Bending the Bow: Poetry

by Robert Duncan

In Bending the Bow , Robert Duncan is writing on a scale which places him among the poets, after Walt Whitman, bold enough to attempt the personal epic, the large-canvas rendering of man’s spirit in history as one man sees it, feels it, lives it, and makes it his own. In "Structures of Rime," the open series begun in  The Opening of the Field  and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself––the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in  Bending the Bow , he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s  Cantos , Williams’s Paterson , Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of  Bending the Bow  emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres  enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1968

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

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is as if I were moving towards
the wastes of water all living things remember the world to be,
the law of me
going under the wave.

Doubt was rather high. My approach to this collection was almost reluctant. Timid. There were early aspects I found to be inscrutable. Poundian cryptograms. Words carefree on foreboding space. I feared my limitations, not the impossible---though the sum of which hardly differs, no?

Then I found sections on grieving, Palpable human loss, the mad work to construct to satisfy, to allow matters to linger. Then there was the outrage: Vietnam.
From the height of the endless towerwhere Ecstasy carried me:
I have gazed at the cold and sad world, black and agitated. . .

The structure of this verse is pretty amazing, even to a roustabout layman like myself: a Beckett in greasy overalls.

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great little book of poetry from Robert Duncan.
My advice though is to skip the introduction. Duncan's prose is thick, dense at best and I had no idea what he was trying to convey through the introduction. However, I soon forgot about it as I was immediately lost in a poetic wonderland.

Drawing on styles of his various heroes and contemporaries - Pound, Williams, Stein, Olson and even Joyce, Duncan weaves together a very powerful collection of modern lyrical poetry. Many of the poems focus on the human and ecological destruction that was currently taking place in Vietnam at the time and therefore this is a very political book in a sense. Duncan even mentions, in poetical form, a scary experience when he was part of an-Vietnam rally/demo and the police managed to break some of them up rather violently. This is one of the great roles of a poet in society I believe - to challenge the system or expose it when it is unfair or downright tyrannical. I really loved his translations of French poetry too. I think it was Gerard de Nerval (?) Some of them were simple but marvellous.

Duncan is one of my favourite poets. While I prefer the 1971 hardback UK version of Bending the Bow, aesthetically that is, to this one, this is a great near-pocket-size version of a poetry classic. Make no mistake - Duncan is one of the most important poets of the latter half of the 20th Century, right up there with Olson, Ginsberg, Creeley, Dorn, Corso, McClure, Wieners, Auden, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and many others. If you like traditional lyrical poetry but set in modern times, then this is for you. Not quite as good as his phenomenal and timeless The Opening of the Field, this is nevertheless a very strong collection of poems that warrants your attention.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duncan's adoptive mother, Minnehaha Symmes, died in December 1960. In December 1955, Duncan had drafted "Often I Am Permitted to Return To A Meadow," and between 1956 and October 1967, Duncan went through an extraordinarily fertile period, unmatched in American writing of this time, as far as I'm aware, aided by the income provided for in his mother's will, and from the uptick in art market interest in the paintings of his life-partner, Jess Collins. Duncan produced eleven books during this period of 11 years, five of which I would call great: The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968) -- all date from the period, as do two prose works, The Truth and Life of Myth (1968) and The H.D. Book, the writing of which was completed by The Pentagon March, and which is due to appear finally in book form at the fifty year anniversary of his mother's death, December 13, 2010.

Moreover, in the middle of Bending the Bow Duncan got stuck. He reports in a July 13, 1966 letter to Denise Levertov that he has just managed to complete a draft Passages 26, "The Soldiers," and adds that other than a Christmas 1965 occasional poem, "Earth's Winter Song," some narrative transitions for his play Adam's Way, (in Roots and Branches), and the beginning of the poem "A Shrine to Ameinias," "The Soldiers" is the first poem he's completed in a year. Now, I should add that during this year, he oversaw the publication of his collaboration with Jess, A Book of Resemblances, another small press book, from Perishable Press in Wisconsin, Six Prose Pieces, his Black Mountain play, Medea at Kolchis, and his collected early poems, from Oyez, The Years As Catches. These, as well as the two-volume English edition of his collected poems, could be added to the five books mentioned above. Still, the year of blocked work on Bending the Bow is remarkable, and Duncan seemed to think it was brought on by high blood pressure medication he'd been put on, which he perilously experimented with going on and off; much to his friend Levertov's alarm.

