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The Opening of the Field: Poetry
"...he is and will be always the magister, the singular Master of the Dance." ―Robert Creeley Speaking of his own work, Robert Duncan (1919-1987) "I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or to exercise my faculties at large." The Opening of the Field , his first major collection, was originally brought out in 1960; in it, Duncan introduced his "Structures of Rime," the open series he continued in his subsequent collections, Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Before the War (1983), and Ground Work In the Dark (1987). "Structures of Rime" affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language. Thus in "The Structure of Rime I" he "O Lasting Sentence, / sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be."
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
8 people are currently reading
470 people want to read
About the author
Robert Duncan
287 books58 followersRobert 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.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
September 15, 2010
Dear Opening of the Field, you are a prayerful and extensive book. You are a fucking book. You get the book the opening the measure. You hammer it to the wall end rhymed allude to. You fly out. Big city of time on the grass, tangled in the feet of the grass. How inspiring to get the drift, reading on Saturday on the ships of July, the scissors of the water and the pouring out of time. Into this book, R. Duncan, yours dawn.
August 12, 2014
This was my very first experience reading Duncan and I was not disappointed.
Overall, he is a very talented poet, I can tell, with a great command of rhythm and poetic momentum which builds and builds within each line and cadence. These poems sound great read aloud too, like any good poetry.
I was not a huge fan of his rhyming poetry in this collection (some of it sounded a bit corny and obsolete) but the imagery and organic connections between human language and earth, where our 'music' comes from, are so resonant that they overweigh any shortcomings within. You can strongly feel the mark (inspiration?) of Dante and Chaucer whose canonic influence blow strong thru these poems.
Duncan stands out from his contemporaries; the beats, the San Francisco Renaissance poets and his fellow Black Mountain poets, in that his poems exude an unmistakeable strain of classical lyricism, which is not to be gainsaid or mocked or undervalued against contemporary poetic style. The only other poet I can think of around Duncan's time who also has such a strong classical feel within his poetry is Gregory Corso who I think would have dug Duncan's work very much. (Corso of course combines classical styles with surrealistic imagery though...)
I look forward to reading Creeley and Olson and comparing some of their work against Duncan's. I hope to read Roots and Branches sometime in the near future. Thanks to my lovely wife for purchasing this as a Xmas gift.
Overall, he is a very talented poet, I can tell, with a great command of rhythm and poetic momentum which builds and builds within each line and cadence. These poems sound great read aloud too, like any good poetry.
I was not a huge fan of his rhyming poetry in this collection (some of it sounded a bit corny and obsolete) but the imagery and organic connections between human language and earth, where our 'music' comes from, are so resonant that they overweigh any shortcomings within. You can strongly feel the mark (inspiration?) of Dante and Chaucer whose canonic influence blow strong thru these poems.
Duncan stands out from his contemporaries; the beats, the San Francisco Renaissance poets and his fellow Black Mountain poets, in that his poems exude an unmistakeable strain of classical lyricism, which is not to be gainsaid or mocked or undervalued against contemporary poetic style. The only other poet I can think of around Duncan's time who also has such a strong classical feel within his poetry is Gregory Corso who I think would have dug Duncan's work very much. (Corso of course combines classical styles with surrealistic imagery though...)
I look forward to reading Creeley and Olson and comparing some of their work against Duncan's. I hope to read Roots and Branches sometime in the near future. Thanks to my lovely wife for purchasing this as a Xmas gift.
July 16, 2009
required reading from our last real Blakean-theosophist mystic poet. Duncan doesn't always succeed, for his vision is wild and uncontained. If there's such a thing as the opposite of backyard-flowerpot-chirping-chickadee-poetry, this is it. The poetry is far from random or messy though; Duncan's knows what he's doing, but he's just tuned into an older kind of song and rhthyms more archaic than we accustomed to. Was immersed in reading the immense and lovely correspondence btwn RD and Denise Levertov before the NYPL had to take the book away from me. The letters and friendship is a model of cooperative, intense learning and searching, and deep sympathy and care for the other's vision and creations.
