I see I always figure there are things that people like and things that people don’t like about Robert Duncan which makes him a kind of difficult person to write about in terms of you know getting uh getting into the Poetry see my experience was when I was
An undergraduate um at the University of Buffalo around 1986 887 I read um Duncan’s book roots and branches or I tried to and I thought this guy is completely out to lunch because he’s writing about trees right and at the time I was very interested in beat poetry and very
Interested in Alan ginsburg’s work and interested in political poetry and I thought how can this guy get away with saying that he’s an experimental poet when he’s writing you know about the roots and the branches of the tree which I equated with you know the kind of the tree
Poem um like the Joyce Kilmer kind of tree poem or the Robert Frost kind of poem about nature um so I wanted to kind of use that as a starting point to open up this idea of field from from there which is why I wanted to ask like what do people think
About Robert Duncan but no one wants to say anything so okay okay so as I talk if you want to interject and say wait a minute I want to talk about that then let’s let’s do let’s do that um this idea of the opening of the field
I’ve taken it from the title of uh book of Duncan from 1960 right which I think is really the beginning of his mature work but I wanted to go back um into the beginnings of Duncan also and maybe that’s something that I should ask do you already know basic biographical okay
Some some okay um d was born in 1919 in Oakland California he was uh his mother died in childbirth and 6 months later he was farmed out to a family uh he was adopted by a basically middle class family the Father Was An Architect uh mother was a school teacher
Briefly she um later became a housewife and socialite um they lived in California and Alam California for the first four years of Duncan’s life and he was adopted uh apparently based on his astrological chart uh the parents were the adoptive parents were theosophists uh his adoptive grandmother was a member of a
Hermetic Brotherhood in Oakland California which was if you know anything about California in the early part of the 20th century there was a lot of that kind of activity going on um there was a big res res acution cult in San Jose and the kind of West Coast um
Post Gold Rush era brought in also a lot of ideas about magic tarot card readings seances so that all that all came into that wild west culture um Duncan’s adoptive family used that in a in a couple different ways um it seemed like it was a serious religious pursuit in
Some ways and in other ways they used that kind of information to give to tell them what to do um in the way that people read um horoscopes these days you know like should should we um should I be working at this job or this other job
And so on uh which is what uh happened in brown 19 let’s see uh when Duncan was about 8 years old so 1926 27 28 uh the family decided to move to Southern California to Bakersfield where the father was going to get a job as a public works architect um but the you
Know the the idea within the family was that this decision had to be made by The astrologers Who they consulted with um so this I wanted to set that up as an idea about um where Duncan is coming from as a kid it’s a very unusual kind
Of childhood um he’s faced not only with being adopted but also with being told that he adopted uh and being told that he was adopted for this specific reason which is that in the context of the myths of the Hermetic Brotherhood um he his chart shows that
He had not been incarnated in an Earthly form since the destruction of Atlantis okay so so it g it gives you a little bit of a sense of what’s going to come into the poems in terms of these ornate Divine orders right um it’s throughout these early years um
As he’s growing up and as he’s hearing these stories from his parents he’s also being told well you know in your previous life you were kind of you know part of this Elite group um and intellectual his his he had an an aunt who was in the Hermetic Brotherhood who
Told him he had he had already been a poet right so that he should move on from there and do something new um he uh he was also told that you know as the reason that he had been brought back was because the current um within his generation the world would
Be destroyed by fire right so previous Incarnation the world is destroyed by water right the destruction of Atlantis and so you know at by the age of eight or nine he’s faced with these anxiety dreams that he’s having because his parents have told him that you know
Basically the world is going to end and that he’s going to be a significant part of it um for whatever reason um Duncan doesn’t become completely psychotic he manages to survive this and to actually turn it into a Poetics um and you know the question does exist how
Much of this does he make up afterwards and how much of it was really a part of his his childhood um when I when I interviewed his sister who still lives in Bakersfield she was also adopted you know she said well I don’t remember any
Of this um at at the at the same time she was a year younger at the same time she she when she showed me what she has the little box of family trinkets you know she has all of the little booklets from the Hermetic Brotherhood the in the
Book about reading tea leaves and the book about numerology you know and she says well this was my mother’s stuff um but she doesn’t remember it as being an active part of the household so my sense of Duncan is always that he expanded that story when
