Ruth Lepson
“A Language Event”: “How Much Everything Is Blended”
“'Rightly viewed, my voice is theosophical, the lore of the gods or the lore of the divine.” So writes Robert Duncan in The Poet's Mind: Collected Interviews, edited by Christopher Wagstaff, with an introduction by Gerrit Lansing, published by North Atlantic Books in 2012--and what a look into the mind of this essential poet. It's a revelation to those who read contemporary poetry, as he makes clear distinctions among the so-called Black Mountain poets--Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Duncan himself.
“A poem for me is a language event, and is a primary experience in language. It doesn't refer to experience outside itself.” “...repeated vowel forms work together to form melodies.” They help create the “intensification of the moment,” which is a central act for him. He called himself an escapist, but he isn’t one in the usual sense; rather, he delves into the moment’s depths, through language and the layering of experience.
Yet what differentiated Duncan from the others, among other things, was his kind of Romanticism. “The spiritual world is as much a puzzle as death...it is a pure realm in which the imagination is the only thing that we can indeed come from and go to.” “...in poetry I obviously have trance states. You see, I entered--poetry we enter.”
“My experience about poets is discovering a company....I write for those alike in soul.” “I feel close to Pound because I'm a mixed-up person like Pound. Some poems of Levertov, H.D., the late William Carlos Williams seem to be just purely, just immediately the voice.”
As for Gertrude Stein, whom he spent years of his early poetry life imitating, she is “where you let the 'turbine' talk, instead of you trying to move it around.”
So we glimpse his theory of composition: '”..not interested in the justice of an emotion in a poet or the creative artist; it's how he composes it, its ratio to other things, and its restoration to reality” or “you will find throughout my poetry an idea of an individuality that has absolute freedom and is a law to itself, that has its being in a larger being...that's the cosmos finally.”
From The H.D. Book, “The crux of the poet is to make real what is only real in a heightened sense. Call it his personal feeling, or the community reality, it exists only in its dance, only to its dancers.” “What is seen is already informed, full of form that determines what is seen and how it is seen, even though the forms may remain hidden.” This bent clearly links him to the Romantics and to pre-Enlightenment poets such as the troubadours in his desire to go beyond reason to the lyrical. The lyrical is certainly an aspect of Duncan's, Creeley's, and Levertov's poetry.
Yet the differences among the Black Mountain poets are crucial: “You will find that in my poetry I undo my propositions....Contradictions are dramatic propositions and interesting in a poem to get range, to be active throughout.” “I think myth is made up....By the time anything appears to us in dreams, it's consciousness....Consciousness is creative....I want a multiphasic consciousness. All points in time are the same, and have the same quality of authenticity.” “Charles [Olson] sees the writer converting experience into language....I wouldn't dream that you could put energy out of one place into another.” “New poems force us to get words as things in and of themselves. It does this by making them puzzling.”
Duncan, an anarchist, hated Roosevelt for the deaths he was even indirectly responsible for. Involved politically to some extent (“I can't take a moral stand against them [the American government] because I feel entirely part of it”), he rejected the poetry of his close epistolary friend Denise Levertov, though they had written for years, developing poetry of field and organic form, because from his vantage point her poetry had become polemical during the Viet Nam war--poetry should enact, not preach, he wrote--and his harshness extended to implicating her in the psychology of the sadism she wrote about. (My own feeling is that some of her finest poems are war poems, and that she “kept” the aesthetics she was wedded to throughout, in her truly moral stance in both realms.) Where they could agree is in the belief and sense that “all of us live on the edge of an occult reality that is really quite ordinary.” “[The image] was not only a vivid representation of sensory image but an evocation of depth.” “The imagination links Creeley and myself and Levertov and [Larry] Eigner” (a student of Olson who is just recently receiving his due as poet).
What I Saw
The white peacock roosting might have been Christ,
featherd robe of Osiris, the radiant bird, a sword-flash, percht in the tree
and the other, the fumed-glass slide—were like night and day,
the slit of an eye opening in time vertical to the horizon
Imagination is a key to Duncan. An intellectual, Duncan read deeply and widely (he claimed that most poets aren't intellectuals, by the way, and, interestingly, panels of innovative poets as intellectuals have been popping up at conferences lately—it’s a continuing discussion, what this means and might mean), but he is never pedantic in that he “want[s] the reader to be involved with my primary experience of a text.” The point was not whether you had read Ulysses but “what are you going to do with Ulysses.” “I tend to overcompose because I'm thematic....I compose leitmotifs and themes.” Elsewhere he claims that he doesn't revise a poem--no point in taking out a little something here and there--rather, he goes back and adds layers, and each layer works with the others like a collage. “[My poems] consist of minute details which accumulate in a huge faith as to what is going to happen on the whole canvas."
