Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (1919--1988) was a foremost figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and is considered one of the most accomplished and influential postwar American poets. He became a leading practitioner of nontraditional open form poetry, his later work shaped by ideas associated with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of poetry. During his lifetime, he published more than a dozen collections of poems, including those in this volume, which remain his best-known works. Peter Quartermain taught contemporary poetry and poetics at the University of British Columbia for over thirty years. He is the author of Basil Bunting, Poet of the North; Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe; and Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde. He is the editor of Robert Duncan's Collected Early Poems and Plays (UC Press).

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Discovery Making The Opening of the Field (1960) Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow - The Dance The Law I Love Is Major Mover The Structure of Rime I The Structure of Rime II A Poem Slow Beginning The Structure of Rime III The Structure of Rime IV The Structure of Rime V The Structure of Rime VI The Structure of Rime VII Three Pages from a Birthday Book This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom The Ballad of the Enamord Mage The Ballad of Mrs Noah The Maiden The Propositions Four Pictures of the Real Universe Evocation Of Blasphemy Nor Is the Past Pure Crosses of Harmony and Disharmony A Poem of Despondencies Poetry, a Natural Thing Keeping the Rhyme A Song of the Old Order The Question The Performance We Wait For At Christmas Proofs Yes, as a Look Springs to Its Face Yes, as a Look Springs to Its Face, A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar The Structure of Rime VIII The Structure of Rime IX The Structure of Rime X The Structure of Rime XI A Storm of White Atlantis Out of the Black Bone Dance Under Ground The Natural Doctrine The Structure of Rime XII The Structure of Rime XIII Another Animadversion After Reading Barely and Widely Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal Food for Fire, Food for Thought Uncollected Work 1957--1960 A Stray Poem (Notes Reading from Rene Fulop-Miller's The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits) Melville after Pierre Solitude The Song of the River to Its Shores Pre-face I Saw the Rabbit Leap Roots and Branches (1964) Roots and Branches Roots and Branches What Do I Know of the Old Lore? Night Scenes A Sequence of Poems for H.D.'s Birthday A Letter Nel Mezzo del Cammin di Nostra Vita A Dancing Concerning a Form of Women The Law Apprehensions Sonneries of the Rose Cross Now the Record Now Record Variations on Two Dicta of William Blake Cover Images Come, Let Me Free Myself Risk Four Songs the Night Nurse Sang Structure of Rime XV Structure of Rime XVI Structure of Rime XVII Structure of Rime XVIII Osiris and Set Windings Two Presentations After a Passage in Baudelaire Shelley's Arethusa Set to New Measures After Reading H.D.'s Hermetic Definitions Strains of Sight Doves Returning to the Rhetoric of an Early Mode Two Entertainments The Ballad of the Forfar Witches' Sing A Country Wife's Song What Happened : Prelude A Set of Romantic Hymns Thank You for Love From The Mabinogion Forced Lines A New Poem (for Jack Spicer) Sonnet 1 Sonnet 2 Sonnet 3 Answering Adam's Way: A Play upon Theosophical Themes Cyparissus A Part-Sequence for Change Structure of Rime XIX Structure of Rime XX Structure of Rime XXI The Continent Uncollected Work 1961--1964 A Play with Masks Weaving the Design Old Testament New Testament Bending the Bow (1968) Introduction Sonnet 4 Structure of Rime XXII 5th Sonnet Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing Bending the Bow Tribal Memories Passages 1 At the Loom Passages 2 What I Saw Passages 3 Where It Appears Passages 4 The Moon Passages 5 The Collage Passages 6 Envoy Passages 7 Structure of Rime XXIII As in the Old Days Passages 8 The Architecture Passages 9 These Past Years Passages 10 Shadows Passages 11 Wine Passages 12 Structure of Rime XXIV Structure of Rime XXV Reflections The Fire Passages 13 Chords Passages 14 Spelling Passages 15 A Lammas Tiding My Mother Would Be a Falconress Saint Graal (after Verlaine) Parsifal (after Wagner and Verlaine) The Currents Passages 16 Moving the Moving Image Passages 17 The Torso Passages 18 The Earth Passages 19 Structure of Rime XXVI: For Kenneth Anger An Illustration Passages 20 The Multiversity Passages 21 In the Place of a Passage 22 Benefice Passages 23 Orders Passages 24 Up Rising Passages 25 The Chimeras of Gerard de Nerval El Desdichado (The Disinherited) Myrtho Horus Anteros Delphica Artemis The Christ in the Olive Grove Golden Lines Earth's Winter Song Moira's Cathedral A Shrine to Ameinias Narrative Bridges for Adam's Way The Soldiers Passages 26 An Interlude Transgressing the