He felt like he needed to to give a lecture or something and keep people from falling asleep um which is why I’m not sure how I feel about lectures but uh but I’m going to proceed anyway okay um 1936 um Duncan went to the University of California at Berkeley he was a freshman
There um and I want to look at this as really the beginnings of this thing that I’m going to call the opening of the field because what I mean by the opening of the field is I I mean this um this these moments where Duncan is
Coming into him a sense of himself as a poet right and it starts for him in high school in Bakersfield he has a teacher there who has studied a little bit of modernism including the work of HD and um DH Lawrence and if you know about this unpublished book of Duncan
Called HD book I don’t know you guys know about some yes no it used to be available online and I think it’s disappeared again yeah it’s gone yeah okay um the HT book is basically a two volume book that was an ongoing project for Duncan it was a study of hd’s work
But it was also a study of modernism um and it’s and it’s there’s a lot of autobiographical information that comes into it um and there are two stories that he tells in the HD book about how he comes into poetry and he saw the HD book as really not only a
Tribute to HD but also a tribute to these women who play this significant role in his life and in the building of his intellect right so um so at the opening of this field at the beginning of this intellectual development um there are these key women there’s his mother his adoptive mother
Um there’s his mother’s sister uh her name was FAA Phillip he you know his aunt Fay she was a DieHard um theosophist she was a poet she was a pharmacist she had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in the pharmacy program she was one of the
First women to go through the University of California system um and you know to graduate in the pharmacy program uh there was this High School teacher named Edna Kio and then there were women who he met at the University of California at Berkeley in 1936 and
1937 um so I wanted to remark on that a little bit to give you a a sense of this this this early life as a as a poet and and how dependent it was um on his connections to these to these women and this is one of the things that he
Doesn’t really talk about or acknowledge in his later work is the is the relationship with his stepmother and um he called her stepmother you know she was adoptive mother whatever but he always referred to her as stepmother um partly I think because whenever she was
Mad at him she would remind him that he was adopted so kind of creepy right um uh last year um Duncan’s sister sent me a stack of letters that she had found in her garage which were letters that Duncan had written to his mother while he was an undergraduate at the University of
California um which I’ve drawn off of here to give you a little bit of a sense of of how important that relationship was um and my and my sense also is that he was often writing home to explain to his family that he wasn’t going to do
Anything that they wanted him to do right and this really kind of passive aggressive way it’s interesting both in terms of his educational life and his political life um so he’s so he’s opening up the what he calls cultural advancement right by creating these lists and he’s sending
These lists home to his to his mother right um this is a letter from probably early 1937 he says uh cultural advancement right music well underway bee toin Bach Brams chaikovsky stravinski WC Revel Strauss Vagner etc etc red this he’s about 18 here red Steinbeck’s M men Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass Jeffers solstice art El Greco Federal Art Exhibit Ella Young’s Celtic lectures now Ella young seems to have been a friend of his high school teacher Edna Kos who was in Berkeley and had a Poetry Club that he would attend um he says at the beginning of a book uh
There’s a book called The years’s catches he says this by my 18th year I recognized in poetry my soulle and ruling vocation only in this art at once a dramatic projection and at the same time a Magic Ritual in which the poet comes into being only in this art it seemed to
Me could my inner nature unfold um with I think with that recognition we see basically the end of Duncan’s academic career you know about maybe eight months into his academic career um he became an uh he he joined the editorial board of a college magazine at Berkeley called the
Oxident and um in a lecture he gives later in 1969 he has this great idea that he calls it the little freshman yes because every time an unusual poem came to the table everyone would say no to it and he would say yes um so he and this I’m going to I’m going
To read you this quote because it’s kind of funny he says um this is this is his later um memory of it this is from 1969 while there were some 20 poets who were ruling the whole scene at the University of California and they all knew what
Poetry was it was Ain and Spencer and I couldn’t see this so when we were looking at student poems they would be no no no no no and a little freshman yes and I had a stubbornness that should have told me I was going to be able to
Hold out for the rest of my life for sure what I didn’t know of course is that I would be the only one to survive at the age of 50 to actually be a poet um and there’s a this is this is the moment where Duncan discovers modernism um and I I
Think it’s kind of important um that when I mean I think what I really want to get at is the the sense of when we when I talk about openings in Duncan’s work when I talk about uh how his work evolves what happens at the beginning it follows through there’s a
