Robert Duncan

This volume in the Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series gathers a far-reaching selection of Robert Duncan’s prose writings including most of his longer and more well-known essays along with other prose that has never been widely available. Ranging in original publication dates between 1940 and 1985 the forty-one titles reveal a great deal about Duncan’s life in poetry—including his impressions of poets whose work he admires both contemporaries and precursors. Evocative and eclectic this work delineates the intellectual contexts and sources of Duncan’s poetics and opens a window onto the literary communities in which he participated.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: 1940s
1. An Embryo for God: Tropic of Capricorn
2. The Homosexual in Society
3. What to Do Now
4. Reviewing View an Attack
5. Poetics of Music: Stravinsky
6. The Poet and Poetry—A Symposium

Part II: 1950s
7. Pages from a Notebook
8. From a Notebook
9. Notes on Poetics regarding Olson’s Maximus

Part III: 1960s
10. Properties and Our REAL Estate
11. Ideas of the Meaning of Form
12. After For Love
13. Preface: Helen Adam Ballads
14. Poetry before Language
15. The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound
16. The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy
17. Introduction: William Everson Single Source
18. Towards an Open Universe
19. The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography
20. A Critical Difference of View
21. Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife
22. Jack Spicer Poet: 1925–1965

Part IV: 1970s
23. Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman
24. Notes on Grossinger’s Solar Journal: Oecological Sections
25. Iconographical Extensions
26. Of George Herms His Hermes and His Hermetic Art
27. From Notes on the Structure of Rime
28. Preface to a Reading of Passages 1–22
29. Kopóltuš
30. Introduction: Allen Upward The Divine Mystery
31. An Art of Wondering
32. A Reading of Thirty Things
33. As Testimony: Reading Zukofsky These Forty Years
34. Wallace Berman: The Fashioning Spirit
35. In Introduction: John Taggart Dodeka

Part V: 1980s
36. Preface: Jack Spicer One Night Stand & Other Poems
37. The Adventure of Whitman’s Line
38. The Self in Postmodern Poetry
39. Statement on Jacobus for Borregaard’s Museum
40. Afterword: Beverly Dahlen The Egyptian Poems
41. The Delirium of Meaning

Appendix: List of Uncollected Essays and Other Prose
Notes
Works Cited in the Essays
Acknowledgments of Permissions
Index