That analogy to visual art, in his interview on poetry and painting, helps the reader to picture how he works: “The field in a Bonnard or a Vuillard, going beyond Impressionism, is not felt to be just a matter of looking at light. I was intrigued because it was broken up and I get that kind of texture.” '”..it is all material. It isn't an idea that I ‘have,’ and I don't really think in a poem....Poetics is the part you do think.”
I say “picture,” by the way, in part because Duncan, after seeing Larry Eigner’s lines scattered around the page, began to develop his poetry of field more deeply. This is not to suggest that Duncan's measure was in any way arbitrary; quite the opposite: the beat pulled toward meaning.
Reminiscent of Creeley's explanation of how he learned to write by listening to Charlie Parker and others at the Hi Hat in Boston in the 50's, when Creeley was a student at Harvard, he heard rhythmic effects creating moods, and syncopations that showed him how to break a line of poetry. As Duncan wrote, “in actual enjambment we recognize how much everything is blended.” One can break the line asyntactically to emphasize the last word of the line or the first word of the following line or to create a cluster of sounds on a line or to get various denotations of a word, but finally this kind of improvisation has as its deepest effect connections between the lines.And the enjambed line central to Duncan is one connection between his line and Creeley's.
Duncan believes that personality is shallow identity, not the true identity at all, yet he acknowledges “what the poem is supposed to be, which is personal feeling deeply expressed or something like that.” A seeming contradiction but not so, since for him the self allowed the poem to come into itself rather than trying to control it, so that what was larger than the self also got expressed through the self.
“I'm a Heraclitean in that the universe creates itself,” as the poem creates itself through the medium of language. The imagination “is leaping to find something that holds all that together, all that being the collage” that is his poem, which he edited “not to correct but to refocus.” He was Freudian in the sense that he admired Freud’s “multi-layeredness.” This is one link to Olson and one that differentiates him from Creeley and Levertov. The “rhythmic organization of a poem is what links them,” each in his or her strikingly individual way. Creeley once said that his lines were short because he was nervous. Levertov wrote that Olson’s projective verse was widely misinterpreted and that one breaks the line where the mind pauses. This book of interviews stresses for me the differences among the Black Mountain poets whom I looked at as monolithic for too long.
“...poetry becomes stronger and stronger as men are no longer religious.” “...the spirit is what's 'in' work and consequent of its also being mortal. It can be destroyed.” “...the gods are states of mind.” All is imagination. This is Duncan’s valuable contribution in a materialist time.
I recommend the evenhanded and delightful if at moments unnerving biography by Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan: Ambassador from Venus. Jarnot read and culled from eighty notebooks of Duncan as well as all of his other writing and extensive interviews with those who knew him. It’s an astonishingly thorough work in which every period of his life is described in detail, including his life as a San Francisco Renaissance poet, a subject outside the purview of this essay. Jarnot, herself an accomplished and original poet, knows the issues intimately.
Finally, in The H.D. Book (a 700-page collection on modernism’s roots, with special attention to the women who affected him, including H.D. and Edith Sitwell, gathered and published in 2012), “I want to compose a poetry with meaning entirely occult, that is--with the meaning contained not as a jewel is contained in a box but as the inside of the box is contained in the box.” “As with the mind, nothing is ever lost....mind as palimpsest.”
Duncan visited poet George Quasha's contemporary poetry class at SUNY Stony Brook in 1967. I remember his dancing around the room, writing words and phrases on the board and drawing arrows between them. Having no idea what he was talking about, I nevertheless felt his energies so intensely that I went to the woods and wrote I know not what for hours. His intense presence, his fiery mind, put me in a whirlwind of the imagination. He couldn't stop talking, traveling, writing, reading, looking at art, listening to music, visiting friends, teaching and giving readings; his life was a whirlwind. His companion the collagist and painter Jess loved to stay at home, and set limits on their socializing, giving him a steady and artistic home to return to. He was a bohemian dependent upon his comforts, as he himself confessed.
Duncan notes that Kenneth Rexroth, a poet of his time and place, “knew the essential thing was moving down from Yeats,” whom some see as the last Romantic and others as the first modernist. “Shelley's poetry absorbs and breaks the forms that precede it, and it ripples like a muscular being, and it surges forward, and it invents its own rules.” An apt description of Duncan at his best. "Poetry has no rules,” he insists.
__________
Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory and has been collaborating with musicians in recent years. Her forthcoming book of poems (from Pressed Wafer) will include a CD of musical settings of her poems. Her other books are Dreaming in Color (Alice James) and Morphology (with photographer Rusty Crump) and Morphology (both by blazeVOX). She has essays in the new journals based in Boston, SPOKE and Let the Bucket Down.
