Jerome Rothenberg: Robert Duncan - A Memorial
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Jerome Rothenberg
ROBERT DUNCAN: A MEMORIAL
I first met Robert
Duncan in 1959. San Francisco was and remained
his city, but he was then living in Stinson
Beach , a short ways up
the coast. We had been corresponding for maybe a year before that, although I
was a dozen years younger and very little published. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights
was bringing out my first book, New Young
German Poets (a book of translations), and that summer Diane and I had come
to San Francisco
for the first time. We ran into him at
the City Lights Bookstore – there was a kind of photo session going on – and a
few days later Diane and I drove to Stinson Beach, picking up Robert, who was
hitchhiking, somewhere along the way. He
was at that rare moment bearded, as was Jess, and looked to my naive eye a
little like the forty-year-old Whitman. (Jess then looked oddly like a youthful
D.H. Lawrence.) There was a feeling of
enchantment about it all: themselves, their house and garden, the books they
read, the paintings and collages Jess was making, the grunion running that
night along the shore, the meteorites that flashed across the night sky, and a
meal (Diane reminds me) replete with sorrel and lemons and nasturtiums from
their garden. I felt myself led, by a
kind of magic, into a world suggested by his poems.
It was, I now realize, a moment of change for me, even in some sense
of transformation, to which those two were among the singular
contributors. I had like others been
wavering about my location as a person and a poet, and Robert showed me in his own terms the
possibility of relating to a vast and uncharted domain of poetry – and something
more. With an incredible lightness and
cheerfulness he announced himself as “bookish” and “derivative,” freeing those
words suddenly from the academic bounds in which I had then
placed them. He spoke impassionedly, for he was then most into it, of Williams
and of a poetic line determined by the breath.
More singularly, he brought “romance” and “gnosis” back into a world of
common things – a merging, in David Antin’s later, clearly too flippant terms,
of Anaheim and Disneyland . In exchange for Paul Celan, whom I first gave
him then, he led me into Gershom Scholem’s vision of kabbala and the lore of
the “old Jews,” and he sensed, before anyone else and least of all myself, that
I would move in that direction.
What he offered then and later – in spite of any shifting moods and
weathers – was a generosity of spirit or, more immediately, a poetics of the spirit, even where the generosity
might seem to falter. It was an acknowledgement of, and an insistence on, the
spiritual-in-art, as Kandinsky might have known it: an inspired reminder of
what art and poetry still could be and a vision – through Whitman and/or Dante
and/or others — of a totalizing universality that included and surpassed all
separate individuals and species,
All of this he spoke in what sometimes seemed like a language of
pure parataxis. a leapfrogging speech that was constantly on the lookout for
connections – like a rare form of collage brought into the world of
conversation. If his rap included camp,
as Jonathan Williams has elsewhere pointed out, that was good also and an
essential part of who he was. But the language of the poems and essays was,
above all, a noble and ennobling language – a stance that he was willing to
project as few others among us:
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
An ennobling
language and one striving at the same time (through what he called “courage in
daily act”) toward the creation of a new and “natural” measure.
Robert Duncan was in the end a poet of enormous means and
complexity – one of the last to assay a cosmological poetics, to be “the
model of the poet,” as Michael Davidson described him, “for whom all of reality
can enter the poem.” As such he was (he
made himself) a man and poet open to multiple influences, accepting and announcing a sense of his own derivations that freed others to do the
same. One has only to think of
the remarkable lists of predecessors – and contemporaries – that filled his
essays or, by collage and paraphrase, came into his poems. “Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy
Richardson, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Cocteau, Mallarmé,
Marlowe, St. John of the Cross, Yeats, Jonathan Swift, Jack Spicer, Celine,
Charles Henri Ford, Rilke, Lorca, Kafka, Arp, Max Ernst, St. John Perse,
Prevert, Laura Riding, Apollinaire, Brecht, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg,
Joyce Cary, Mary Butts, Freud, Dalí, Spenser, Stravinsky, William Carlos
Williams, John Gay … [and] Higglety-pigglety: Euripides and Gilbert. The
Strawhat Reviewers, Goethe (of the Autobiography. I have never read Faust) and H.D.”
So goes one list in his 1953 essay,
“Pages from a Notebook,” the same piece in which he also tells us,
memorably: “I make poetry as other men
make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my faculties
at large.” It is the kind of statement
by which one knew and loved him – the kind of statement that placed him, by its
bravado and because the poetry itself had also proved it, among that visionary
company of which he knew he was a part.
And that company could then be extended in every direction – noble and
lowly – toward the greater symposium of the whole that he prophesied in his
later “Rites of Participation” and that he saw already forming in our time.
He was, then, a poet (even a great poet), who created – like Whitman
before him – his own life as a poet.
Toward that creation he was aware, and he made us aware, of the stages
(the grand design) by which a life like his might grow. His retreat from publication, a fifteen-year
hiatus that he announced in 1969, was an aspect of that, as was the prophecy
for his later years, which he foretold as a delirious and creative senility and
in which he was (alas) to be thwarted by several years of debilitating
illness. The relative lack of critical
response to Ground Work I: Before the War
was also, I suppose, unforeseen – to place him among those great poets whose
own lifetimes were not sufficient to
receive the acclaim that a posterity would give them. Yet that non-recognition itself became the
occasion for an outpouring of devotion by dozens of outstanding contemporaries
who joined together in creating for him a national poetry award for Ground Work I and for a lifetime of
achievement.
For one who thinks in terms of
patterned lives, of grand designs, an artist’s later work takes on a special
meaning. With Robert Duncan the final
book of his lifetime – Ground Work II: In
the Dark – is, we now can see, one of those culminating works: his creation
of an altenstil marked not by a mere
quiescence but by ominous premonitions/confrontations with sickness and pain –
he who had once thought himself the master of a charmed life, for whom a mighty
hand was always ready to appear (he told me once), to pluck him from
disaster. So, in a great dark section of
the “passages” sequence, “In Blood’s Domain,” he contemplates the death by
illness of poets before him:
The
Angel Syphilis in the circle of Signators
looses its hosts to swarm
mounting the stem of being to the head
Baudelaire, Nietzsche,
Swift
are not eased into Death
the
undoing of mind’s rule in the brain.
That same poem
ends:
What
Angel what Gift of the Poem, has
brought into my body
this
sickness of living? Into the very Gloria of Life’s theme and
variations
my own counterpart of Baudelaire’s
terrible Ennuie?
Ground
Work II ends – for he lived to achieve it – with the single poem written
after the final illness struck his body and with the contemplation also of the
devastation it had already carried to his mind and spirit. He read it to us shortly after it was written
– the hope implicit in it that he would be spared to write still more. He never did, as if Death‘s angel had to
rebuke the beautiful optimism of his life and his desire to leave it
intact. But the last time I saw him – a
month before his death – with my wife Diane, and Jess, and Michael Palmer, the
two hours at the bedside were mostly spent in laughing, joking, as if to show
us that he had entered the outrageous and hilarious “senility” of his earlier
prediction. And I thought (for my own part and likely not for his) that that
was right – that on this occasion we could laugh Death and God to scorn. That
God and that Death who are the same.
______________________________________________________________________________________
In American Poetry, Fall, 1988.