academic in venue, too: the Green Lantern Gallery in Wicker Park, which is really a big old loft-style apartment. You know you're in for the real poetry when the instructions for arriving at the reading say: "Green Lantern is above the Singer Sewing Machine shop; the doorbell doesn’t work but the door will be open." You read that and right away you know this ain't no bullshit Derek Walcott reading — this is the genuine, inconveniently located article.

The Green Lantern event began with a great deal of milling around, which was fantastic: I got to talk about the infant's relation to syntax with Palmer and Mackey, got to hear Steve Fredman reminisce about his days on a San Francisco poets' baseball team ("Michael Palmer was the archetypal third baseman, able to go from vertical to flat-out horizontal instantly"), and I got the lowdown on the best Canadian poets I haven't read from Steve Collis (Jordan Stutter and Roger Farr, and someone else whose name I can't quite decipher in my trusty Miquelrius notebook). Brian Teare and I compared notes on the poets at Stanford, especially Ken Fields and Eavan Boland, about whom we have similar feelings.

Since everything was running wonderfully late, I could only stick around for the first two readers — Steve Collis and Joe Donoghue. I'm in dept to both guys. Steve and I first met about a dozen years ago, when we traded chapbooks in the Louisville airport. He's sent me a lot of his work since then, and I've admired all of it. I've just not been prolific enough to send him much of mine. And Joe Donoghue? I think he paid for the bourbon when he and I and Norman Finkelstein hung out at the MLA last December in Philly. And I suppose I'm more in debt now, since each delivered a fine reading entirely appropriate to an event held under the aegis of Robert Duncan.

Collis' early work was very much in the mode of Duncan, and while he's moved on somewhat from that mode, the influence is still clear, even in some of his titles — "Poem Beginning with the Title of a Cy Twombly Painting," for example, echoes Duncan's "Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar." By a nice bit of synchronicity, Collis also showed a reverence for Michael Palmer, using a line of Palmer's ("There's still no truth in making sense") as an epigraph for "Gail's Books," Collis' powerful elegy for his sister. Joe Donoghue read from a serial poem called "Terra Lucida," and was, if anything, even more Duncanesque than was Collis. He worked some fine anaphoric repetitions while speaking of "the coming of a world of light after a life of knowledge," which seemed very much down Duncan's street, especially after Joe introduced a series of troubadours, alchemists, and Bedouins into the poem. Both Donoghue and Collis got the real poet-visiting-Chicago treatment, in that their readings were punctuated by the rumble of the El, which passed just outside the gallery's windows, and by blues harmonica emanating from the nearby Double Door club. If there'd been a little random gunfire they'd have hit the windy city trifecta.

So: all honor to John Tipton and Peter O'Leary for putting the symposium together. They're clearly guys who know Duncan's poetry, and know how to throw a party. Long may the tattered banner of the Chicago Poetry Project wave.

**

My colleague Josh Corey went to Saturday's Duncan symposium events. Let's hope he blogs about what went down.