Selected Poems

by Robert Duncan, Robert J. Bertholf

This second edition of the late Robert Duncan's 'Selected Poems', first published in 1993, includes eleven additional poems and excerpts.

Genres: Poetry

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was edited with some care, but it met with stiff skepticism upon its appearance, and there are several worthwhile criticisms: The book leaves out "An African Elegy," a crucial early Duncan poem that not only anticipates his whole approach to the pastoral, but was the poem that rated the ire of the New Critic John Crowe Ransom, who took back his acceptance (on behalf of The Kenyon Review) of the poem when Duncan "advertised" (Ransom's word) his homosexuality in the pages of Dwight Macdonald's politics. Then again, almost all the early Duncan worth looking into, i.e, his long poems, including "The Venice Poem", "An Essay At War," and "The Effort," are left out of the volume. That's some significant culling, and add to this, that the layout of the poems is poor, with frequent widows, the poems crammed together on pages and then enormous spaces left open at the end of poems on verso pages. But Robert Bertholf, the editor, must be only partly responsible for the latter, and the inclusion of the late poems that matter, while arguable, does not neglect his inarguable late masterpiece, "Circulations of Song," after Rumi, nor, when the volume was revised, and enlarged (in response to the criticisms), "Apprehensions," another great long poem, this one from the middle period. So, while the three sixties books are really the place to start with Duncan, this volume will do in a pinch.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

Duncan was an admirable artist that one can laud until the cows come home for his advocacy and revelatory writings on gay folks in America. Unfortunately, I don't find his poetry that engaging. Especially pre-, say, 1964. He has that strange Old World cant that Pound uses to some effect and that Saint-John Perse excelled at. Duncan's poetry is a little blander and only really gets interesting later in his career when he starts writing from the center, not out of Ovidian style.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorry I wish I liked these more I really do

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was pretty much my first exposure to Robert Duncan. i don't think i could have appreciated his work without understanding and identifying his dense attention to prosody. the discipline he affords his poetry may require a few rereads, but the depth of spirit it reveals is definitely worth it. as a modern poet, some of the subject matter contained in these works is very relevant today, particularly Duncan's bitter hostility towards the political and military machines defining and driving the economies of the superpowers of the world and their effect on psyche and spirit as the common individual searches for a place to call home in a generally beautiful, but often cold and exactingly absolute universe. he invokes dreams, imagination and memories as the paradises where true immortality resides.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 D9123s 1993

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the years I'd read drips and drabs of Duncan and was impatient with his "canvas" and general approach. No longer. Being much better studied in 20th century poetics than I once was, I can now see how Duncan was both a pioneer of form and a eloquent devotee of a Romantic / Metaphysical approach driven in its fractured--fracture like Pound, like the 20th Century--search for the "heart of things".
Having started to write seriously in the late 1930s when he met such formidable figures as Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Duncan really discovered his sense of poetic purpose in 1947 when he met Charles Olson and began an immensely important critical friendship that brought the ideas of the Black Mountain School to the West Coast where Duncan was living.
Duncan was lyrical and visual. Though there are many works here written in a more tradition free verse style, the depth and breath of his experimentation is truly astounding. There are incredible language variations on his page but nothing frivolous: Each decision is carefully weight. If he speaks of something mystical or of great metaphysical and ontological depth, it is consciously carved from the words. He is drawn to religious mystics like Rumi or Blatavatsky but his being is also anchored in the dirt of the physical word.
I suspect part of the reason for straddling mind and body was sexual. He was an early, courageous voice for Gay rights. And unlike Phil Whalen, another gay, mystical San Francisco poet who was a generation younger, Duncan never became a monk (though he joined an arts commune in Woodstock, New York for a time in his youth).
Of course there were some sections of his work I enjoyed more than others. Parts of Bending the Bow, where he's going on about the Vietnam War have much to recommend but seem more an extension of Ezra Pound than his own voice. His final poems in the Groundwork sections, both the fabulous section on Rumi and his meditations on mortality are truly the work of a great, modern metaphysician.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars

[Scott Holstad · Rating 3 out of 5]

A major piece of the San Francisco Renaissance movement poets who would later play a critical role in influencing the Beats as young writers and helped shape their worldview and poetic styles. Definitely recommended.

[jesse]

I wanted to love him but only managed to like him. The anthology only begins to get good around 1964, and even then seems primarily concerned with reminding us he's friends with H.D. The selections from "Ground Work" (making up the last twenty or so pages) are the strongest and most credible poems in the bunch by far.