[chacierrr · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s very good at times. My first work by Robert Duncan.

I feel like the constant stream of references and allusions tear me away from the true feeling and scene he is trying to tell me. I almost get there, but I often don’t.

The poems that are very American, or what you would call American poems, are very special, same with the ones political in nature, but when he’s in the thick of one of these poetics and calls to name Poseidon or something else out of the blue, it just takes me away, bums me out.

Maybe it’s going over my head, perhaps I’m not classically trained enuf to enjoy it, anyways I do find some fault with this, but otherwise it’s enjoyable and some of the structures are fun and intriguing to read.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"An Interlude"
"We must go back to sets of simple things,/ hill and stream, woods and the sea beyond,/ the time of day--dawn, noon, bright or clouded,/ five o'clock in November five o'clock of the year--changing definitions of the light...What twelve things of your world will you appoint guardians, / Truth's signators?/. Salt, Cordelia said. Gold and lead./ The poet, the great maker of wars and states, and/ the saint, Burckhardt named as the three creative /. masters of history. / But now. let the twelve be unnamed./. The dancers come forward to represent unclaimd things." (Duncan, 118-119).

This poem, "An Interlude," appears near the terminus of Robert Duncan's collection "Bending the Bow," but the poem is emblematic of the depth of Duncan's versification. Here are the allusions (to Shakespeare's 'King Lear'), here are the incantatory invocations of the ritualized aspects of the poetic venture, and here is the language, sweet language, of which Duncan is a master, in which all this wonderful thought is embodied in. What a joy it is to encounter such a majesterial effort!

Truth be told, I am a complete neophyte when it comes to poetry of this depth, ambition, and difficulty, so I sort of find it difficult to offer up an worthwhile evaluation of this work, which I just finished, in a manner which can be appreciated by lovers of the oeuvre of Robert Duncan. So, I will offer a compromise between a sophisticated paean to the virtues of the work in question ("Bending the Bow"), which presupposes a complete understanding of the work and its ramifications, and a total rejection of the collection, due to a high state of ignorance as to what the poet was seeking to accomplish and his place in the tradition that he seeks to thrive in (that of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson).

The work begins with a ten page introduction that seeks to place the work that follows in a realizable tradition and context. To this end, the war in Vietnam is mentioned (raging powerfully in 1968, the date of publication) under the first subheading of the Intro; followed by "The Readers," which recounts an experience Duncan had during a protest concerning the war; and, third from last, the one that I found most revealing, "Equilibrations." In this revelatory segment, Duncan explores the 'poetics' of his poetry. "This is not a field of the irrational (poetry); but a field of ratios in which events appear in language. Our science presumes that the universe if faithful to itself: this is its ultimate rationality. And we had begun to see that language is faithful to itself...The poem is not a stream of consciousness, but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it. Only words come into it. Sounds and ideas. The tone leading of vowels, the various percussions of consonants. The play of numbers in stresses and syllables. In which meanings and ideas, things and themes seen, arise. So that there is not only a melody of sound but of images. Rimes, the reiteration of formations in the design, even puns, lead into complexities of the field..." (Duncan, vi). This is taken, I believe, from the poetic theory of Olson, Duncan's precursor and mentor at Black Mountain College. Additionally, in the next section ("IT"), are the following equally essential thoughts: "Back of my person, my creaturely being, as words shift from words of my mouth, expressing, to words of the poem, creating, Man His-Her-Self, my immediate creator, moves--the poet, His-Her agent--and would force me to some agony of my resources I dare not come to sufficient for the birth of the Created Self. In this figure, my own breath becomes a second, the breath of the poem. Olson's 'the breathing of the man who writes' made anew in the breath of the line. But there is the third: the inspiration, the breath of creation, Spiritus Sanctus, moving between the creator breathing and the breath of his creature." (Duncan, viii). Finally, the introduction, which I found to be essential to appreciation of the work that follows, ends with the section entitled, "Articulations," which continues with the technical musings concerning poetry, along with well-placed digs at LBJ, the would-be tyrant who presided over the slaughter in Vietnam, a slaughter that animated Duncan into outrage that informed his verse ("Up Rising" and "The Soldiers," found in the collection).

