A Selected Prose

by Robert Duncan

A Selected Prose represents the most wide-ranging collection to date of Robert Duncan's essays and talks and is a companion volume to the Selected Poems (1993). Editor Robert J. Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan's writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer. Included as well are "Rites of Participation, " an excerpt from the still unpublished "H.D. Book"; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan's controversial and provocative essay of 1944, "The Homosexual in Society."

Genres: Poetry

230 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

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]

It's Duncan, so I hate to carp. Still, when the Eagles put out a Greatest Hits as their fifth release, everyone knew what that was about. And when the editor of this volume, Robert Bertholf, put out "A Selected Prose" (the fussy self-satisfied title!) that included chapters from "The H.D. Book" and three essays from the book of criticism Duncan himself assembled, Fictive Certainties, Duncan readers had good reason to worry about whether the latter would stay in print, whether "The H.D. Book" would ever come out, and what would be the fate of so much uncollected Duncan prose worth getting between covers. Our only hope for such a volume as this is that, like the Byrds on Asylum, it's an i.o.u. on real chops to come. A star taken off for vitiating any reader's need for Fictive Certainties!