1Like his predecessors and peers – Ezra Pound, H.D., and Charles Olson in particular – Robert Duncan reached for a poetry of range and amplitude. His “symposium of the whole,” as he speaks of it in The H.D. Book (Duncan 2011, 154), is nothing less than the human story as told in all the world’s cultures. Duncan thought that this on-going narrative was to be mobilized for present use, and he describes himself as a poet derivative of and participant in it. Few American writers today, I think, would invoke the thought of wholeness so unguardedly, and yet a major reason they do not – the difficulty of proposing world-sized imaginaries in geo-historical contexts where there are many competing versions of the world – is a social condition that Duncan also recognized and built into his writing practice. His response to it, however, is instructively disjunctive from contemporary difference narratives and it is the disjunction I want to emphasize. Duncan embraced tradition(s), championed mythopoesis, and employed both strategies in acknowledgement of, rather than blindness to, social heterogeneity.
- 1 For a discussion of the formal variousness of the 20th century long poem, see Lynn Keller’s “Introd (...)
- 2 Raven Travelling was related to linguist John Reed Swanton, c. 1900, by the Haida poet Skaay. Rober (...)
2In order to discuss the stakes in Duncan’s poetry, I need to pose the idea of “big poetry” in the 20th century. I acknowledge that this is an impressionistic phrase, but I prefer it to “long poem” or “serial poem” or “modern verse epic” because it isn’t length or the formal features of modern long poems that I have in mind,1 but the world-reach of traditional foundational narratives. In cultures that deeply inform European and North American imaginations, “big poetry,” meant epic or origin story. It meant The Theogony, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, The Ramayana, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost. In Indigenous cultures it meant and means creation stories such as the Haida epic, Raven Travelling.2 In this introduction to my commentary, I want to recall some of the functions of these traditional poetic forms before I go on to discuss how Duncan adapts them to his own times and poetic practice and why they might speak to readers now. These tales of people and animals and gods performed some important social and intellectual roles that I will summarize as memory, measure, and meaning.
3First is Mnemosyne. Discussing the Homeric epics, Gregory Nagy glosses the word “memnēmai” as “total recall” (Nagy 41). The phrase, he says, is “meant to convey a special mentality of remembering, of putting things on record, common in traditional societies” (Nagy 42), and it supposes a claim by the poet to have channeled the omniscient view of the Muses (Nagy 44). Milton makes just such a claim at the beginning of Paradise Lost, when he asks the “Heav’nly Muse” to sing of “the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth / Rose out of Chaos” (Milton 5–6). Worlds away, the Haida poets referenced mythtime with what Robert Bringhurst calls the “quotative” (Bringhurst 113). This is the “they say” or “it is said” (Bringhurst 112) woven into poems of primordial creation. In A Story as Sharp as a Knife, his book about Haida oral poetry as recorded at the beginning of the 20th century, Bringhurst says that the quotative “can suggest that what is said has been tested by tradition and found true, or warn that it bears no guarantee because it lies outside the speaker’s own experience” (Bringhurst 113). In the above examples, the cosmic perspective and collective memory is secured by superhuman or ancestral agents.
- 3 Thomas King in The Inconvenient Indian and Glen Sean Coulthard in Red Skin, White Mask offer exempl (...)
4Cultural memory is closely related to measure, by which I mean not simply the number and stress pattern of a poetic line, but the arrangement of events, characters, and images so as to show contrasts and similarities between them. Duncan would call this the “structure of rime”: “An absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance establishes measures that are music in the actual world” (Duncan 1960, 13, original emphasis). The term “measure” also implies judgement, as in taking the measure of someone or something to determine whether a person has character or not, or whether an act might be deemed significant or trivial, good or bad. As a function of the foundational narrative, measure gives weight to actions and behaviours in a way that reveals the connections between things said and done in the society that produced the work and this provides a means to take the measure of it and of the reader’s own self too. Haida epic, for example, emphasizes interchange between the human and natural worlds, particularly through shape-shifting trickster figures like Raven. Homeric epic, in contrast, centers on narratives of “kleos” or “‘the glories of men’” (Nagy 43), as these are manifest in acts of military prowess or situations exemplary of social decorum. The two cultures demonstrate contrasting ways of measuring the living universe and the human place in it.3
5Memory and measure generate meaning, and here I propose a distinction between meaning and knowledge. Knowledge that is empirically testable or logically coherent – knowledge that presents new facts about the world or knowledge that is based primarily on consistent reasoning – is not exactly the business of poetry. A great deal of misunderstanding rests on the notion that it is – that poetry simply does poorly what other disciplines do better. This is a very old argument. In Plato’s Ion, for example, Socrates has a conversation with the rhapsode, Ion, who specializes in the recitation of the Iliad. Socrates argues that because Homer was not himself a General capable of leading an army or a chariot-maker capable of supplying the troops that he had nothing much to say about the Trojan War. This is an awful argument, but as usual, Socrates wins; Ion is simply befuddled by the Socratic method. What he tries to say, however, and doesn’t quite manage is that knowledge of this kind is not the aim of the Iliad; it is the manner in which the characters act, the quality of the action, and the relationships between them that shows how everybody is doing everything: the rhapsode, Ion says, “will know what a man and what a woman ought to say, and what a freeman and what a slave ought to say, and what a ruler and what a subject” (Plato 11). The technical skill that works out military strategies and constructs chariots is not the point. Meaning comes from relational thinking, not technological or analytical thought. A fact becomes meaningful to us only when it is put into a network of relationships.
