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Robert Duncan Web Feature

America Runs on Duncan

by Adam Fales


Robert Duncan, “Self-Portrait” (1939), featured on the cover of Chicago Review 45:02

Robert Duncan often wrote in multiple directions at once. His poems, laden with allusions and images, dart around the page as they explore art, myth, and intimacy through polyvalent movements of wordplay and allusion. Similarly, celebrating a centenary involves thinking across multiple temporalities. While the event marks a hundred years since someone’s birth, we more properly celebrate all the life that followed from that birth as well as the legacies that will endure past this hundred-year mark. Any such easy marking of dates seems even more complicated in the case of Duncan, whose personal mythology stretched from his adoptive childhood in California, back to Homeric epics, upward to astrological signs, and inward to psychoanalytically inspired explorations of our subconscious life.

January 7, 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of Robert Duncan’s birth. We take this opportunity to return to some of Duncan’s past work published in Chicago Review, which we are happy to say was a frequent home for his writing over the years. This web feature includes two poems published in 1958 and 1959 and selections from a 1976 interview with Duncan, conducted by Robert Peters and Paul Trachtenberg and first published by CR in 1997. Along with Duncan’s self-portrait and a childhood photograph, these selections span Duncan’s career and life. The earliest of these illustrates Duncan’s childhood that intimately shaped his poetry, whereas the interview captures Duncan as he prepared for his final major project: Ground Work (1984). This breadth of documents testifies to the expansiveness of Duncan’s work and its varied influences and materials. We also include two commentaries on Duncan’s work, one by longtime friend and collaborator Helen Adam, along with a poem that Adam wrote about Duncan toward the end of his life, as well as Duncan’s own introduction to his work, delivered at the Poetry Center in San Francisco.

This feature’s two visual contributions capture images of Duncan before his writing career really began. The 1921 photograph portrays the setting of his mythologized childhood. The young Duncan (then christened Robert Edward Symmes) stands in a garden in Alameda, California, where his adoptive family lived until 1927. The child turns in two directions simultaneously, inspecting something with his hands—perhaps a leaf picked from one of the plants that surround him—while his head turns toward the camera that captures the moment. There’s a similar divergence of attention in his 1939 self-portrait, drawn with wax crayon. Duncan’s likeness stares calmly, resting his head as his nude body extends outside the frame, extruding into the life that animates the portrait. This calm depiction changes when we consider the production of this self-portrait: rendering his body as passive, at rest, Duncan elides the very process of composition. The active body drawing with the crayon calls attention to its own artifice through this very elision. The separation of a representation from the object to which it refers fascinated Duncan throughout his poetic trajectory, especially shaping his early poetry.

Duncan was first published in CR 12.1 (1958) under Irving Rosenthal’s editorship. The poem “Upon Taking Hold” appeared in the contentious “From San Francisco” feature, alongside work by Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. Compared to something like Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Duncan’s poem probably did not directly contribute to the University of Chicago’s censorship of CR and Rosenthal’s subsequent resignation along with most of the rest of the editorial staff. (This episode is detailed in Eirik Steinhoff’s essay, “The Making of Chicago Review: The Meteoric Years” in CR 52.2/3/4 as well as our forthcoming Big Table web feature.) However, “Upon Taking Hold,” dedicated to Charles Olson, captures a less overt but still vivid sensuality at play in all of Duncan’s poetic creation: “It is to grasp or to measure / a hand’s breadth, / this hand—mine / as I write—.” These lines collapse the objects and agents of representation, allowing these images to ricochet through meditations on the paintings of Paul Cézanne and echoing Duncan’s early experimentation with visual representation in his self-portrait. His play of visual and verbal representation manifests in the phonic and graphic similarities of words, such as his juxtaposition of the words “altered” and “altar,” which turn “the poetry—now—a gesture” laden with concrete and tangible qualities.

Poetry’s gestural qualities also shape Duncan’s poem “The Natural Doctrine,” published in CR 13.4 the following year. The poem meditates on possible inspirations from nature and artifice. Pondering the wonders of nature, language, and the divine, Duncan hopes: “there may be such power in a certain passage of a poem / that eternal joy may leap therefrom.” To resolve these deliberations, Duncan again turns to pictorial representation, quoting J. M. W. Turner’s last words “The Sun is God, my dear” before adding that “the actual language is written in rainbows.” This modified quotation collapses the many materials that compose the poem—the Sun, God, and Language—to inscribe a linguistic underpinning in purely natural phenomena. However, this gesture, which establishes a privileged position for poetry, removes surety in the authority of that written expression, as nobody actively writes this “actual language.” Poetry occurs in the passive voice; it “is written.”


Duncan thought poets must discover such language, rather than craft it authoritatively in their hands. This conviction led the poet to spend his life occupied with intellectual friendships, collaborations, classrooms, and other forms of experimental thinking together, such as in his time at Black Mountain College, where he taught theatre and poetry and worked closely other artists like Olson. Some of this energy is captured in his free-wheeling interview, conducted by Peters and Trachtenberg and excerpted here. In the interview, Duncan discusses the politics of literary publishing, including John Crowe Ransom and the Kenyon Review’s treatment of him as a gay writer, his interest in Jung and H.D., and his hiatus from publishing and preparation for Ground Work, the first volume of which would be published, eight years after this interview. As the interview conveys the power of Duncan’s vision, it also exhibits some of its limits, especially pertaining to race and gender. Such moments let us examine our political and aesthetic pasts from multiple directions, as Duncan might have done—recognizing their achievements alongside their errors—as well as the work yet to do in our own present. Even as we celebrate the past, we might also reconsider the future of poetry and its politics.

Duncan’s centenary year shares the bicentenaries of similarly exploratory American writers Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. His work shares the same enthusiastic sensuality that these earlier writers seized through their own literary experiments. In many ways, he expresses possibilities that these earlier queer writers would not have thought possible. Duncan moves us to explore many more directions, looking to the future and imagining the potential, as-yet-unimagined, unfoldings of literary experimentation. Happy 100th Birthday, Robert Duncan.

Robert Duncan reading from his own work Wednesday, October 10, 1956

Upon Taking Hold

The Natural Doctrine

A Conversation with Robert Duncan (1976)