Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation

12. Talking Cosmos: Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson

chapter t welve Talking Cosmos: Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson peter o’leary 1 Curiously, the source for one of Robert Duncan’s most influential statements about his poetry is the jacket copy for the first New Directions printing in 1969 of his book Roots and Branches, published originally by Scribner in 1964. “I am not an experimentalist or an inventor,” intones Duncan , “but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters—Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov.” This statement resonates with the pronouncements found in Duncan’s “Pages from a Notebook,” first published in 1953 but placed famously after Olson’s “Projective Verse” in The New American Poetry from 1960, in which Duncan asserts his work to be a “composite indecisive literature, attempting the rhapsodic, the austere, the mysterious, the sophisticated, the spontaneous ,” further claiming, “where I am ambitious only to emulate, imitate, reconstrue, approximate, duplicate: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Cocteau, Mallarmé, Marlowe, St. John of the Cross, Yeats, Jonathan Swift, Jack Spicer, Céline, Charles Henri Ford, Rilke, Lorca, Kafka, Arp, 232 Talking Cosmos Max Ernst, St.-John Perse, Prévert, Laura Riding, Apollinaire, Brecht, Shakespeare , Ibsen, Strindberg, Joyce Cary, Mary Butts, Freud, Dalí, Spenser, Stravinsky, William Carlos Williams, and John Gay,” adding H.D. in a subsequent paragraph.1 2 Derive, from the Latin derivare, “to turn a stream from its channel,” from de-, “from,” and rive, “river; or, from a river.” Its cognate in literary thought is influence, from the Late Latin, influentia, “a flowing in,” from the Late Latin influere, “to flow in,” from in- plus fluere, “to flow.” From a river flowing in. Or flowing in from a river. But there’s a pun coursing through Duncan’s notion of the derivative. He claims derivation in contradistinction to experimentation and innovation. One of the definitions of derive is “to originate.” As in one chemical deriving from another. It’s also suggestive of the descent of one organism from another in a process that involves structural changes, namely, evolution. In claiming derivation, Duncan is suggesting that he originates from the figures he lists—“dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit”—and that he is the evolved organism of this process. And what is flowing into Duncan? Not only poetry but tradition. From the Latin traditio, from traditus, which is the past participle of tradere, “to deliver.” As in delivering something into the hands. As part of a trust, as a part of a legally binding covenant. Duncan is claiming to be carrying the tradition delivered into his own hands by poetry itself. Here, a recitation from Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is useful . “Tradition,” writes Eliot, “is a matter of much wider significance [than following the ways of the generations immediately before us]. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” For the poet willing to undertake this great effort, Eliot assures us that “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”2 Though this labor is great, its potentials are boundless. Tradition serves as a vast, renewable resource. Nathaniel Mackey, writing of Duncan’s derivative poetics, suggests that Duncan “shows tradition to Peter O’Leary 233 be porous rather than impermeable, to be fissured and incomplete rather than comprehensive and monolithic.”3 Furthermore, Mackey insists, “Duncan ’s repeated recourse to the work of predecessor poets as sources for his own work attests to limits dialectically related to a theme of unboundedness found in his and their work. His having to do with sources leads to the idea of a transcendent Source.”4 Duncan himself reads tradition as astrology, the sublunary influences of destiny and fate: “In the constellation of Poetry there are thousands of distant stars and more immediate planets, lighting the night sky of those who delite in that art with a plenitude of brilliancies, and in time each new poet in his vocation comes to realize that he has a kind of...