“A Language Event”: “How Much Everything Is Blended”
“'Rightly viewed, my voice is theosophical, the lore of the gods or the lore of the divine.” So writes Robert Duncan in The Poet's Mind: Collected Interviews, edited by Christopher Wagstaff, with an introduction by Gerrit Lansing, published by North Atlantic Books in 2012--and what a look into the mind of this essential poet. It's a revelation to those who read contemporary poetry, as he makes clear distinctions among the so-called Black Mountain poets--Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Duncan himself.
“A poem for me is a language event, and is a primary experience in language. It doesn't refer to experience outside itself.” “...repeated vowel forms work together to form melodies.” They help create the “intensification of the moment,” which is a central act for him. He called himself an escapist, but he isn’t one in the usual sense; rather, he delves into the moment’s depths, through language and the layering of experience.
Yet what differentiated Duncan from the others, among other things, was his kind of Romanticism. “The spiritual world is as much a puzzle as death...it is a pure realm in which the imagination is the only thing that we can indeed come from and go to.” “...in poetry I obviously have trance states. You see, I entered--poetry we enter.”
“My experience about poets is discovering a company....I write for those alike in soul.” “I feel close to Pound because I'm a mixed-up person like Pound. Some poems of Levertov, H.D., the late William Carlos Williams seem to be just purely, just immediately the voice.”
As for Gertrude Stein, whom he spent years of his early poetry life imitating, she is “where you let the 'turbine' talk, instead of you trying to move it around.”
So we glimpse his theory of composition: '”..not interested in the justice of an emotion in a poet or the creative artist; it's how he composes it, its ratio to other things, and its restoration to reality” or “you will find throughout my poetry an idea of an individuality that has absolute freedom and is a law to itself, that has its being in a larger being...that's the cosmos finally.”
From The H.D. Book, “The crux of the poet is to make real what is only real in a heightened sense. Call it his personal feeling, or the community reality, it exists only in its dance, only to its dancers.” “What is seen is already informed, full of form that determines what is seen and how it is seen, even though the forms may remain hidden.” This bent clearly links him to the Romantics and to pre-Enlightenment poets such as the troubadours in his desire to go beyond reason to the lyrical. The lyrical is certainly an aspect of Duncan's, Creeley's, and Levertov's poetry.
Yet the differences among the Black Mountain poets are crucial: “You will find that in my poetry I undo my propositions....Contradictions are dramatic propositions and interesting in a poem to get range, to be active throughout.” “I think myth is made up....By the time anything appears to us in dreams, it's consciousness....Consciousness is creative....I want a multiphasic consciousness. All points in time are the same, and have the same quality of authenticity.” “Charles [Olson] sees the writer converting experience into language....I wouldn't dream that you could put energy out of one place into another.” “New poems force us to get words as things in and of themselves. It does this by making them puzzling.”
Duncan, an anarchist, hated Roosevelt for the deaths he was even indirectly responsible for. Involved politically to some extent (“I can't take a moral stand against them [the American government] because I feel entirely part of it”), he rejected the poetry of his close epistolary friend Denise Levertov, though they had written for years, developing poetry of field and organic form, because from his vantage point her poetry had become polemical during the Viet Nam war--poetry should enact, not preach, he wrote--and his harshness extended to implicating her in the psychology of the sadism she wrote about. (My own feeling is that some of her finest poems are war poems, and that she “kept” the aesthetics she was wedded to throughout, in her truly moral stance in both realms.) Where they could agree is in the belief and sense that “all of us live on the edge of an occult reality that is really quite ordinary.” “[The image] was not only a vivid representation of sensory image but an evocation of depth.” “The imagination links Creeley and myself and Levertov and [Larry] Eigner” (a student of Olson who is just recently receiving his due as poet).
What I Saw
The white peacock roosting might have been Christ,
featherd robe of Osiris, the radiant bird, a sword-flash, percht in the tree
and the other, the fumed-glass slide—were like night and day,
the slit of an eye opening in time vertical to the horizon
Imagination is a key to Duncan. An intellectual, Duncan read deeply and widely (he claimed that most poets aren't intellectuals, by the way, and, interestingly, panels of innovative poets as intellectuals have been popping up at conferences lately—it’s a continuing discussion, what this means and might mean), but he is never pedantic in that he “want[s] the reader to be involved with my primary experience of a text.” The point was not whether you had read Ulysses but “what are you going to do with Ulysses.” “I tend to overcompose because I'm thematic....I compose leitmotifs and themes.” Elsewhere he claims that he doesn't revise a poem--no point in taking out a little something here and there--rather, he goes back and adds layers, and each layer works with the others like a collage. “[My poems] consist of minute details which accumulate in a huge faith as to what is going to happen on the whole canvas."