- 4 The traditions Duncan references are mostly European, and this may be a stumbling block for contemp (...)
6The problem, of course, is all in saying who the “us” is. For modern and contemporary poets, there is no uncontestable heavenly muse and no “tribe” that can simply be taken for granted. Forty years ago, in The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, Michael André Bernstein articulated this problem in his study of Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson: “the essential paradox of a modern verse epic,” he says, is that “a text that can be only the response of a particular individual writing from his own, partial and limited perspective […] must nonetheless give voice to historical forces transcending any single consciousness or moment” (Bernstein 272). Insofar as a poet aims to respond to the world conditions of his or her times, he or she has to assemble a community and convince readers that he or she can tell its stories. In Duncan’s America, riven between the mainstream and counterculture during the civil rights era, this was a hard task; it is perhaps even harder now. It is much easier to critique existing cultural artefacts for ideological blindness than it is to create works that gather a community – let alone a “symposium of the whole.” It is a claim of this paper that Duncan saw the task and responded to it, and that he did so by broadening the scope of his poetry and ranging widely through various literary traditions,4 rather than confining his reach to his own social group (gay white males, say), or by rejecting cultural content that did not align with his anarchist politics. What I want to show is how Duncan adapts the functions I have associated with big poetry to his times through his treatment of memory, measure, and meaning.
7In “The Truth and Life of Myth,” Duncan says that poets have become “readers of the text,” rather than “rememberers” of it (Duncan 1985, 37). This gives him a flexible way into cultural memory. He writes that
Memory must strive to preserve to the letter, but Writing preserves in itself the first version, and we see the more clearly how our very reading varies from reader to reader, from generation to generation. The morphology of forms, in evolving, does not destroy their historicity but reveals that each event has its origin in the origin of all events; yes, but in turn, we are but the more aware that the first version is revised in our very turning to it, seeing it with new eyes. (Duncan 1985, 37)
- 5 Both Bringhurst and Nagy, from their positions as scholars of Haida myth and Homeric epic respectiv (...)
8What Duncan presents here is his version of a living tradition – an evolving “morphology of forms” – that may accommodate differences in time, place, and perspective.5 No completed world view, then, but a view-from-here, and not by birthright but by creative labor. This much, I think, is common to many poets of the 20th century. However, what is telling about Duncan’s re-articulation of cultural memory as reading is that he does not discard the origin myth or foundational story but retains it as a layer in the textual palimpsest. He can then use these big picture narratives to bring into contiguity variants across times and cultures, thus to stage a conversation. “Our responsibility as artists,” he says, “is to recognize as fully and as deeply as we can what […] belongingness consists of” (Duncan 1985, 37). To cite “The Truth and Life of Myth” again, “the poetic imagination faces the challenge of finding a structure that will be the complex story of all the stories felt to be true, a myth in which something like the variety of man’s experience of what is real may be contained” (Duncan 1985, 6).
- 6 The phrase, “like water in water” comes from Georges Bataille’s Theory of Religion (Bataille 25).