The poetry itself (whew, we got through that slog of an introduction? Hot damn!) appears soon after, starting with a "Sonnet 4," an effort which seems to promise a traditional foray into the territory of poesy, as this is such a old standby for poets. But, wait! Soon enough Duncan, who has more than a few tricks up his literary sleeve, places "Stucture of Rime XXII" immediately following. This effort, free verse to its core, is part of a serial poem, continued from the earlier collection "The Opening of the Field," that appears three more times in the collection. Connected to the Olson inspired concept of poetry as an 'open' field of discourse, separated chronologically but linked by themes, ideas, and motifs/diction, this series adds immeasurably to the scope and significance of Duncan's poetic project in that it expands the breadth of subject matter, and its form, for the reader. Additionally, there's another 'serial' poem present in the collection, "Passages," which consists of thirty individual efforts, linked as a 'multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning.." (New Directions, back blurb). And this is not to mention the other individual poems, such as "My Mother Would be a Falconress," a Jungian inspired poem that adds untold layers of complexity to the understanding of Duncan's own Oedipal Triangle.

Taken as a whole, "Bending the Bow," even with the qualifiers I bring as a 'neophyte' reader, is an incredibly complex, erudite, worthwhile, and profoundly deep foray into verse that I have ever had the challenge (and the pleasure) of encountering. This work will bear multiple readings in order to fully appreciate the brea(d)th, ambitions, and just plain fineness of Duncan's work. Layered with multiple meanings; promising the stars and delivering them to the careful, patient reader; and plumbing the depths of esoteric knowledge in pursuit of wisdom, sweet (and disturbing) wisdom, "Bending the Bow" is a superior, essential bit of poesy: fine stuff!

[Fenixbird SandS]

This is lovely enough for a wedding announcement!! SOME FAVORITE POETRY SELECTIONS!
Excerpt from Bending the Bow by Robert Duncan

“. . . I'd been
in the course of a letter – I am still
in the course of a letter – to a friend,
who comes close in to my thought so that
the day is hers. My hand writing here
there shakes in the currents of... of air?
of an inner anticipation of...? reaching to touch
ghostly exhilarations in the thought of her.

At the extremity of this design
"there is a connexion working in both directions,
as in the bow and the lyre"–
only in that swift fulfillment of the wish
that sleep can illustrate
my hand sweeps the string.

You stand behind the where-I-am.
The deep tones and shadows I will call a woman.
The quick high notes... You are a girl there too,
having something of sister and of wife,
inconsolate,
and I would play Orpheus for you again,

recall the arrow or song
to the trembling daylight
from which it sprang. . . “

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duncan is the poet for feeling a poem in spirit, like when you first sit down to write a poem and you can just tell that first draft is more beautiful than anything. Duncan is more beautiful than anything. And with this book, the introductory essay, that dictates his own rhetorical framework for defining a poem, or his poem, in front of an audience, with an audience being an army ready to assault it, I say, "Duncan is beautiful!"

[Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This got 4 stars because I don't think it's as good as THE OPENING OF THE FIELD. Maybe it was just a tad too long? I don't know. I felt a little lost at times. But Duncan kicks ass. FOUR STARS!!!

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some good poems in here.

[David Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read Bending the Bow before but wanted to revisit after Sherman's Lost America of Love. Duncan is an incredible writer and this book ranges across myth, history, war, love, queerness, free speech, and the idea of America. Duncan's opposition to war and his comments on America's suspicions of others, community, and foundation on genocide and racism are sadly still relevant.

[Ivan Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of the most insane things ive read in a while, duncans brain is so fucking big i dont think ill ever compare.

he is Gay and Literary and honestly i aspire to that level