There’s a linear sense of of Duncan’s work and Duncan didn’t like the idea of progress in poetry but he you know he talked about process um but there is a there is a pro we can see a progression in his work that he starts off with these ideas of coming out of modernism
Coming out of pound coming out of Stein um coming out of uh I would say uh a little bit out of the ideas of the Hermetic Brotherhood of his childhood but also out of um the information about the occult that comes from the modernism that comes from
HD that comes from pound and comes specifically from the Cambridge classicists and I’m thinking of people like Jane Harris um and the list that happens at the beginning will continue throughout his work and I think this is one of the difficulties that people have with Duncan is that he’ll just start making
Lists of things that he’s reading in the middle of a poem you know and then and then there’s a sense well what do am I supposed to have read this or what does this mean and a lot of times it seems that it’s it’s really for his own
Reference to chart his his progress um he was an obsessive list maker um in his house in San Francisco he had index cards that he would he would write down the names of all of the classical records that he would buy and then he would he would
Kind of cross reference them who had um who the composer was who had actually played it and then where he had it in another part of his collection so he had these big drawers full these boxes of index cards that were all handwritten written you know and I mean the
Obsessiveness of of those kinds of lists I think that you know he’s always going to tell you what he’s reading and where the quotation comes into the poem it’s something he gets a little bit from from pound and um and I think that that’s we see that that early
Um at Berkeley working on this magazine the oent he he meets two writers um Robert hos and woman named Louise Antoinette Krauss and he writes this letter to his mother in 1937 um and this is a great thing about the relationship with the mother because he’s completely he confesses everything
To her you know and he does this right into his late 20s you know and he tell I mean he tells her who he’s sleeping with and you know and what political organization he’s about to join and how he’s not going to join the Army during the second World War and he’s actually
Going to go to India and become a Buddhist and all this stuff and I mean stuff that must have just really freaked her out over and over again but you know and once a week he would write her this these letters um so he he said this is a
Letter to his mom in 1937 I have met this boy at the ey house and a girl who writes beautifully Louise Krauss both of them encourag me to read Elliot and to read bodair the and then in parenthesis the one who wrote flowers of evil I haven’t read either yet both
Warned me to stay away from Stein I told them that I was easily influenced by other people’s cadences uh it’s an interesting moment and actually I was very surprised when I saw this letter because when Duncan talks about this in lectures he says he says that at this point he had already read
Read Elliott and that uh he says that when he meets uh Louise anut crash she says oh no his work is too dramatic he shouldn’t be reading Elliot um he should be reading pound uh that doesn’t come up in any of the letters um so I get the
Feeling that this is an invention later to give this lecture on pound um what comes up in in the lecture in uh some let’s see 69 so we’re moving forward 30 years he says oh well I met with uh Louise antonet Krauss and she said oh you must read pound and and
He says in the lecture and I went trembling and running to a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue and I found there the 30 kantos and I opened the page and read and then went down to the ship and I said I can’t bear it this is too much
For a whole week I went around with and then went down to the ship it was a poem that opened up exactly like an Oz book um Duncan as a child had read uh Frank bombs Oz books obsessively uh as an adult those books uh became the center of his household
The books would were uh in the library in the bedroom they were kind of the Sacred books um again that sense of field and opening into a space of the imagination right that that he really got from from the OS books and he talks about this at
Some at some point in his undergraduate career that when he would meet academics and they would talk about what they were reading he would always say well have you read the Oz books and then he whoever said yes he would spend time with them you so
Um uh so again and then another list that I wanted to to read you from this is another letter to his mother right um where he’s explaining to her that he might not make it through this college thing um and he he took great great pride in that later in life he always
Said well I was never initiated I was never graduated I was never analyzed you know he had this real kind of West Coast Rebel um idea about it but uh so here’s another letter to his mom uh if while I am sweeping I murmur vinsky a couple of
Times I am in absolute ecstasy dos pasos dovi and Dickens I would say to myself write it down on and on for in the night and Over Flowers and in Spare Time talking writing to myself Shakespeare Shelly Sherwood Sheridan Shaw Sophocles Stein Schiller four Saints and 3X fall of a city and murder