9In Duncan’s own work, the story of Cupid and Psyche serves as such a myth of myth. Drawn from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, the story says that Psyche holds a lamp up to Eros, her lover, after she is asked not to look. When she loses him to the light – the inquisitive, doubting intellect – Venus, Cupid’s mother, sets her a series of impossible tasks which she is to accomplish before she can regain her love. As Duncan makes clear in The H.D. Book (Duncan 2011, 82–89), this meta-myth supports a number of analogous readings. As a story of cosmic becoming, it speaks to the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness from the flow of life where it had once existed “like water in water.”6 As a Freudian story, it dramatizes the coming-to-consciousness of the infant, or the manifestation of the unconscious in dream and desire, or the evolving intellect of humanity. The world play of emerging forms is repeated in “the soul wailing / up from blind innocence” in “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (Duncan 1960, 62), or the “thought of the One in the World-Egg” in “Passages 1: Tribal Memories” (Duncan 1968, 10). Individual human development repeats the story of the species (Duncan 2011, 137; 1985, 185). In yet another analogue, Duncan reads the myth as a shorthand of the historical ascendency of Christianity and consequent forgetting of the old pagan alliance with Pan: “The Palace of Eros, where once Psyche had known every imagined thing, had fallen into the darkness of a perishing civilization, and Psyche’s tasks had begun. Driven by dogma, threatened by excommunication, she must harrow Hell before she come again into the light of the upper world” (Duncan 2011, 89). Christianity, then, has to unearth its pagan kinships: “Dionysius in wrath, Apollo in rapture, / Orpheus in song, and Eros secretly // four that Christ-crossd in one Nature / Plato named the First Beloved” (“A Poem Slow Beginning,” Duncan 1960, 15).
10From another angle, Cupid and Psyche is a story about poetry: “the would-be poet stands like Psyche in the dark […] possessed by a spirit outside the ken of those about him” (Duncan 2011, 80, original emphasis). One of Psyche’s tasks is sorting a mixed pile of seeds. This element of the story speaks to the seeds or origin myths of the world’s cultures and languages that the poet gathers and sorts. Companion myths would be the tale of Osiris dismembered by Set, Orpheus torn by the Bacchants, or the confusion of tongues at Babel – scatterings to be collaged together, even including “a little language of my cat,” as Duncan writes in The Dante Études (Duncan 1984, 98). In the Pindar poem he salutes Pound as a fellow sorter of seeds: “The old man at Pisa / mixd in whose mind / (to draw the sorts) are all seeds” (Duncan 1960, 65). This sorting and gathering also takes a personal twist from Duncan’s family background in theosophy (Duncan 2011, 128–129), an important tenet of which is faith in the unitive truth behind the many truths of the world’s religions, philosophies, and sciences.
11Through this versatile myth of Cupid and Psyche and the many others that double and extend it, Duncan proposes a “symposium of the whole” (Duncan 2011, 154). The phrase is from a much quoted passage in the H.D. Book, where he contrasts Plato’s “community of Athenians” with a new collective in which “all the old excluded orders must be included” (Duncan 2011, 154) – repressed people groups, the non-human planet, the dead and the living. “[T]he great drama of our time,” he writes, “is the coming of all men into one fate” (Duncan 2011, 155). The power of the poem to draw in and assemble such diversity, however, depends on keeping close to primary human experiences – nearer to myth than to history. All cultures and times tell of relationships between humanity and nature, the child and adult, or the dream world and the waking one. So in a section of the H.D. Book titled “Rites of Participation,” Duncan finds that the Australian Aranda “create a language of acts and things, of devouring and being devoured, of giving birth and being born, in which man and the world about him come into one body” (Duncan 2011, 163). The point is recognition, not appropriation. Because Duncan’s mythopoesis is really meta-myth, he avoids the ethnocentricity of traditional origin stories as well as the cultural amnesia that comes with discarding them. If he weakens the ethos embedded in particular myths by relativizing them, he gains diversity and scale, and the poem as a place of virtual global assembly. The wager of such an assemblage is that difference may reveal commonality at the primordial level.
12Memory, I have said, supplies the materials of measure, another traditional function of poetry. Duncan famously exploits measure in all of its senses – as sound and rhythm as well as ethos. In the first sense, measure gives form. For example, the Moly suite in Ground Work: Before the War presents a complex series of shifting perspectives and contrasts between youth and age, male and female personae, the panting “animal tongue” (Duncan 1984, 68) and “[t]he voice we raise in poetry” (67). The suite is drawn “FROM THE MARGINS” (Duncan 1984, 63) of Thom Gunn’s Moly, the titular poem of which is based on Book X of the Odyssey. In this Book, the witch Circe changes Odysseus’s crew into swine: the magical herb, moly, is the antidote. Gunn’s “Moly” plays with the chiasmatic relationship between a man trapped in a pig’s body and a piggish self within the man. Duncan’s poem crosses and re-crosses that chiasm, drawing the “dumb illiterate / Underbeing of Man” into sense and then singing it back to thralldom in the address to a Pan-like youth in the last section of the suite. Like “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” “Rites of Passage: I” of the sequence begins with a footstep (Duncan 1984, 66). Out of that step, comes the hoof of the satyr, the “wild dancing” (67) of spring, and finally Pan who arrives by name as the last word of the poem. The poem brings to imaginative presence “the foot that has / its reason in bright ratios / it would measure” (Duncan 1984, 66), an image of the dance that draws the animal body into patterned movement, as language draws it out of dumbness. Rhythm and rhyme enact the drama of emerging form that is the poem’s theme and, in the larger sense, the magic – the “moly” – of poetry’s measure.