June 30, 2023
what a frolic!
November 11, 2024
Not everyone is meant to be a poet and that’s okay (sorry Robby 😔🤚🏻)
January 26, 2022
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architecture I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down
whose secret we see in a children's game
of rung a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to 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.
* * *
* * *
At the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love.
There where the threshers move,
the lewdness of women ripening the wheat,
the men in outer room joking,
how the Holy moves over them!
The Earth shakes. Kore! Kore! (for
I was thinking of her - She
who shakes the stores of ancestral grain)
The Earth does not shake again. Troubled,
the heart recovers. But is moved.
At the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love.
It moves to fill with song, with wine,
the trouble, the quiet, the cup, that follows
the divine Threshers.
Kore! O visage as of sun-glare, thunderous awakener, light treader!
will you not wake us again? shake the earth under us?
At the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love.
It is my song of the whole year I sing
rendering lovely the fall of Her feet
and there where Her feet spring, even
at the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love,
the melody from whose abundance leaps
the slow rounds of winter, pounds summer's heat.
How the Holy moves over them I will tell my love
that lies a grain among the living grain.
Therefore I join them, dancing, dancing . . .
a thresher among the Threshers. Kore! Kore!
(for I was thinking of her when the quake came, of radiant desire underground)
Thou hast my heart, a grain, in the Earth's stone.
At the dance of the Hallows I praise thee therefore, Earth-mover, tender Thresher, Queen of our dance-floor!
* * *
By stress and syllable
by change-rhyme and contour
we let the long line pace even awkward to its period.
The short line
we refine
and keep for candour.
This we remember:
ember of the fire
catches the word if we but hear
("We must understand what is happening")
and springs to desire,
a bird-right light
sound.
This is the Yule-log that warms December.
This is new grass that springs from the ground.
* * *
Yes, as a look springs to its face,
as earth, light and grass illustrate the meadow,
there's a natural grace I hope for
that unknowing a poem may show
having its life in a field of rapture,
a book made full of days (pages),
a ready effort full of all places then
that may be because I have loved them
part-song of companions
and of those unknown, alike in soul.
For them may there be a special green
and flowering of life in these words -
eager to be read, taken, yielded to.
Yes, though I contrive the mind's measure
and wrest doctrine from old lore,
it's to win particular hearts,
to stir an abiding affection for this music,
as if a host of readers will join the Beloved
ready to dance with me, it's for the unthinking
ready thing I'm writing these poems.
* * *
There are memories everywhere then. Rememberd, we go out, as in the first poem, upon the sea at night - to the drifting.
Of my first lover there is a boat drifting. The oars have been cast down into the shell. As if this were no water but a wall, there is a repeated knock as of hollow against hollow, wood against wood. Stopping to knock on wood against the traps of the night-fishers, I hear before my knocking the sound of a knock drifting.
It goes without will thru the perilous sound, a white sad wanderer where I no longer am. It taps at the posts of the deserted wharf.
Now from the last years of my life I hear forerunners of a branch creaking.
All night a boat swings as if to sink. Weight returning to weight in the cold water. A hotel room returns from Wilmington into morning. A boat sets out without boatmen into twenty years of snow returning.
* * *
As I came needing wonder as the new shoots need water
to the letter A that sounds its mystery in wave and in waine,
trembling I bent as if there were a weight in words
like that old man bends under his age towards Death -
But it is the sun that sounds Day from the first brink,
it is the sea that in its dazzling holds my eye.
How under the low roof of desolate gray
a language not of words lies waiting!
There's depth, weight, force at the horizon
that levels all images.
Rabbi Aaron of Bagdad meditating upon the Word and the letter Yod and He
came upon the Name of God and achieved a pure rapture
in which a creature of his ecstasy that was once dumb clay, the Golem,
danced and sang and had being.
Reading of this devout jew I thought
there may be such power in a certain passage of a poem
that eternal joy may leap therefrom.
