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Ranging in original publication dates between 1940 and 1985, this title features forty-one titles that reveal a great deal about Duncan's life in poetry - including his impressions of poets whose work he admires, both contemporaries and precursors.
List of contents
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
About the author
Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was one of the major writers in the San Francisco Renaissance movement and is considered one of the most accomplished and influential of the postwar American poets. A foremost figure among the New American and Black Mountain poets, Duncan, following the death of Charles Olson, became the leading practitioner of a nontraditional open form poetry. He is the author of The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow, among other works.
James Maynard is Associate Curator of the Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, and has written extensively on the work of Robert Duncan. His other editorial projects include a new edition of Duncan’s Ground Work: Before the War/In the Dark and (Re:)Working the Ground: Essays on the Late Writings of Robert Duncan.
Summary
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.
Additional text
"Includes some of Duncan's greatest essays . . . a great help to all readers."