13If measure be read as ethos rather than traffic between sound and sense, it is drama again that defines Duncan’s method. In the quarrel with Denise Levertov over her Vietnam war poems, Duncan accuses Levertov of making the poem mean what she wants it to mean rather than following it toward the discovery of form. Levertov replies that Duncan’s habit of referring history to myth flattens out important historical distinctions: North Vietnamese and U.S. forces are not the same, for instance, and cannot simply be treated as interchangeable examples of cosmic order and strife (Bertholf and Gelpi, 681). From Duncan’s perspective, however, “[t]he poet’s role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it” (669). “Passages 35, Before the Judgment,” illustrates both sides of the argument. The poem brings the destructions of the Vietnam War and the “betrayers of public trust” who enabled and profited from it into Dante’s Malebolge (the 8th circle of the Inferno, devoted to deceivers, seducers, and fraudsters), “where the deep violation begins” (Duncan 1984, 28). Duncan places these evil-doers – “the bosses and war-mongers, misusers of the public trust, / heads of the Hydra that Pound named Usura” (Duncan 1984, 32) – in contiguity with Hesiod’s mythical “golden race” from Works and Days, who “live as spirits of the earth, / Holy and good, guardians who keep off harm” (Hesiod 62).
14To extrapolate from Levertov’s perspective, I think such a move can be read as a de-historicizing of the war by making it one of a string of evil deeds. The mention of Hesiod’s guardians would then contribute to the poem’s quietism by referring a real historical occasion to a mythical resolution. However, if “Passages 35” is treated as drama, it fulfills its function as measure by bringing “before the judgement” of the reader a play of figures and events. This is uniquely a poet’s way of addressing political issues, rather than that of the political activist on the other side of the page. Hesiod, Dante, and Pound come into the poem as fellow poets who have also brought good and evil doings into memorable form and public light where they can be seen and heard. Without these being made present, judgement is impossible. Hence the poem takes place “before the judgement” (my emphasis). Duncan’s language in poems like “Passages 35” or other politically-oriented pieces like “Passages 21: The Multiversity” (Duncan 1968, 70–73) or “Passages 25: Up Rising” (Duncan 1968, 81–83) is strong in the rhetoric of indignation, but, he says to Levertov, the point isn’t what he thinks, but what the poem makes available for thought.
- 7 In Whitehead’s Process and Reality, the “lure for feeling” is a limit concept that expresses the ur (...)
15Duncan’s habit of referring history to myth also turns on the significance of propositional elements to his work. James Maynard has recently documented Duncan’s familiarity with Whitehead’s philosophy in his Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime. Laying out a processive, interconnected cosmos in Process and Reality, Whitehead speaks of the “lure for feeling”7 as an element in the becoming of any entity; propositional rather than actual, it guides the entity’s selection and synthesis of data in the process of its self-creation. Duncan adapts this concept to his treatment of myth: not only does myth assemble a wide range of culturally diverse foundational narratives, but as a “lure for feeling” it gathers up and orients the various becomings of self, community, and species. So in the Dante Études he writes:
and only in the imagination of the Whole
the immediate percept is
to be justified—Imagining
this
pivot of a totality
having
no total thing in us, we so
live beyond ourselves
and in this unitive. (Duncan 1984, 106–107)
- 8 Silliman’s “new sentence” takes the paragraph as “a unit not of logic or argument, but as quantity, (...)
