Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus

This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919–1988), one of America’s great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan’s birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan’s notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.

Lisa Jarnot is a poet and independent scholar. She has taught at Brooklyn College and the Naropa Institute and is the author of four books of poetry, including Ring of Fire and Night Scenes.

Foreword by Michael Davidson
Preface

Acknowledgments
Textual Notes

Part One
Childhood’s Retreat
1 The Antediluvian World
2 Native Son of the Golden West
3 The Architecture
4 A Part in the Fabulous
5 The Wasteland
6 The Fathering Dream

Part Two
Toward the Shaman
7 The Little Freshman Yes
8 A Company of Women
9 The Dance
10 From Romance to Ritual
11 Queen of the Whores
12 Enlisted
13 Marriage
14 Divorce

Part Three
The Enamord Mage
15 The End of the War
16 The Round Table
17 The First Poetry Festival
18 The Venice Poem
19 Indian Tales
20 The Song of the Borderguard
21 The Way to Shadow Garden
22 The Workshop
23 Mallorca
24 Caesar’s Gate

Part Four
The Opening of the Field
25 The Meadow
26 New York Interlude
27 The San Francisco Scene
28 Olson, Whitehead, and the Magic Workshop
29 The Maidens
30 Elfmere
31 Night Scenes
32 H.D.
33 Go East
34 Apprehensions

Part Five
The Nasty Aesthetician
35 The Will
36 The Playhouse
37 The Political Machine
38 Knight Errant
39 The Vancouver Conference
40 Bending the Bow
41 A Night Song
42 Anger
43 The Berkeley Conference
44 The Sixties

Part Six
Domestic Scenes
45 The Household
46 The Summer of Love
47 Days of Rage
48 Ground-Work
49 Helter Skelter
50 Santa Cruz Propositions
51 The Torn Cloth
52 Despair in Being Tedious
53 The Cult of the Gods
54 Elm Park Road
55 Riverside
56 The Heart of Rime

Part Seven
Troubadour
57 An Alternate Life
58 Cambridge
59 The Avant-Garde
60 Adam, Eve, and Jahweh
61 San Francisco’s Burning
62 At Sea
63 The Cherubim
64 Alaska
65 Enthralled

Part Eight
The Master of Rime
66 New College
67 Five Songs
68 A Paris Visit
69 Bard
70 The Baptism of the Blood
71 Hekatombe
72 The Year of Duncan
73 The Circulation of the Blood
74 In the Dark

Notes
Bibliography
Index