But it was for a clearing of the sky,
for a blue radiance, my thought cried
Sublime Turner who dying said to Ruskin, The Sun is God, my dear, knew
the actual language is written in rainbows.
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architecture I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down
whose secret we see in a children's game
of rung a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to 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.
- Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, pg. 7
* * *
remembering powers of love
and of poetry,
the Berkeley we believed
grove of Arcady -
that there might be
potencies in common things,
"princely manipulations of the real"
the hard electric lights,
filaments exposed
we loved by or studied by,
romantic,
fused between glare and seraphic glow,
old lamps of wisdom
old lamps of suffering
but that's not the way I saw
Crossd,
the sinister eye sees the near
as clear fact,
the far
blurs; the right eye
fuses all that is
immediate to sight.
There first I knew
the companions name themselves
and move
in time of naming upward
toward outward
forms of desire and enlightenment,
but intoxicated,
only by longing
belonging to that first company
of names stars that in heaven
call attention to a tension
in design,
compel
as the letters by which we spell words compel
magic refinements;
and sought from tree and sun, from night and sea,
old powers - Dionysus in wrath, Apollo in rapture,
Orpheus in song, and Eros secretly
four that Christ-crossd in one Nature
Plato names the First Beloved
that now I see
in all certain dear contributor
to my being
had given me house, ghost,
image and colour, in whom I dwell
past Arcady.
For tho death is sweet and veriest
imitator of ecstasy
and there be a Great Lover,
Salvator Mundi,
whose kingdom hangs over me;
tho the lamps strung among
shadowy foliage are there;
tho all earlier ravishings,
rapture,
happened, and sing melodies, moving thus
when I touch them;
such sad lines they may have been
that now thou hast lifted to gladness.
Of all fearless happiness
from which reaches my life I sing -
the years radiating
toward the so-calld first days,
toward the so-calld last days,
inadequate boundaries
of the heart you hold to.- A Poem Slow Beginning, pg. 14-15
* * *
At the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love.
There where the threshers move,
the lewdness of women ripening the wheat,
the men in outer room joking,
how the Holy moves over them!
The Earth shakes. Kore! Kore! (for
I was thinking of her - She
who shakes the stores of ancestral grain)
The Earth does not shake again. Troubled,
the heart recovers. But is moved.
At the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love.
It moves to fill with song, with wine,
the trouble, the quiet, the cup, that follows
the divine Threshers.
Kore! O visage as of sun-glare, thunderous awakener, light treader!
will you not wake us again? shake the earth under us?
At the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love.
It is my song of the whole year I sing
rendering lovely the fall of Her feet
and there where Her feet spring, even
at the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love,
the melody from whose abundance leaps
the slow rounds of winter, pounds summer's heat.
How the Holy moves over them I will tell my love
that lies a grain among the living grain.
Therefore I join them, dancing, dancing . . .
a thresher among the Threshers. Kore! Kore!
(for I was thinking of her when the quake came, of radiant desire underground)
Thou hast my heart, a grain, in the Earth's stone.
At the dance of the Hallows I praise thee therefore, Earth-mover, tender Thresher, Queen of our dance-floor!
- Evocation, pg. 40
* * *
By stress and syllable
by change-rhyme and contour
we let the long line pace even awkward to its period.
The short line
we refine
and keep for candour.
This we remember:
ember of the fire
catches the word if we but hear
("We must understand what is happening")
and springs to desire,
a bird-right light
sound.
This is the Yule-log that warms December.
This is new grass that springs from the ground.
- Keeping the Rhyme, pg. 51
* * *
Yes, as a look springs to its face,
as earth, light and grass illustrate the meadow,
there's a natural grace I hope for
that unknowing a poem may show
having its life in a field of rapture,
a book made full of days (pages),
a ready effort full of all places then
that may be because I have loved them
part-song of companions
and of those unknown, alike in soul.
For them may there be a special green
and flowering of life in these words -
eager to be read, taken, yielded to.