In the cathedral and Ezra pound’s kantos um he ended up getting thrown out of the fraternity house that he lived in uh because he was partly because he was flunking out of school and partly because um he had decided to join um something called the uh
ASU which was let me get it right the associate wait I want to get I want to get this right for you the okay the American students union of the Berkeley campus which was a leftist group he decided not to join the Communist the young Communists although
He told his mother that he might and that he had many friends who were young Communists um he gets stumped by his fraternity which was actually a masonic fraternity kind of associated with a hermetic Brotherhood which his parents had kind of gotten him involved in um
As a safe place to be on the road to whatever he was going to do they wanted him to be an architect um or a lawyer or something respectable uh he then met a couple of women and I’m going to get back to these women who kind of feed the whole educational
Process for for him and later throughout his life when he gives lectures or when he talks about politics when he talks about his intellectual life uh he’s a lot of times he’s stealing stories from these women um there’s a lecture that he gives it must be in the early 70s at
Kent State University where he talks about Elliot and the Wasteland and he and he says that the Wasteland is a prediction of the atomic bomb and it turns out that his aunt Fay had written this whole thing about the Wasteland and the atomic bomb and you know it’s like somehow
Never he never mentions this in the lecture where it came from but um so uh at Berkeley leaving the fraternity he meets a woman named Lily failly she has a sister named Mary they’re from the Central Valley and they’re actually they grew up not far from Bakersfield in a town called velia
Um came from a big uh Italian workingclass Catholic Family family had landed in Berkeley um Lily was working for a a wealthy couple as a she was basically a housekeeper um Duncan is supported throughout his undergraduate career and into his early um well Duncan is supported throughout his life by his
Mother’s money um which wasn’t a lot of money but it was enough for him to get by whereas most of his friends at Berkeley were working and kind of starving to death and living with each other in circumstances that weren’t always that great meanwhile all all in
All of his letters home he says could you please send my allowance you know um I’m joining the Communist and please send my allowance uh which interestingly his mother always did she always sent him the money um uh when Duncan met the failly sisters and met another woman named sesily Kramer
Um they they influenced his political life they um persuaded him that he that he should uh think about this idea of the second world war that he should think about not participating that he should think about not participating in the ROC he had to you know mandatory military drills for
Undergraduates at Berkeley um and he opens up a chapter of the HD book with with that um where he says and he’s out on the green with with these two women reading joy and he says in the jostling streams lower classmen some in uniform some still to change into uniform went
From all parts of the campus toward the gymnasium it was the hour for ROTC classes that impended you don’t have to go Lily commanded raising her hand in a dramatic gesture that had been delegated its power by the conspirac of our company stay with Joyce um and then he writes in that same
Chapter of the HD book he says turning from The Authority that the requirements and grades of the University or the approval of my teachers had once had over me to a new Authority in the immediacy of what I had come to love I came into a new fate
Um and I very much think that that when we when you know Duncan comes around in 1960 to call this book the opening of the field that it’s really started there um that you know it started in in high school um in Bakersfield with with this
Teacher who turned him on to to Joyce and and HD and then it moves forward through these women he meets as an undergraduate uh the other uh undergraduate who he meets at that time is a woman named Virginia Admiral who was a painter um she had actually just
Graduated when he met her uh she later came to New York when he was living there they briefly talked about getting married and then she ended up marrying a painter named Robert dairo and then Duncan became jealous and married her best friend uh woman named Marjorie mcke um and then Virginia Admiral who
Who was a she was a student of abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffman um she ended up having a kid who was Robert dairo the actor so um so so these are but these are the these are the women who are in charge of um I mean they’re actually he it’s it’s
Kind of this relationship Works two ways he’s running home from classes to to talk to them and they’re all there um and he’s saying I just wrote this poem and he’s insisting that they listen to these poems and then they’re saying to him well Robert you know you have to do
This this and this read this this and this and by the time he gets to his own sense of the political and starts writing these essays about the political including this essay which is kind of like his early famous essay the homosexual in society you know he’s
Talking about how important it is to um disregard the sense of separatist groups and to understand this field that we call Humanity you know that that uh you know he considers himself an anarchist right he considers that uh when we talk about see there’s an overlap in Duncan’s
