 | This article includes a list ofgeneral references, butit lacks sufficient correspondinginline citations. Please help toimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(June 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988[1]) was anAmerican poet and a devotee ofHilda "H.D." Doolittle and theWestern esoteric tradition[2] who spent most of his career in and aroundSan Francisco.[3] Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of theNew American Poetry andBlack Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition ofPound,Williams andLawrence. Duncan was a key figure in theSan Francisco Renaissance.[4]
As a poet andintellectual, Duncan's presence was felt across many facets of popular culture. His name is prominent in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture and in the emergence ofbohemian socialist communities of the 1930s and 1940s, in the Beat Generation, and in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, influencing occult andgnostic circles of the time. During the later part of his life, Duncan's work, published byCity Lights andNew Directions, came to be distributed worldwide, and his influence as a poet is evident today in both mainstream andavant-garde writing.[5]
Duncan was born inOakland, California,[6] as Edward Howard Duncan Jr. His mother, Marguerite Pearl Duncan, had died in his childbirth. He was her tenth child and the delivery was at home to avoid the risks of contracting the so-calledSpanish influenza at a medical facility.[7] Duncan's father was unable to afford him, so in 1920 he was adopted by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes, a family of devoutTheosophists.[8] They renamed him Robert Edward Symmes in honor of a family friend.[7]
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 theastrologers, his mother was to die shortly after giving birth, and he was to be ofAnglo-SaxonProtestant descent.[9] 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. He 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. The family adopted a second child, Barbara Eleanor Symmes, in 1920. She was born one year minus one day after Duncan, on January 6, 1920.
After the death of his adopted father in 1936, Duncan started studying at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. He began writing poems inspired in part by hisleft wing politics and acquired a reputation as a bohemian. His friends and influences included Mary and Lilli Fabilli,Virginia Admiral, andPauline Kael, among others.
In 1938, he briefly attendedBlack Mountain College,[6] but left after a dispute with faculty over theSpanish Civil War.
|
| --Michael Palmer[10] |
In 1938, while a sophomore at Berkeley, Duncan met graduate student Ned Fahs at a dance, and the two entered into Duncan's first recorded homosexual relationship, which biographer Ekbert Faas describes as "marriage-like".[11][12] When Fahs graduated, Duncan followed him to Philadelphia, and the couple lived together first there and then in New York. They lived separately while Duncan attended Black Mountain College; by 1940, they were living together again, in Annapolis. The relationship ended not long after, and Fahs married a woman in 1941. Duncan continued to write poetry about Fahs for another twenty years.[11]
In 1941 Duncan was drafted and declared his homosexuality to get discharged. In 1943, he had his first heterosexual relationship, which ended in a short, disastrous marriage. In 1944 Duncan had a relationship with the abstract expressionist painterRobert De Niro Sr.[13]
Duncan's name figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture. In 1944, Duncan wrote the landmark essay "The Homosexual in Society." The essay, in which Duncan compared the plight of homosexuals with that of African Americans and Jews, was published inDwight Macdonald's journalpolitics. Duncan's essay is considered a pioneering treatise on the experience of homosexuals in American society given its appearance a full decade before any organizedgay rights movement (Mattachine Society). It made Duncan the first prominent American to reveal his homosexuality.[citation needed]
After the end of World War II, Duncan returned to theBay Area, where he met the youngGerald M. Ackerman. The two entered into a relationship, living together in a boardinghouse in Berkeley, but broke up after a year.[11] In 1950, Duncan met the artistJess Collins, and in January 1951 the two men took marriage vows and moved in together.[11] The two men collaborated on creative projects throughout their partnership, which lasted until Duncan's death 37 years later.[14]
Duncan returned to San Francisco in 1945 and was befriended byHelen Adam, Madeline Gleason,Lyn Brockway, andKenneth Rexroth (with whom he had been in correspondence for some time). He returned to Berkeley to studyMedieval andRenaissance literature and cultivated a reputation as a shamanistic figure in San Francisco poetry and artistic circles. His first book,Heavenly City Earthly City,[6] was published byBern Porter in 1947. In the early 1950s he started publishing inCid Corman'sOrigin and theBlack Mountain Review and in 1956 he spent a time teaching at the Black Mountain College.[6]
During the 1960s, Duncan achieved considerable artistic and critical success with three books;The Opening of the Field (1960),Roots and Branches (1969), andBending the Bow (1968). These are generally considered to be his most significant works. His poetry ismodernist in its preference for the impersonal, mythic, and hieratic, butRomantic 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 begins with "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow", suggesting one interpretation of "Field" in the title.[15] The book includes short lyric poems, a recurring sequence ofprose poems called "The Structure of Rime," and a long poem called "Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar". The long poem draws materials fromPindar,Francisco Goya,Walt Whitman,Ezra Pound,Charles Olson, and the myth ofCupid and Psyche into an extended visionary and ecstatic fugue in the mode of Pound'sPisan Cantos.[citation needed] AfterBending the Bow, Duncan vowed to avoid the distraction of publication for fifteen years. His friend and fellow poetMichael 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 thatGround 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, byGround Work II: In the Dark.[16]
His correspondence with the British academic and poetEric Mottram, which began in 1971 and continued through to 1986, is published inThe Unruly Garden: Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram, Letters and Essays (Peter Lang), edited byAmy Evans Bauer and Shamoon Zamir.
The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan began appearing in January 2011 from the University of California Press.
The press planned to publish a total of six volumes.[17] However, only four were published with the press confirming that "no further volumes will be issued."[18]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)