Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation

7. Derivation or Stealth? Quotation in the Poetry of Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson

chapter seven Derivation or Stealth? Quotation in the Poetry of Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson ross hair The goods of the intellect are communal; there is a virtu or power that flows from the language itself, a fountain of man’s meanings, and the poet seeking the help of this source awakens first to the guidance of those who have gone before in the art. Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book Plunder, O poet. H.D., Tribute to the Angels Why do we read? What are our motives for opening a book? Are we looking for pleasure, knowledge, instruction? When Barry Alpert, editor of VORT magazine, asked Kansas-born poet Ronald Johnson (1935–98) the same question in 1974, Johnson answered: “I read to steal.”1 For a poet whose resourcefully eclectic “magpie gleanings of song” take in everything from poetry, music, art, and science as well as snippets from everyday life, this admission of stealth is an apt summary of how Johnson’s collage poetic operates.2 As Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi stress, “Authorship does not exist to innocent eyes: they see only writing and texts.”3 Therefore, a level of cunning and artfulness is necessary if one is to see the multiple factors that produce a text. Johnson’s own stealthy strategies foreground a number of pertinent questions about authorship, originality, and the creative possibilities and permissions that intertextuality affords the poet. 130 Derivation or Stealth? Johnson’s stealth significantly recalls the derivative poetics of his friend and mentor Robert Duncan, who, in The Artist’s View, famously claims to be “ambitious only to emulate, imitate, reconstrue, approximate, [and] duplicate ” an eclectic range of influences and models.4 But is Johnson’s stealth the same as Duncan’s poetics of derivation? I want to address this question by examining how Johnson read Duncan in the mid-1960s. “Duncan was more a poet to learn ideas from than technique,” Johnson writes in a letter to Peter O’Leary. “Ah how I miss Robert,” he continues, recalling his friendship with “the Dunc who was always available to bounce ideas off and talk Cosmos” (RJ, 590). But Duncan has given Johnson more than just “ideas” and has played a practical role in his poetry, providing Johnson with poetic techniques and strategies that he applies in The Different Musics. This, Johnson ’s third major collection comprises the poems he wrote between 1966 and 1967 and forms the second half of his 1969 collection, The Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses.5 Duncan plays an important role in the new direction Johnson’s poetry takes during this period, with Duncan’s poem “The Fire, Passages 13”—first published in the April 1965 edition of Poetry—providing Johnson a platform for sounding the different musics of his own poetry.6 As Johnson acknowledges in the introduction he gave for Duncan’s reading at the San Francisco Poetry Center on September 22, 1984, Duncan’s poetry gave him not only the creative permission he was seeking at the time but also “tools” that would help him find his own voice. Like no one else, he ever, too, left room on the page for my own inspiration to grow and flourish. The title poem of my third book, The Dif­ ferent Musics, was not only dedicated to him, it used his tools to break new ground for my own poetic. He is also one of the two friends I have on this earth who knows everything I want to know, and always gives me more than I imagined.7 But what are these “tools,” and how do they help Johnson “break new ground” in his own poetics? My intention is to consider the range of tropes, images, and techniques that Johnson “steals” from Duncan’s work. “The Different Musics” is not, I argue, simply a derivation of “The Fire” but a poem that skillfully assimilates a number of salient sources into its own Ross Hair 131 unique music. By following Johnson’s reading of Duncan it is possible to see the wider implications—both in terms of practice and ethics—of Johnson’s stealth and the ways in which it differs from Duncan’s derivative poetics. alpert saw enough of a similarity between the poetics of Johnson and Duncan to prompt the question: “Do you ever think of yourself as a ‘derivative poet’ in Robert Duncan’s sense of the word?” Johnson answers...