"Not to Creation or Destruction but to Truth": Robert Duncan, Kenneth Anger, and the Conversation between Film and Poetry

Aesthetic values characterized in part by serial form, liberatory depictions of male queerness, and an allegiance to or engagement with hermetic magic practices are generally recognized as part of Robert Duncan's overall poetics. This essay is a modest attempt to situate those poetics within the context of Robert Duncan's decades-long friendship with filmmaker Kenneth Anger. I write this primarily because no published work has as yet investigated the possibility that "New American" or "Underground" Cinema¹ had an effect on Duncan's work, despite the fact of Duncan's well-known interactions with filmmakers including Anger, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, and others.

Indeed, the two published monographs that focus on Duncan's work (Peter O'Leary's Gnostic Contagion and Mark Jacob's Robert Duncan) do not at any point discuss the fact of Anger's and Duncan's mutually influential friendship, much less the effects film had formally on Duncan's output. Clearly, the time has come to think about the relationship between Anger's film and Duncan's poetry—my hope is that this essay will lead to further exploration not just of the affinities that Duncan's work had with Kenneth Anger's practice, but of the aesthetic and social interactions between innovative writers and filmmakers of the postwar era generally. The fact is that so many poets affiliated with the "New American poetry"—John Ashbery, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, Helen Adam, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg come to mind—collaborated extensively with their filmmaker peers, including Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, and Alfred Leslie. I wish to position this essay, then, as an "opening of the field," to use Duncan's well-known phrase, one that will simultaneously reveal new interpretative strategies for Robert Duncan's poetry specifically and inspire scholarship on the as-yet undocumented valences between American film and poetry of the postwar avant-garde.

Robert Duncan's "Modernist Shame"

In sifting through the correspondence between filmmaker Kenneth Anger and poet Robert Duncan, and in reading sections of Duncan's unpublished "Notebooks," we find Duncan referring in various ways to the influence that Anger had on his developing poetics and "spirit." In a notebook entry, Duncan wrote:

The violations of art are ruthless, and Kenneth Anger's film in reaching out to disturb the centers of life has corrupted his actors until thru the decompositions of their individual being enigmatic avatars appear; he has corrupted the motion of the film, ripening it and pushing it on to the inertias of human pleasure . . . O felix culpa, Augustine cries—And this cry I heard repeated as I lay awake after this film. These images of pleasure having forced themselves thru Anger's art to address my spirit that recoils at pleasure. For all spirit as it has dedicated itself to joy has sought, as it is weak, escape from pleasure and, as it is strong, defeat of pleasure . . .

Whatever the war of our existence—in living we are at every moment upon a partisan front—of this world or the other, the artist is dedicated finally not to life or to death, not to creation or destruction but to truth. And this is the final authenticity of Anger's art: it has not shied from the true thing which its process reveald [sic].²

Here, Duncan grants Anger credit for challenging his resistance to heightened sensuality and pleasure: "These images of pleasure having forced themselves thru Anger's art to address my spirit that recoils at pleasure." Duncan appears to look to Anger in part for permission to go back to what at this point in time seems like a practically corny, Romantic conceit—the pursuit and enactment of "truth." As Keats, Coleridge, and Blake understood before him, Duncan sees inherent in the moving visual image (be it the magic of absinthe-induced hallucination, vision, or the "process" that finds light projected onto the cinema screen) a point of entry into a state of consciousness free from binaries. Interestingly, words including "decompositions...