Yes, though I contrive the mind's measure
and wrest doctrine from old lore,
it's to win particular hearts,
to stir an abiding affection for this music,
as if a host of readers will join the Beloved
ready to dance with me, it's for the unthinking
ready thing I'm writing these poems.
- Yes, As a Look Springs to Its Face, pg. 61
* * *
There are memories everywhere then. Rememberd, we go out, as in the first poem, upon the sea at night - to the drifting.
Of my first lover there is a boat drifting. The oars have been cast down into the shell. As if this were no water but a wall, there is a repeated knock as of hollow against hollow, wood against wood. Stopping to knock on wood against the traps of the night-fishers, I hear before my knocking the sound of a knock drifting.
It goes without will thru the perilous sound, a white sad wanderer where I no longer am. It taps at the posts of the deserted wharf.
Now from the last years of my life I hear forerunners of a branch creaking.
All night a boat swings as if to sink. Weight returning to weight in the cold water. A hotel room returns from Wilmington into morning. A boat sets out without boatmen into twenty years of snow returning.
- The Structure of Rime, pg. 73
* * *
As I came needing wonder as the new shoots need water
to the letter A that sounds its mystery in wave and in waine,
trembling I bent as if there were a weight in words
like that old man bends under his age towards Death -
But it is the sun that sounds Day from the first brink,
it is the sea that in its dazzling holds my eye.
How under the low roof of desolate gray
a language not of words lies waiting!
There's depth, weight, force at the horizon
that levels all images.
Rabbi Aaron of Bagdad meditating upon the Word and the letter Yod and He
came upon the Name of God and achieved a pure rapture
in which a creature of his ecstasy that was once dumb clay, the Golem,
danced and sang and had being.
Reading of this devout jew I thought
there may be such power in a certain passage of a poem
that eternal joy may leap therefrom.
But it was for a clearing of the sky,
for a blue radiance, my thought cried
Sublime Turner who dying said to Ruskin, The Sun is God, my dear, knew
the actual language is written in rainbows.
- The Natural Doctrine, pg. 81
July 4, 2017
If Walt Whitman's second cousin had dropped acid on a day when he wasn't particularly inspired, I think he would have written something as disjointed, pseudo-profound, and needlessly obscure as this. I trudged through The Opening of the Field as best I could, trying to tell myself it was worth the challenge, but after several pages of fumbling, vague, and frankly linguistically adolescent phrases like "flamey threads of firstness go out from your touch" (which I only recall because it's on the very last page, but the book is full of them) sprinkled with pointless archaisms, I lost interest.
Reading poetry is like falling in love. You need the energy of infatuation to get you over the threshold to know enough about the person to sustain a relationship. This book (without meaning to be sexist, here--just trying to convey my frustration and disappointment) is the mildly attractive woman with the PhD who has a reputation of being incredible in bed, but turns out to be a long-winded boor with very little imagination and a large handful of off-putting habits. The book is revered by lots of poets, many of whom I admire, but I'm left scratching my head as to why. There are, I think, two poems that seemed to me worth delving into, promising some reward for the effort of untangling the metaphors and structure ... but for the most part, the poems were both near impossible to decipher and not interesting enough to inspire me to give a shit.
Reading poetry is like falling in love. You need the energy of infatuation to get you over the threshold to know enough about the person to sustain a relationship. This book (without meaning to be sexist, here--just trying to convey my frustration and disappointment) is the mildly attractive woman with the PhD who has a reputation of being incredible in bed, but turns out to be a long-winded boor with very little imagination and a large handful of off-putting habits. The book is revered by lots of poets, many of whom I admire, but I'm left scratching my head as to why. There are, I think, two poems that seemed to me worth delving into, promising some reward for the effort of untangling the metaphors and structure ... but for the most part, the poems were both near impossible to decipher and not interesting enough to inspire me to give a shit.