Work between the political and between the biological and he’s interested in systems you know so uh when he sees the process of humanity the evolution of humanity he’s very much against um the black nationalist movement he’s very much against um what he called the the ghetto of San
Francisco which was the Castro um he was again he said I’m not a radical queer right he was he was interested in this idea that um that one best expressed oneself politically by being part part of a Continuum of humanity um that disregarded what he called special interest groups that idea entirely came
From these women from Mary and Lily failly it came from Virginia Admiral you know and I remember when I interviewed Lily um she she actually I was shocked because that we had we had gone out to dinner we had talked a lot and then she
Turned to me you know and she said she said well you know the homosexuals in San Francisco they’re all you know part of this separatist organization and she said and and as she was speaking I was hearing the words of this essay from 1944 Robert Duncan you know she’s saying
You know Humanity depends on this togetherness that has nothing to do with separatist groups and on and on and I thought all these years later like this is where this was coming from in Duncan’s work you know um and I mean that’s kind of a side issue because then
If you look at it from a kind of radical political position you can say that Duncan was an incredibly homophobic homosexual but um which is what a lot of his gay friends said that uh he wouldn’t hang out with them at parties and stuff but I’m not going to
Go there right now um I wanted to get at this basic o opening of the opening of the field um so okay well we can actually I can I can start with with that passages piece how long have I been talking a half hour okay um passage over water I
Will go to I will go to that to the um to the to that homosexual moment uh when when Duncan is in Berkeley he meets a he meets a graduate student a guy named Ned fos f a HS um Ned was uh he was studying French he was getting his P PhD
Duncan fell in love with him he was 10 years older than than Duncan um Duncan ended up going to the East Coast with with Ned and um when their relationship ended in 1939 he wrote this poem passage over water um which is again I think for Duncan is
A very significant poem because it’s at the beginning of this work of openings and the and the word passage is very important because um one of the themes of Duncan’s work later is this idea of passages and he has a series of poems called passages um so I’m going to read this
Passage over water we have gone out in boats upon the sea at night lost and the vast Waters close traps of fear about us the boats are driven apart and we are alone at last under the incalculable sky listless diseased with stars let the OES be idle my love and forget
At this time our Love Like a Knife between us defining the boundaries that we can never cross nor destroy as we drift Into the Heart of our Dream cutting the silence slyly the bitter rain in our mouths and the dark wound closed in behind us forget depth bombs
Death and Promises we made Gardens laid waste and over the wastelands Westward the rooms where we had come together bombed but even as we leave your love turns back I feel your absence like the ringing of bells silenced and salt over your eyes and the scales of salt between
Us now you pass with ease into the destructive World there is a dry crash of cement the light fails falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant Shore and within the indestructible night I am alone um the this theme of water comes partly out of a recurring dream that Duncan has as
A kid which is um interpreted of course by his parents because they’re always waiting to hear his dreams because he’s the chosen one from Atlantis um it’s a there’s a great story that he tells uh a friend of his um a writer uh Bob Louise Hawkins who was married to Robert KY and
He he tells Bobby Louise that he would do this trick on his parents he would come down to breakfast in the morning and he would sit down at the table when he you know just a little kid like 10 or 11 and he would say I had the most
Incredible dream last night everyone would stop what they were doing you know so they could write it down and take it to be interpreted but um but one of one of the dreams that he talks about as a recurring dream is this dream where it’s a kind of disaster dream um
Where it comes up in the opening of the field U there’s a children’s game of Ring Around of roses and then he is Crown he’s in the center he’s crowned the king he he ascends to the throne and there’s this sense of impending disaster like a flood right um his parents tell
Him it’s his memory of what happened in Atlantis uh he also points out that in Freudian terms it’s the memory of birth trauma right so and and also he’s coming into writing all of the this you know the beginnings of his work are at a time when he’s obsessed with the beginnings
Of the second world war um so you know and here you have you have it at the end of this passage over water the light fails falls into the ruins of cities Upon A Distant Shore um and I think that we can call this you
Know if if you want to look at Duncan’s work if you want to look at the range of Duncan’s work from beginning to end you’re going to see first of all the passages the opening the corridors right that come out of the his father’s um study of
Architecture um there is a poem I think it’s passages nine it’s called the architecture um we’re going to see from there um the recurring theme of the water and that sense of loss and that story of Atlantis uh in in the opening of the field he