That analogy to visual art, in his interview on poetry and painting, helps the reader to picture how he works: “The field in a Bonnard or a Vuillard, going beyond Impressionism, is not felt to be just a matter of looking at light. I was intrigued because it was broken up and I get that kind of texture.” '”..it is all material. It isn't an idea that I ‘have,’ and I don't really think in a poem....Poetics is the part you do think.”
I say “picture,” by the way, in part because Duncan, after seeing Larry Eigner’s lines scattered around the page, began to develop his poetry of field more deeply. This is not to suggest that Duncan's measure was in any way arbitrary; quite the opposite: the beat pulled toward meaning.
Reminiscent of Creeley's explanation of how he learned to write by listening to Charlie Parker and others at the Hi Hat in Boston in the 50's, when Creeley was a student at Harvard, he heard rhythmic effects creating moods, and syncopations that showed him how to break a line of poetry. As Duncan wrote, “in actual enjambment we recognize how much everything is blended.” One can break the line asyntactically to emphasize the last word of the line or the first word of the following line or to create a cluster of sounds on a line or to get various denotations of a word, but finally this kind of improvisation has as its deepest effect connections between the lines.And the enjambed line central to Duncan is one connection between his line and Creeley's.
Duncan believes that personality is shallow identity, not the true identity at all, yet he acknowledges “what the poem is supposed to be, which is personal feeling deeply expressed or something like that.” A seeming contradiction but not so, since for him the self allowed the poem to come into itself rather than trying to control it, so that what was larger than the self also got expressed through the self.
“I'm a Heraclitean in that the universe creates itself,” as the poem creates itself through the medium of language. The imagination “is leaping to find something that holds all that together, all that being the collage” that is his poem, which he edited “not to correct but to refocus.” He was Freudian in the sense that he admired Freud’s “multi-layeredness.” This is one link to Olson and one that differentiates him from Creeley and Levertov. The “rhythmic organization of a poem is what links them,” each in his or her strikingly individual way. Creeley once said that his lines were short because he was nervous. Levertov wrote that Olson’s projective verse was widely misinterpreted and that one breaks the line where the mind pauses. This book of interviews stresses for me the differences among the Black Mountain poets whom I looked at as monolithic for too long.
“...poetry becomes stronger and stronger as men are no longer religious.” “...the spirit is what's 'in' work and consequent of its also being mortal. It can be destroyed.” “...the gods are states of mind.” All is imagination. This is Duncan’s valuable contribution in a materialist time.
I recommend the evenhanded and delightful if at moments unnerving biography by Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan: Ambassador from Venus. Jarnot read and culled from eighty notebooks of Duncan as well as all of his other writing and extensive interviews with those who knew him. It’s an astonishingly thorough work in which every period of his life is described in detail, including his life as a San Francisco Renaissance poet, a subject outside the purview of this essay. Jarnot, herself an accomplished and original poet, knows the issues intimately.
Finally, in The H.D. Book (a 700-page collection on modernism’s roots, with special attention to the women who affected him, including H.D. and Edith Sitwell, gathered and published in 2012), “I want to compose a poetry with meaning entirely occult, that is--with the meaning contained not as a jewel is contained in a box but as the inside of the box is contained in the box.” “As with the mind, nothing is ever lost....mind as palimpsest.”
Duncan visited poet George Quasha's contemporary poetry class at SUNY Stony Brook in 1967. I remember his dancing around the room, writing words and phrases on the board and drawing arrows between them. Having no idea what he was talking about, I nevertheless felt his energies so intensely that I went to the woods and wrote I know not what for hours. His intense presence, his fiery mind, put me in a whirlwind of the imagination. He couldn't stop talking, traveling, writing, reading, looking at art, listening to music, visiting friends, teaching and giving readings; his life was a whirlwind. His companion the collagist and painter Jess loved to stay at home, and set limits on their socializing, giving him a steady and artistic home to return to. He was a bohemian dependent upon his comforts, as he himself confessed.
Duncan notes that Kenneth Rexroth, a poet of his time and place, “knew the essential thing was moving down from Yeats,” whom some see as the last Romantic and others as the first modernist. “Shelley's poetry absorbs and breaks the forms that precede it, and it ripples like a muscular being, and it surges forward, and it invents its own rules.” An apt description of Duncan at his best. "Poetry has no rules,” he insists.
__________
Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory and has been collaborating with musicians in recent years. Her forthcoming book of poems (from Pressed Wafer) will include a CD of musical settings of her poems. Her other books are Dreaming in Color (Alice James) and Morphology (with photographer Rusty Crump) and Morphology (both by blazeVOX). She has essays in the new journals based in Boston, SPOKE and Let the Bucket Down.