Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness

by Peter O'Leary

Brings together the study of literature with the psychology and history of religions.

Robert Duncan's poetic creativity does not exist without a language of illness, nor the revelation and insight that such language generates. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary work is one of the first book-length studies of Robert Duncan's poetry, and it includes a treatment of his influences (H.D. and Freud) and those he influenced (Nathaniel Mackey and John Taggart). Through close readings of crucial poems, Peter O'Leary shows how Duncan's poetry locates a gnostic insight expressed through a language of illness in the realms of religion. Gnosticism is a doctrine of salvation by knowledge.

In addition to studying Duncan's poetry and his life, O'Leary considers the psychological impact Freud's ideas of the unconscious and dream interpretation had on the poet. O'Leary continues with an analysis of Duncan's work in light of the theories of shamanism put forth by religion historian Mircea Eliade. Along the way, O'Leary undertakes detailed discussions of gnosticism, hermeticism, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, shamanism and religions of the African diaspora.

288 pages, Paperback

Published June 24, 2002

About the author

Born in Detroit, 1968. Raised in Grosse Pointe Park, a suburb of Detroit,
educated in public schools there & then in a Catholic high school, De
LaSalle Collegiate, taught by the LaSallean Christian Brothers. Post-
secondary education at the University of Chicago, the College, earning
an AB in English literature in 1990, albeit with a one-year stint at Reed
College, in Portland, Oregon, to study poetry (with poet & classicist Jim
Powell). Three years of wage-slavery followed: eighteen months at a
correspondence high school on the South Side of Chicago, another
eighteen as a researcher at the City Colleges of Chicago. In 1993 began
studies at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, earning a
Master of Arts in Divinity in 1994 & a PhD in Divinity, specializing in
Religion & Literature, in 1999. In the midst of this, some movement:
notably, a period traveling in Greece in 1994, including a visit to the holy
island of Patmos where Orthodox iconography was discovered & a year
spent living in Vienna in 1997-8, where coffee & opera were discovered.
More notably & somewhat earlier, epistolary contact with poet Ronald
Johnson was initiated in 1992, followed by a few valuable meetings in
San Francisco. Mentored by RJ until his death, in 1998. Not before being
asked by the ailing poet to be his literary executor. This charge has
resulted in three books: To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems (Talisman
House, 2000, The Shrubberies, a collection of last poems (Flood
Editions, 2001), and a reprinting of Radi os (Flood, 2005). As well as various archival tasks, ongoing. So far, two books of poetry: Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001) & Depth Theology (Georgia, 2006). Also one critical book, Gnostic Contagion:
Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness (Wesleyan, 2002). Since late
2001, following eighteen months in St. Louis, residency in Berwyn, a
working-class suburb on the west side of Chicago, in a house, with wife,
Rebecca Houze, an art historian, & two sons, Gabriel & Lucian. Teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

O'Leary's central chapter, on Robert Duncan's "My Mother Would Be A Falconress," is the largest, most creative reading of Robert Duncan in the secondary literature. He begins in close reading, noticing the extent to which the poem is a belated response to the death of the poet's mother, in December 1960. Using photographic reproductions of the "Copy Book" entries Duncan made in late summer, 1964, O'Leary demonstrates the poem was practically dictated to RD in a dream-like state, which finding allows O'Leary to argue that the poem partakes of three different mythological figures crucial to Duncan's imagination in Bending the Bow. These are Eros/Anteros, Orpheus, and Narcissus, the latter two interpreted throughout O'Leary's book at large. O'Leary argues that Duncan's poem after the death of his mother is a poem of healing, and to argue this he introduces concepts from Mircea Eliade, on the shaman, and Freud's reading of the Narcissus myth in his essay on Leonardo. Julia Kristeva, on the Black Sun of melancholy, and Kirk and Raven, on Parmenides, also authorize O'Leary's reading. The idea is generous: we would not at first find in "My Mother Would Be A Falconress" a shamanistic ritual of a "technician of the sacred," however, employing Duncan's own use of "psychosis" as the compelling motive of telling, or myth-making, O'Leary reasonably demonstrates that Duncan's poem is a Crisis Ode (though these terms O'Leary doesn't use) trying to construct a more complex formulation of self and soul. Psychosis is the self's soul-life, as O'Leary reads out Duncan, and the enactment of its reconfigured terms is the telling of a new Black Sun, or writing through melancholy. The generosity of this reading has -- or should have -- profound implications on the way we experience the Crisis Ode, which, as Harold Bloom has argued, is one our most significant American poetic modes.

[Rusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

a powerful text. i learned a lot, and i enjoyed the writing style.