Goes he actually I mean you see how significant that that poem is passage over water and it’s funny because it’s it’s a poem that I’ve rarely looked at and and haven’t thought about that much as really the beginnings of Duncan’s work but we see some let’s see this is
Going to be 20 years later yeah about 1958 he writes a poem called the structure of rhyme 11 right now if if you look at passage over water now listen to this poem here’s here’s the poem 20 years later there are memories everywhere then remember we go out as in the first poem
Upon the sea at night to the drifting of my first lover there is a boat drifting the oares have been cast down into the shell as if this were no water but a wall there is a repeated knock as of hollow against hollow wood against wood stooping to knock on wood
Against the traps of the night Fishers I hear before my knocking the sound of a knock drifting it goes without will through the perilous sound a white sad Wanderer where I no longer am it TAPS at the posts of the deserted Warf now from the last years of my life
I hear forerunners of a branch creaking all night a boat swings as if to sink weight returning to weight in the cold water a hotel room returns from Wilmington into morning a boat sets out without boat into 20 years of snow returning um if you if you know Duncan’s
Work you know you might know that he opens the beginning of uh his groundwork book with a poem called a achilles song which also has that theme of the boat and um is actually a poem that uh responds in some way to his connection to um to HD
Uh and he he he references that at the end of the poem um he this is the other thing I think that’s interesting about Duncan’s work is that when when you’re not sure where he’s coming from or where he’s going he’ll tell you he’ll give you a footnote you
Know he likes to create all of these C cross references okay um so that’s what I I wanted to get at in terms of a start of what I call this o opening of the field the sense of Passage that comes from the early dream life that comes from the stories that
Come from the parents that comes from these women who he meets at Berkeley and then he enters into the poetry and starts to you know find his voice and move into it when he gets to the opening of the field right when this book um when he begins into this book he writes
This poem um often I am permitted to return to a meadow and he and he actually writes letters to friends and he says and now he writes the poem he sends them the poem he says and now I have a book you know and it’s a it’s a
Clear it’s a clear moment for him um you know the book ends up being some 53 poems which is it’s a it’s a real project book where he decides they’re going to be these themes like he constructs it in this certain way it’s a whole it’s the beginning of uh a
Universe for him he likes to think of the book as this place of you know of actual structure of a place that where one can actually enter of a metaphysical space that one is actually steps into um which is where his work is going to differ from Jack Spicer’s work right
Because Spicer is going to say well you can try to do that but the poem is always there’s an artifice to the poem so um it’s not really a metaphysical structure in that way um the the passage uh and the sense of boundary again comes in into this poem I
Want to read this um I also want to know how long I’m should I should talk for um okay I actually I know I think I know where to end this okay I got I got it okay um what I’m going to do is I’m
Going to set this up for you so that you can then go right into the work and and see where the where these threads lead okay so I’m just going to open it out uh often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a scene made up by
The mind that is not mine but is a made place that is mine it is so near to the heart an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made Place created by light where from the Shadows that our forms fall where from fall all
Architectures I am I say our likenesses of the first beloved whose flowers are Flames lit to the lady she it is Queen Under the hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded it is only a dream of the grass blowing East against the source of the
Sun in an hour before the sun’s going down who seek secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold
Against chaos that is a place of first permission Everlasting Omen of what is um the the main text that Duncan has kind of stumbled upon that this poem comes out of is he’s reading um he’s reading the Zohar uh which is this um you know mystical interpretation
Of the of the Old Testament uh you know he’s reading a section of it which is an interpretation of Genesis um in which uh Abraham is about to die and he’s led to this field by God and the field opens up and unfolds and there’s a cave within the field where Adam is
Buried and Abraham and his wife Sarah are supposed to um find their spots next to Adam and Eve in this cave and then God is going to refold this field um so Duncan had he had picked up this five volume set of the Zohar in around 1952
And he seems to have taken part of it with him when he went to Europe um which would have been uh what 1955 is that right yeah okay um he uh he writes the he writes this poem Um partly thinking about that about what he’s read in the Zohar um and he decides that he’s going to write this book the opening of the field which is going to um explore a field of three three themes right first of all this idea of field
Secondly this idea an idea of the dead right we see the dead buried in the field and thirdly uh his third idea is that this there’s a theme called the law right um so that when you get to and you know and and a lot of what you see in
