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In addition to his accomplishments as a poet and intellectual, Duncan's presence was felt across many facets of popular culture over a period of several decades. Duncan’s name figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture, in the emergence of bohemian socialist communities of the 1930s and 40s, in the phenomenon of the Beat Generation, in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, as well as in occult and gnostic circles of the same era. During the later part of his life, Duncan's work came to be distributed worldwide, and his influence as a poet is still evident today in the arenas of both mainstream and avant-garde writing [1]
Birth and Early Life
Duncan was born in Oakland, California as Edward Howard Duncan Jr. His mother, Marguerite Pearl Duncan, had died in childbirth and his father was unable to afford him, so in 1920 he was adopted by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes, a family of devout Theosophists. They renamed him Robert Edward Symmes; it was only after a psychiatric discharge from the army in 1941 that he formed the composite of his previous names and became Robert Edward Duncan.
The Symmeses had begun planning for the child's arrival long prior to his adoption. There were terms for his adoption that had to be met: he had to be born at the time and place appointed by the astrologers, his mother was to die shortly after giving birth, and he was to be of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent. [2] His childhood was stable, and his parents were popular and social members of their community--Edwin was a prominent architect and Minnehaha devoted much of her time to volunteering and serving on committees.
Robert grew up surrounded by the occult in one form or another; he was well aware of the circumstances of his fated birth and adoption and his parents carefully interpreted his dreams. He was also told that in his lifetime he would witness a second death of civilization through a holocaust. The family adopted a second child, Barbara Eleanor Symmes, in 1920. She was born almost one year after him, on January 6 of that year, and was chosen under circumstances similar to that of her brother; her presence was expected to bring good karma into the family.
At age three, Duncan was injured in an accident on the snow which resulted in his becoming cross-eyed and seeing double. In Roots and Branches, his second major book, he wrote, "I had the double reminder always, the vertical and horizontal displacement in vision that later became separated, specialized into a near and a far sight. One image to the right and above the other. Reach out and touch. Point to the one that is really there."
After his adopted father's death in 1936, Duncan started studying at the University of California, Berkeley. He began writing poems inspired in part by his left wing politics and acquired a reputation as a bohemian. His friends and influences included Mary and Lilli Fabilli, Virginia Admiral, Pauline Kael, and Ida Bear, among others. Duncan thrived as storyteller, poet, and fledgling bohemian, but by his sophomore year he had begun to drop classes and had quit attending obligatory military drills.
In 1938, he briefly attended Black Mountain College, but left after a dispute with faculty on the subject of the Spanish Civil War. He spent two years in Philadelphia and then moved to Woodstock, New York, to join a commune run by James Cooney. There he worked on Cooney's magazine The Phoenix and met Henry Miller and Anais Nin, who both admired his poetry. Cooney was less fond of its pagan tendencies.
Duncan and Homosexuality
Long before it was safe to do so, Duncan "came out" in both his personal and public lives. In 1944, Dwight Macdonald's Politics published Duncan's still-controversial article, The Homosexual in Society. This caused John Crowe Ransom to withdraw Duncan's [poem] "African Elegy" from its scheduled publication in the Kenyon Review.
Michael Palmer[3]
Duncan’s name figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture, particularly with the publication of "The Homosexual in Society". While in Philadelphia, Duncan had a relationship with a male instructor he had first met in Berkeley. In 1941 he was drafted and declared his homosexuality to get discharged. In 1943, he had his first heterosexual relationship. This ended in a short, disastrous marriage. In 1944, he published The Homosexual in Society, an essay in which he compared the plight of homosexuals with that of African Americans and Jews. From 1951 until his death, he lived with the artist Jess Collins. Before then, Duncan began a relationship with Robert De Niro, Sr., the father of famed actor Robert De Niro, Jr., shortly before DeNiro Sr. broke up with his wife, artist Virginia Admiral.[4]
San Francisco
Duncan returned to San Francisco in 1945 and was befriended by Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, and Kenneth Rexroth (with whom he had been in correspondence for some time). He returned to Berkeley to study Medieval and Renaissance literature and cultivated a reputation as a shamanistic figure in San Francisco poetry and artistic circles. He also became friends with fellow poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, plus novelist Philip K. Dick. In the early 1950s he started publishing in Cid Corman's Origin and the Black Mountain Review and in 1956 he spent a time teaching at the Black Mountain College. These connections were instrumental in getting some of the Black Mountain poets involved in the San Francisco Renaissance. He was also a prominent figure amongst a circle of San Francisco painters, among which are Jess Collins(whom Duncan had a relation with), Norris Embry, and many others...