16The effect of the thought of the Whole as a “lure for feeling” suggests why Duncan’s wide range of reference, intense focus on language, and political content do not better accord with some of the language writing that came forward in the generation after his where the juxtaposition of words, phrases, or sentences both invite and refuse meaning, as in Ron Silliman’s early seminal piece Tjanting. This book-length poem begins “Not this / What then?”; as it unfolds, the indeterminacies of language and the disjunctive “new sentence” strategy8 guarantee that whatever this is, this isn’t it. Duncan also refuses completion, but his revisionary take on memory and measure as the drama of an evolving Whole give him language directed toward an end that can never arrive: whatever this is, this isn’t it yet. In other words, the “lure for feeling” gives him plot.
17From memory and measure, Duncan draws the potential for meaning. In the H.D. Book, he comments on the analogy between language and money, speaking from Ezra Pound’s perspective:
If we think of Pound’s later concern for a monetary credit that is grounded in an actual productive order […] we find a basic concern for the good credit of things. Both words and money are currencies that must be grounded in the substance of a credibility if they be virtuous. Abstraction from the actual guarantee of experience meant manipulation of the public trust, as, in the United States, demagogues had long established by their misuses of language the common sense that what was “rhetorical” was for effect only, a persuading with words that were not truly meant, empty or worse, a hiding of the real meaning in order to make a sell. (Duncan 2011, 54–55)
18Duncan’s own way of dealing with the gap between “the debased currency of the word” and “the good credit” of it in experience is to demonstrate at a meta-level the capacity of language to mean and to draw readers into exploring the historical freight it carries. There can be no fixing of linguistic currency to a “gold standard,” (original, true meaning), but there may be a search for living words – the gold of language, so to speak.
19“Passages 13, The Fire,” illustrates Duncan’s push for the word “grounded in an actual productive order.” The poem begins and ends with a grid of words, grammatically unconnected, and readable forward, backward, up, down, or diagonally. Read horizontally, the first grid begins with this line:
Jump stone hand leaf shadow sun
(Duncan, 1968, 40)
The second grid inverts and turns the first on the vertical. The last vertical line of this grid reads as follows:
Sun
shadow
leaf
hand
stone
jump (Duncan, 1968, 45)
- 9 Pletho (1355 – 1450/52) was a Byzantine philosopher whose treatise, “On the difference between Aris (...)
20Between the two-word grids are exempla of the “old belief” in cosmic harmony, referenced through the Neoplatonic imagination of an ensouled cosmos in which all things are connected through the spirit of music. Duncan synthesizes Gemistus Pletho, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola9 with Orpheus and the biblical David, the last two of legendary skill on the lyre. These references Duncan then juxtaposes to Piero di Cosimo’s painting, A Forest Fire (1490–1500) and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510). Cosimo’s painting depicts terror and sorrow in the humanized faces of animals fleeing a fire; Bosch’s Garden depicts “bestial extrusions no true animal face knows” (Duncan 1968, 43). In contrast to the cosmic harmony sought by the Florentines is the “opposing music” of Hell (Duncan 1968, 42). Both paintings show a paradise lost, but where Cosimo paints “our animal spirits” in flight from natural disaster, Bosch paints the flight of the soul from innocence to depravity. The two art works come together in Duncan’s reference to the bad deeds of political leaders and scientists who contributed to the making of nuclear weaponry, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the building of military-industrial complexes everywhere and everywhen that burn woods, brushlands, and grassy fields for “profitable suburbs” – “Pan’s land […] [laid] waste” (Duncan 1968, 44–45). The word grids that bracket this mid-section of the poem evoke, without specifying, “Pan’s land” in word strings like “Cool green waver circle fish sun” (Duncan 1968, 45). Without a limiting syntax, however, these strings can be read and the scene imagined in any number of ways. To be noted is the inclusion of words that reference the built world as well as the natural. Words like “coin,” “boat,” “harbor,” ”wall” and “bronze,” for instance, hint of the passing of Ovid’s and Hesiod’s mythical golden age: coin brings banking; boats and harbors enable trade and hence competition; walls suggest a city to defend; and bronze supplies the metal for utensils and weaponry. All of human history is there in embryo, along with Psyche’s desire for her lost Eros. The word grids create a place in language where myth and history collide, as if the words had been washed in a primordial dawn. Readers who accept the poem’s invitation to enter this place may find the common seeds of their own diverse histories and traditions.
21To better show the significance of Duncan’s push to revitalize the word, I would like to situate it next to Agamben’s commentary on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Agamben writes that spectacle alienates people from their communicative nature (Agamben 82) because it isolates the word from its revelatory powers (Agamben 83).