The in the Zohar is this is this idea of law um and he’s very specific that this is not about man-made law this is about Cosmic law right this is about evolutionary law this is about spiritual law this is about you know metap metaphysical law um
So when you go into the opening of of the field he gives you all of those themes in the first poem um where from fall all architectures I am there you have that figure of the adom right the first beloved um you the theme of the Dead she it is
Queen Under the hill you have pany right but you also have the cave and the field and that’s um whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded right straight out of the Zohar um again he brings in now he’s going to
Link this back to the Early Childhood dream whose secret we see in a children’s game of Ring Around of Ro roses told right so he’s putting himself in the cosmic drama right I this is my story I was from Atlantis now I’m here and this is what’s going to happen you
Know and there’s this great you know the the the great continuity of of the human beginning with the architecture of this first man who’s buried in this field in this cave you know so it goes on from there so every poem in this book takes one of these themes and pulls it apart
And pushes at it in some way um I know that some some people have been reading those those Levert Duncan letters um you know and he pushes at that in in the poem uh a storm of white where he’s got he’s living in Stinson Beach and the cat
Dies you know so he goes into the theme of the Dead with the dead cat um Duncan is a great he’s a great Democratic poet in that way because he’ll take anything that’s happening and he’ll bring it in as a you know a sense of part of the
Cosmic drama you know it’s like I mean he’s like the classic paranoid everything takes on meaning you know it’s like the fork falls off the table and then that has to go into a tube because there’s some reason that that happened um so that’s kind of like the basic
Trajectory that I wanted to build in terms of getting at a sense of how the work proceeds and once you get out of the opening of the field all of the other books fall into that order you know and by the time you get to the end
Of it you have this beautiful unfolding of a Duncan really as a master in terms of you know being a I think a metaphysical poet on the level of his favorite seven 1th Century metaphysical poets if you look at the end of uh groundwork one with this poem
Circulations of the song and the beginning of groundwork too um an alternate life right it’s wonderful I mean incredible love poems that I think are really unmatched in you know his generation I mean they’re kind of amazing so um maybe but that’s probably like what I
Need to say and then I can if you have questions maybe that’s what to do now I think yeah okay let clap this u s it seems like also are nice a nice pair because they bring out some of what you’re talking about in the sense of um these things are occurring
But re approaching them from a new Direction and it’s I like the fact that in pass river water but even as we leave your love turns back he’s in the position which it seems like he more often is in the early poems of of orus yeah um and and and often I’m permitted
To return on mea he’s with uh U um which is a strange and interesting shift that that he’s he’s he’s permitted to return as in the return to to Spring that she’s permitted but yeah yeah so it’s I mean that but he’s the lost one potentially yeah yeah and but then
There’s also I think the kind of the the myth of um the kind of early Agricultural Society myth of the Old King and the new King right right so you have to kill off the old King at the end of the year it’s like that’s like the new New Year where
You have the old guy leaving and then you have the baby crawling in right you same kind of thing yeah definitely talk a little bit more about fate I like the phrase new fate also um uh the connection between the field and being fated both from
Loss in the myth way the myth of Atlantis pleas in uh and also F towards loss which looks like part of what’s going on in the passage over water that very strong ending within the indestructible night I so is there a way that can you say something more about
How how how fate fits into your sense well I think that that’s you know it it had to have been a key anxiety for him because this was what he was born into this idea of Fate you know and I mean I I think that it was it in some
Ways it was it had to have been very problematic for him as well because um he had to interpret everything that was happening around him in relation to the Fate that he had already been instructed was his fate you know I mean he uh he would talk about how it didn’t matter
What he did as a kid he couldn’t really get his mother mad or like do things that regular kids did because she would say well that’s your fate you know you’ve we’ve we we this is why we adopted you you’re going to be monstrous and you know so so he he couldn’t really
Get a rise out of her in that way you know um and and it’s interesting because when I met his sister see what what happened in the adoption was that he was the one with the Bad Karma and the sister the younger sister was the one with the Good
Karma right so she had another interesting problem is that she couldn’t get anyone’s attention because they just figured she was going to do her thing and she’d get good grades in school and you know and she and she you know she went on this kind of standard path she