January 15, 2010
A truly seminal book by a truly great and too often neglected American poet, brought up in my birth-town, Oakland, California. So there IS a there there... "Often I am permitted to return to a meadow" is the prologue poem par excellence that is also a credo and poetics of inspiration and the unseen aspect of our soul-work. The book contains many of Duncan's masterworks. The reader works with him through the writing of his poems, and enters luxuriant worlds and passes through them into this one. The "everlasting omen of what is."
I'm grateful for the audio PoemTalk 27, hosted by Kelly Writer's House Al Filries, accessible through the Poetry Foundation, where Bernstein, Robinson and Rothenberg discuss the poem and the book, and returned me to my shelf to take it out again and read.
Duncan periodically floats through, dispensing his unique wisdom.
I'm grateful for the audio PoemTalk 27, hosted by Kelly Writer's House Al Filries, accessible through the Poetry Foundation, where Bernstein, Robinson and Rothenberg discuss the poem and the book, and returned me to my shelf to take it out again and read.
Duncan periodically floats through, dispensing his unique wisdom.
July 27, 2007
The classic poem, "Often I Am Permitted to Return.." is here, along with dozens of other rapt raps by this, most flamboyant of poets. I love this book, and learned an enormous amount about myth & how to include things in the poem from it. Duncan is in conversation with all of his favorite poets living & dead in these poems, from Dante to Pound to HD to Rimbaud & back, as if such conversations were the most ordinary things in his life, and I suspect they were. Recent complaints that he was pretentious (absolutely was), or melodramatic (always!) and precious (often) don't marr the excellence or the sheer brilliance of these poems. Duncan is capable of great profundity when he is on, and he is always on in this book. My copy is nearly in tatters. Crucial.
September 19, 2007
I'll never get over this one. FIVE STARS!!!
May 10, 2025
"The light foot hears you and the brightness begins/ god-step at the margins of thought,/ Quick adulterous tread at the heart,/ Who is it that goes there?/ Where I see your quick face/ notes of an old music pace the air,/ torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre." ("A Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar," pg. 62)
The above lines are a selection from the poem "A Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar" by esteemed poet Robert Duncan, one of the best poets I have had the pleasure of reading in my rather long life. For this effort, a brief ninety-six pages in length, is, through its dense and mythologically allusive contents, a collection that enthralls from first glance, with the initial poem "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow." This poem, which is a manifesto of sorts for Mr. Duncan's poetics and vision that he seeks to propagate throughout the rest of this collection, sets a high standard that the rest of the collection more than fulfills! It is all here: dense, resonate lyrics filled with bardic, incantatory content that fills one with a real sense of wonder at the breadth of vision of Mr. Duncan. Additionally, the serial poem "The Structure of Rime," of which there are thirteen attempts, serves as a template for the imaginative, and playful, approach that Mr. Duncan takes to his subject matter. And what subject matter it is! In fact, it is all here (metaphorically)! Christ, vegetation deities, the Lord and Ladies of the Grail Romance, and a myriad number of other allusions to the collective dream life that is world mythology. Indeed, the allusiveness of the content is, however, more than outweighed by the brilliance of the versification, with words laying on top of words, creating a perfect concatenation of sound and sense, the ultimate 'soul' of all poetic efforts! I had heard that Mr. Duncan's work was exemplary, but I was not prepared for the extreme, perspicacious nature of the works found in "The Opening of the Field." Indeed, I was told that Mr. Duncan was, in this and other of his efforts, seeking to wrest away the poetry of his time from the dry, stolid, academic work associated with that great Anglo-American poet, T.S. Eliot. By any measure, he surpassed the standards he set for himself, creating a template and model for poets to follow for later ages. This is truly a great collection!