Even more than economic necessities and technological development, what drives the nations of the Earth toward a single common destiny is the alienation of linguistic being, the uprooting of all peoples from their vital dwelling in language. But exactly for this reason, the age in which we live is also that in which for the first time it becomes possible for human beings to experience their own linguistic essence – to experience, that is, not some language content or some true proposition, but language itself, as well as the very fact of speaking. Contemporary politics is precisely this devastating experimentum linguae that disarticulates and empties, all over the planet, traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. (Agamben 85, original emphasis)
22When words are disconnected from collectively recognizable experience, public discourse falls silent and we – any we – have no means to build communities or oppose the perjorocracy that Pound and Olson and Duncan denounced – a dystopia that contemporary readers might recognize as relevant to their own historical moment in a post-truth era. Agamben writes that the way out of this evisceration of communication is in “bringing language itself to language,” (Agamben 85) which I take to mean that any recovery of the power of words to communicate must pass by way of reflexivity and, I would add, cultural archaeology. To read Duncan’s poems at all is to explore words as associative networks that invite readers into communities of thought and feeling, past and present. This is the gold mining: the weight of historical usage and example provides a kind of ballast against the lightness of facile presentism or the sheerly formal indeterminacy of language.
- 10 This comment on technology has come to me through Robin Blaser’s essay, “Mind Canaries” where he ci (...)
23To summarize: Duncan contributes to a big poetry through his revisionary treatment of memory, measure, and meaning. Cultural memory cannot be dogmatically narrow if it is to avoid both tribalism and false universals. Duncan addresses this issue through an appeal to common elements of foundational myths, but without according them religious status. His fascination with originary thought, as opposed to originality, calls humanity back to a shared relationship with the living planet and to its own difficult, troubled, exiled psyche. The bottom sense of this move is that it proposes a common habitude in primordial myth – a space of assembly – across differences and challenges the narcissism of a species lost in itself and to itself, unable to form relationships with a planet that it has literally consumed. Technology, which is a prosthetic of the human will, treats the world as problem or obstacle; art treats the world as form.10 As form, the world is there to be responded to: hence the significance of the poetic eros or love of the world. “It is not in political right-thinking or in political power that we come into the apprehension of a World Order,” Duncan writes, “but in falling in love” (Duncan 1985, 133). Secondly, in the realm of measure, is the world drama that Duncan stages for his readers, where the poet’s role is to make vivid and present the contrasts – goods and evils, beautifuls and uglies, actuals and potentials – that make up the human universe and to bring these “before the judgement” so that we may take thought and not lose the good of the intellect. And then there is the matter of meaning in times when words as communicative currency have become nearly worthless. Duncan draws our attention to the generative power of words as well as the cumulative and accumulating history of human sayings, against which current usage is to be weighed. When he argues that the poem is to be read for the forms it might reveal rather than for what the reader-writer wants to say, he calls his readers to the task of searching out the truth and life of language – gold mining, so to speak. This kind of reading makes it impossible to forget the historical weight words carry or to use them lightly.
- 11 Christine Agius and Dean Keep, editors of The Politics of Identity: Place, Space, and Discourse, ma (...)
24Since Duncan’s death in 1988, the stage for the creative arts has gone global, courtesy of tighter transnational economic integration and digital communications technology. No local community can be ring-fenced and no serious art form can ignore that fact. Duncan’s sense that humanity has come into one fate seems truer now than when he wrote it. And yet in the populist politics now afoot in the United States and in the stress on identity politics in American culture, the emphasis is on difference, not commonality. I do not contest the importance of identity politics,11 but the social justice which it is meant to serve also requires narratives of common habitudes and common social concerns such as distributive justice if it is to move beyond protest. Duncan reminds his readers that the times always require an imagination for creative and complex relationships, within and between societies, historical periods, and environments. “Imagination is never idiolectic,” Duncan says, “It is the imagination of the world” (Duncan 2020, 413).
25Anarchic, complicated, transhistorical, and cosmic in scope, Duncan’s writings are out of key with the current cultural mood in the United States, and for that reason, all the more necessary. Certainly there is room for complaint about Duncan’s kind of big poetry. His phenomenological focus on experience was uncongenial to the generation of theory-oriented writers who came after him, and his frank romanticism remains temperamentally difficult for some readers. I think it might also be argued that as a dramatist, he plays all the parts himself. And yet Duncan took on the profoundly hard task of imagining the common in an era of emerging globalism and social protest. His commitment to the “commune of Poetry” (Duncan 1968, vi) and his faith in the power of an imagination for it remain a challenge for anyone brave enough to pick up the gauntlet.
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