You know she got married to this guy who was an insurance salesman and then she had some kids and stayed in Bakers field her entire life um really had very little sense of what Duncan had done with his life um although she was um curious about definitely curious about
Him so I think that my sense of it is that Duncan was always trying to reinvent fate in a way you know and through the poetry that I mean that was his way of controlling I think what happened um and saying you know and he he often said well I wasn’t initiated
Into this theosophical world it’s not my world you know poetry became the vocation so-called poetry became the religion in a lot of ways um you know but I mean he he has a letter to his mother about the bombing of Hiroshima where he T he takes the stand that um you know
This shouldn’t have happened um there should have been a group of Assassins that got rid of these guys um he really he really wanted to rewrite that scene um fate might be related to this idea of a permit permission and it’s it’s a return back to a place of first permission and
Yet there’s also often I am permitted there is something a permit isn’t necessarily a license it can also be uh an obligation of A Sort but that it’s it’s a return back to place of first permission is there’s a kind of um uh a ren renovative um Vector in that that you’re
Returning back to this one spot so fate relative to permit I think is is a good place to consider that his rebellion of becoming a poet is in fact not really Rebellion because he already was a poet so that that frustration which is interesting in given to what seems to be
An anxiety that you mentioned in regards to uh what he sees his his openness perhaps over openness to influence from the one letter that you mentioned um I mean which I think ties into to the this sort of almost oxymoronic idea of new fate um and uh I mean the one difference
Perhaps in the in the mature more mature poetry is is more of a sense of himself self as poet um uh than as a poet influenced um by other poets I mean do does that does that sound right in some respects yeah I’m trying to process what you just said um
Po I mean the passage over water seems to be honestly not a great poem oh sure well that’s you know that’s the and you sort of riddled I mean ships passing in the night essentially yeah yeah um that well that’s why it’s interesting to
See that um that prog no that to see the prog to see the prog to get to the end of the work and see what he’s done with that to that he’s taken those images and it’s like taken on the yeah yeah no he
He says a great line he says I was a poet who started without Talent you know yeah so I’m this is kind of Shifting Gears but I was just kind of wondering what um like brought you to the project of devoting all this time to writing biography of another poet at this
Point I I loved hearing uh those passages from the mouth yesterday um just wondering what it’s what’s going on for you right now as a poet with these turning to these other projects and you know helping you to clarify your Poetics in some way or work through some stuff yeah I’ve always been
A really slow writer when it comes to poetry so I I like to have different things going on um when I when I was at the University of Buffalo I studied with Robert KY and he brought in a poem of of Duncan to a class he brought the Venice
Poem which is again I mean it’s a very ornate poem it was it was very difficult for me to read it on my own it’s a long poem and and he read and all KY did was he he read it out loud and he would stop
At the end of a line and he would say wow wasn’t that great you know and I and and I became convinced I was like this this is really great like KY thinks it’s great it must be great you know and and at the same time I was working at the um
Poetry rare books collection at the University I was like a student assistant or work study student they had just purchased Duncan’s collection they had his notebooks you know so I kind of snuck in there and I was interested in the notebooks and then the guy who was the curator said well do you
Want to catalog these notebooks you know cuz he and and they were very um everyone there was like don’t touch the dunan stuff you know so I so I said sure so I spent two about 2 and a half years um you know working there like 10 hours
A week or something and reading I read all of Duncan’s notebooks there were 81 notebooks and I made a list of what was on every page of each notebook so um you know about 10 years later I was out teaching at The neuropa Institute in Boulder Colorado and um the poet Ed
Sanders was giving a lecture on book length research projects and I was talking to him afterwards you know and I said well I should really do something like that and he said yeah you should write a a biography of Robert Duncan so that was like 90 1997 so that was when
That started and I yeah so that’s kind of how it happened but and do you I mean do you feel his like that kind of deep uh you know immersion in his life and his work like when you sit down to right now is it do you feel him as a presence and
Some way I think that maybe other people have said this but writing biography it’s kind of like being married to someone you know like it fades in and out like there are moments when you really love the person and feel completely engaged and it feels natural
And there are other times when you just think this guy is a complete you know it’s like I just so um but I still do have that sense of when I look at the poems I think you know what a beautiful moment this is yeah so that definitely remains yeah
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