Mature Works
During the 1960s, Duncan achieved considerable artistic and critical success with three books; The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968). These are generally considered to be his most significant works. His poetry is modernist in its preference for the impersonal, mythic, and hieratic, but Romantic in its privileging of the organic, the irrational and primordial, the not-yet-articulate blindly making its way into language like salmon running upstream:
Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. "They came up
and died
just like they do every year
on the rocks."
The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.
The Opening of the Field comprised short lyric poems, a recurring sequence of prose poems called "The Structure of Rime," and a long poem called "Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar," which draws materials from Pindar, Francisco Goya, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and the myth of Persephone into an extended visionary and ecstatic fugue in the mode of Pound's Pisan Cantos.
After Bending the Bow, he vowed to avoid the distraction of publication for fifteen years. Duncan's friend and fellow poet, Michael Palmer, writes about this time in his essay "Ground Work: On Robert Duncan":
“ The story is well-known in poetry circles: around 1968, disgusted by his difficulties with publishers and by what he perceived as the careerist strategies of many poets, Duncan vowed not to publish a new collection for fifteen years. (There would be chapbooks along the way.) He felt that this decision would free him to listen to the demands of his (supremely demanding) poetics and would liberate the architecture of his work from all compromised considerations....It was not until 1984 that Ground Work I: Before the War appeared, for which he won the National Poetry Award, to be followed in February 1988, the month of his death, by Ground Work II: In the Dark. [5] ”
Notes
^ Robert Duncan Webpage which is maintained by Duncan biographer and poet Lisa Jarnot
^ (Quoted from Jarnot's biography), excerpts available on line at the Robert Duncan Webpage Which is maintained by Duncan biographer and poet Lisa Jarnot
^ "Robert Duncan and Romantic Synthesis: A Few Notes". This article also republished as "On Robert Duncan" at Modern American Poetry website
^ Deirdre Bair, Anais Nin (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1995)
^ Jacket 29 - April 2006 - Michael Palmer: Ground Work: on Robert Duncan
_Select_ed bibliography
_Select_ed Poems (City Lights Pocket Series, 1959)
Letters 1953-56 (reprint: Flood Editions, Chicago, 2003)
The Opening of the Field (Grove Press, 1960/New Directions) PS3507.U629 O6
Roots and Branches (Scribner's, 1964/New Directions)
Medea at Kolchis; the maiden head (Berkeley: Oyez, 1965) PS3507.U629 M4
Of the war: passages 22-27 (Berkeley: Oyez, 1966) PS3507.U629 O42
Bending the Bow (New Directions, 1968)
The Years As Catches: First poems (1939-1946) (Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1966)
Play time, pseudo stein ( S.n. Tenth Muse, 1969) Case / PS3507.U629 P55
Caesar's gate: poems 1949-50 with paste-ups by Jess. (s.l. Sand Dollar, 1972) PS3507.U629 C3
_Select_ed poems by Robert Duncan (San Francisco, City Lights Books. Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint Co., 1973, 1959) PN6101.P462 v.2 no.8-14,Suppl.
An ode and Arcadia (Berkeley: Ark P, 1974) PS3507.U629 O3
Medieval scenes 1950 and 1959 ( Kent, Ohio: The Kent SU Libraries, 1978) Case / PS3507.U629 M43
The five songs (Glendale, CA: Reagh, 1981) Case / PS3507.U629 F5
Fictive Certainties (Essays) (NY:New Directions, 1983)
Ground Work: Before the War (NY:New Directions, 1984) PS3507.U629 G7
Groundwork II: In the Dark (NY:New Directions, 1987) PS3507.U629 G69
_Select_ed Poems edited by Robert Bertholf (NY:New Directions, 1993)
A _Select_ed Prose (NY:New Directions, 1995)
Copy Book Entries, transcribed by Robert J. Bertholf (Buffalo, NY: Meow Press, 1996)
The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (Robert J. Bertholf & Albert Gelpi, eds.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Ground Work: Before the War / In the Dark, Introduction by Michael Palmer (NY:New Directions, 2006)