Real Passages 27 The Light Passages 28 Eye of God Passages 29 Stage Directions Passages 30 God-Spell Epilogos Uncollected Work 1965--1968 At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley after the New York Style We heard it as a cry. It was the Word. Keeping the War Inside Yes I care deeply and yet Christmas Present, Christmas Presence! From a Poem by John Ashbery If I Had Kin Ground Work: Before the War (1984) Some Notes on Notation Achilles' Song Ancient Questions A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings Despair in Being Tedious The Concert Passages 31 (Tribunals) Ancient Reveries and Declamations Passages 32 (Tribunals) Transmissions Passages 33 (Tribunals) The Feast Passages 34 (Tribunals) Before the Judgment Passages 35 (Tribunals) Santa Cruz Propositions A Glimpse And If He Had Been Wrong for Me For Me Too, I, Long Ago Shipping Out with the Cantos And Hell Is the Realm of God's Self-Loathing Childhood's Retreat Fragments of an Albigensian Rime O! Passages 37 Bring It Up from the Dark Structure of Rime XXVII Structure of Rime XXVIII: In Memoriam Wallace Stevens Over There The Museum Interrupted Forms Poems from the Margins of Thom Gunn's Moly Preface to the Suite The Moly Suite Near Circe's House Rites of Passage: I Moly Rites of Passage: II A Seventeenth Century Suite in Homage to the Metaphysical Genius in English Poetry (1590--1690) 1. Love's a great courtesy to be declared 2. Sir Walter Ralegh, What Is Our Life? 3. Go as in a dream 4. Robert Southwell, the Burning Babe 5. "A pretty Babe"--that burning Babe 6. George Herbert, Jordan (I) 7. George Herbert, Jordan (II) 8. These Lines Composing Themselves in My Head as I Awoke Early This Morning, It Being Still Dark, December 16, 1971 Passages 36 9. Ben Jonson, Hymenaei: Or the Solemnities of Masque, and Barriers 10. John Norris of Bemerton, Hymne to Darkness Coda Dante Etudes Preface Book One We Will Endeavor Secondary Is the Grammar A Little Language To Speak My Mind Everything Speaks to Me In the Way of a Question Speech Directed Enricht in the Increment The Individual Man Of Empire The Meaning of Each Particular The Whole Potentiality The Work The Household Let Him First Drink of the Fountain And Tho They Have No Vowel Letting the Beat Go Book Two A Hard Task in Truth Lovely The One Rule Our Art but to Articulate In Nothing Superior Enacted On Obedience Zealous Liberality We Convivial in What Is Ours! Mr. Philip Wicksteed Stumbling into Rime in Prose in Translating Dante's Convivio Go, My Songs, Even as You Came to Me Book Three My Soul Was as If Free Nor Dream in Your Hearts For the Sea Is God's Where the Fox of This Stench Sulks In Truth Doth She Breathe Out Poisonous Fumes Then Many a One Sang In My Youth Not Unstaind And a Wisdom as Such Four Supplementary Etudes Of Memory Hers I Too Trembling But We, to Whom the World Is The Missionaries Passages The Torn Cloth Songs of an Other Empedoklean Reveries Passages Jamais Passages An Interlude of Winter Light "Eidolon of the Aion" The Presence of the Dance{ths}/{ths}The Resolution of the Music Circulations of the Song Uncollected Work 1969--1982 O tree of lights! tree of colors Childless After Shakespeare's Sonnet 76 Second Take on Shakespeare's Sonnet 76 She Something Is Moving A Fantasy Piece for Helen Adam Feb. 22, 1973 I have{ths}/{ths}nothing to go on A Prepucal Face for Nigel Roberts Johnny's Thing An Epithalamium Poe et Cie Let Me Join You Again This Morning, Walt Whitman Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987) An Alternate Life In the South Homecoming Supplication The Quotidian To Master Baudelaire Toward His Malaise Among His Words The Face At Cambridge an Address to Young Poets Native to the Land of My Mothertongue Le Sonnet Ou Sonne la Sonnette des Dernieres Jours Toujours Fait Son Retour Pour Souffrir l'Envie Jusqu'a l'Amour en Vie Sets of Syllables, Sets of Words, Sets of Lines, Sets of Poems Addressing: Veil, Turbine, Cord, & Bird Preliminary Exercise Notes during a Lecture on Mathematics The Recall of the Star Miraflor The Naming of the Time Ever I Pour Forth My Life from This Bough The Turbine What the Sonnet Means the Sonnet Means For the Assignment of the Spirit The Cherubim (I) The Cherubim (II) Styx The Sentinels An Eros/Amor/Love Cycle Et Passages In Wonder Passages Constructing the Course of a River in the Pyrenees In Waking From the Fall of 1950, December 1980 Two Sets of Tens: Derived from Confucian Analects Regulators Set of Passages The Dignities Passages The First Passages Stimmung Passages Enthralld Passages Quand le Grand Foyer Descend dans les Eaux Passages In Blood's Domaine Passages After Passage Passages With In Passages Seams Passages You, Muses Passages Structure of Rime: Of the Five Songs The Five Songs Whose Passages Close At the Door Illustrative Lines After a Long Illness Uncollected Work 1983--1988 In Passage Hekatombe Appendix: Table of Contents for Roots and Branches Notes Selected Bibliography Index of Titles and First Lines