The above lines are a selection from the poem "A Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar" by esteemed poet Robert Duncan, one of the best poets I have had the pleasure of reading in my rather long life. For this effort, a brief ninety-six pages in length, is, through its dense and mythologically allusive contents, a collection that enthralls from first glance, with the initial poem "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow." This poem, which is a manifesto of sorts for Mr. Duncan's poetics and vision that he seeks to propagate throughout the rest of this collection, sets a high standard that the rest of the collection more than fulfills! It is all here: dense, resonate lyrics filled with bardic, incantatory content that fills one with a real sense of wonder at the breadth of vision of Mr. Duncan. Additionally, the serial poem "The Structure of Rime," of which there are thirteen attempts, serves as a template for the imaginative, and playful, approach that Mr. Duncan takes to his subject matter. And what subject matter it is! In fact, it is all here (metaphorically)! Christ, vegetation deities, the Lord and Ladies of the Grail Romance, and a myriad number of other allusions to the collective dream life that is world mythology. Indeed, the allusiveness of the content is, however, more than outweighed by the brilliance of the versification, with words laying on top of words, creating a perfect concatenation of sound and sense, the ultimate 'soul' of all poetic efforts! I had heard that Mr. Duncan's work was exemplary, but I was not prepared for the extreme, perspicacious nature of the works found in "The Opening of the Field." Indeed, I was told that Mr. Duncan was, in this and other of his efforts, seeking to wrest away the poetry of his time from the dry, stolid, academic work associated with that great Anglo-American poet, T.S. Eliot. By any measure, he surpassed the standards he set for himself, creating a template and model for poets to follow for later ages. This is truly a great collection!
February 9, 2023
I could not get on with this, I really couldn't - just bounced off it entirely. A short way through it, I was reminded of Edith Sitwell's poetry, so imagine my surprise when she was name-dropped a few poems later. I like Sitwell much more, though - at least the bits of her that I've read: one of my early academic papers was on her Three Poems of the Atomic Age, which looked at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Sitwell's own religious lens. The poems sort of mixed the events of the bombings with apocalyptic mythology, and they were really effective... but I think they were so effective because Sitwell limited her comparison to that very strong central metaphor.
Duncan, on the other hand... it's like a grab-bag of references from half a dozen ancient civilizations mixed with contemporary culture and a very mannered approach to the act of creating literature. There's an interminable series of poems, scattered throughout the book, called "The Structure of Rime," and they - like so many of the other poems here - are just unbearably pretentious. Consider this:
I'm sorry, but 90+ pages of this is too much for me to retain any sort of liking for it. There's the very odd interesting image or wordplay, but the (admittedly delightful) single verse about the "forlorn moosey-faced poem" is not enough to save this collection for me. I've read it once, and never again.
Duncan, on the other hand... it's like a grab-bag of references from half a dozen ancient civilizations mixed with contemporary culture and a very mannered approach to the act of creating literature. There's an interminable series of poems, scattered throughout the book, called "The Structure of Rime," and they - like so many of the other poems here - are just unbearably pretentious. Consider this:
How uncertain when I said unwind the winding. Chiron,
Cross of Two Orders! Grammarian! from your side the never
healing! Undo the bindings of immutable syntax!
The eyes that are horns of the moon feast on the leaves of trampled sentences.
I'm sorry, but 90+ pages of this is too much for me to retain any sort of liking for it. There's the very odd interesting image or wordplay, but the (admittedly delightful) single verse about the "forlorn moosey-faced poem" is not enough to save this collection for me. I've read it once, and never again.
November 15, 2024
This collection contains several stunning poems, notably "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," "This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom" and the first half-dozen or so pieces grouped in the "Structure of Rime" series. Unfortunately, these poems are all found in the collection's first quarter. The remainder of the collection is quite uneven and fails to rise to the heights of the aforementioned pieces. Contrast this with Charles Olson's The Distances (which was released the same year and in the same series), the energy, focus and vision of which never falters and in which can be found nearly a dozen poems of the highest creative order.
June 25, 2011
Just read this one, which I've had lying on a shelf for a long time after finding it used. I realized I hadn't added any of his other books to my list, so I fixed that terrible omission. The whole Duncan/Olson/Levertov/Black Mountain/Creeley cluster is one of my very favorite kinds of American poetry, the only set of people who really managed the post-Ezra Pound long open poetic cycle as documentation of a process, and who did it personally and movingly and with often incredible language, plus a lack of horrifying Poundean political beliefs.
As for Duncan, this is one collection earlier than my favorites of his, which really center on "Bending the Bow." His favored tactic for these long exploratory cycles is to have them just kind of overlap his various books. Interspersed among individual works here, there are a couple dozen poems entitled "The Structure of Rime 1" (or 2, or 12), each of which is a different symbol-heavy take on his issues with prosody. Continuations pop up through his next handful of books, even as OTHER long cycles with different titles start up as well, themselves continuing for multiple books. Some even show up 20 years later.
But this collection is where it all starts, and it certainly gets the ball rolling on Duncan as a writer with a sharp, interesting mind surrounded by a cloud of archetypes, trying to pin them down to the world. He never quite succeeded (what would it mean to have succeeded?), but he failed better and better. That's mid-century modernism for you.
As for Duncan, this is one collection earlier than my favorites of his, which really center on "Bending the Bow." His favored tactic for these long exploratory cycles is to have them just kind of overlap his various books. Interspersed among individual works here, there are a couple dozen poems entitled "The Structure of Rime 1" (or 2, or 12), each of which is a different symbol-heavy take on his issues with prosody. Continuations pop up through his next handful of books, even as OTHER long cycles with different titles start up as well, themselves continuing for multiple books. Some even show up 20 years later.
But this collection is where it all starts, and it certainly gets the ball rolling on Duncan as a writer with a sharp, interesting mind surrounded by a cloud of archetypes, trying to pin them down to the world. He never quite succeeded (what would it mean to have succeeded?), but he failed better and better. That's mid-century modernism for you.
June 20, 2013
Not an entirely fair rating. I borrowed this book and had to read it very quickly in order to give it back. I think I would have enjoyed it much more on my second/third read. So much talk of gods and other allusions that I have no reference for kind of kept me from this poetry. However, every once in a while I would find myself in a poem and would think 'Robert Duncan may be on to something here'. Will have to read again one day.
July 5, 2023
"It is only a dream of the grass blowing
East against the source of the sun
In an hour before the sun's going down
Whose secret we see in a children's game
Of ring a round of roses told."
When language is shot through with Longing, it makes an entryway to that Field... where poet and Beloved are bound -- "The inbinding mirrors a process returning to roots of first feeling." Language becomes Rime: melody, magic.
East against the source of the sun
In an hour before the sun's going down
Whose secret we see in a children's game
Of ring a round of roses told."
When language is shot through with Longing, it makes an entryway to that Field... where poet and Beloved are bound -- "The inbinding mirrors a process returning to roots of first feeling." Language becomes Rime: melody, magic.
June 12, 2009
inexhaustable yet again
February 24, 2010
Reading Duncan I'm always reminded of something the late Gerald Burns, who mostly disliked his work, said to me in conversation: He talks about the gods as if they were housecats...
August 22, 2011
typically assoicated with black mountain/post modern poets...but i've always thought Duncan to be steeped in the Romantic tradition. *shrugs*
Read
December 30, 2013read this all in one sitting today. such a wonderful book. i'm gonna read it more.
May 26, 2012
"A Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar"? Dang...
April 24, 2017
there were some poems here that were really really beautiful but flipping back through the book i wrote "fuck you!" in the margins 4 times and called duncan a shithead twice...
duncan's poetics are really interesting (especially when you look at the similarities/also m a j o r differences with some of his pals at the time like charles olson) but in general a lot of this was kind of obnoxious (also like charles olson) and impenetrable. will have to read his other books and some of his prose and maybe i'll come back and like this more another time.
duncan's poetics are really interesting (especially when you look at the similarities/also m a j o r differences with some of his pals at the time like charles olson) but in general a lot of this was kind of obnoxious (also like charles olson) and impenetrable. will have to read his other books and some of his prose and maybe i'll come back and like this more another time.
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