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Remains To Be Seen Robert Duncan: A Poet’s Art So for me there is a question: Is there a me? I? What I do is that I pose a creative process in which I assemble me from surrounding facts including the body and so forth. —Robert Duncan1 “Robert would come to these parties, and if nothing else was going on, he could always draw. It was a form of play.” So said an artist friend of the poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988), whose graphic works are currently on display in a fascinating exhibition set up at two UC Berkeley locations: the Art Museum and the Bancroft Library. “Play” is a central element in any description of Duncan, whose rich, dense, brilliant verse was at once a challenge and an inspiration to anyone who came into contact with it. If we ask what “consciousness” is, we might answer that it is whatever, in our deep need for its representation, we may choose to make it be at any given moment. For Duncan, consciousness was bound up and intertwined with words like childhood, magic, romance, primal. “I am everywhere involved in religion,” he once remarked with amusement, “but nowhere does my involvement produce a church.”2 Acutely aware of all the artistic ramifications of Modernism—and constantly paying homage to them in his work—he nevertheless produced a poetry rooted in what Modernism always represented as its generic enemy: Romanticism. “I see always,” he wrote in one of the poems of his great book, The Opening of the Field (1960), “the underside turning.” “Seeing” was by no means a simple thing for Duncan. A childhood accident he suffered at the age of three left him permanently cross-eyed, and his work refers on numerous occasions to his peculiarity of vision: being cross-eyed, I have been subject all my life, except for the first three years, to one of the states of presentational immediacy . . . When I look at something, I see it double 69 70 The Dancer and the Dance and I can never tell which one is the real one—the one which I see with my left eye or the one that I see with my right eye. As a child I used to go forward and touch it.3 Indeed, “seeing” in the sense of “point of view” was also problematical for Duncan: When a man’s life becomes totally so informed that every bird and leaf speaks to him and every happening has meaning, he is considered to be psychotic. The shaman and the inspired poet, who take the universe to be alive, are brothers germane of the mystic and the paranoic. 4 But it was not only Duncan’s status as psychotic/shaman or as “cross-eyed bear” (“Gladly, the cross-eyed bear,” he wrote, punning, in The Opening of the Field) or his advocacy of a Romantic esthetic which caused him problems. He was also, from the start, courageously committed to an explicitly homosexual Eros, speaking at one point of the search for “a homoerotic Christ.”5 His pioneering essay, “The Homosexual In Society,” “the first discussion of homosexuality which included the frank avowal that the author was himself involved,”6 appeared in Dwight MacDonald’s journal, Politics in 1944 and was the direct cause of John Crowe Ransom’s rejection of a previously-accepted poem of Duncan’s for The Kenyon Review. “Blind lifelines,” Duncan wrote in that essay, “—what Darwin illuminates as evolution—has its creative design, and in that process a man’s sexuality is a natural factor in a biological economy larger and deeper than his own human will.”7 Given such cross-currents (and there are more: I have yet to mention his lifelong interest in the occult, his adoptive parents having been ardent Theosophists, or the fact that his blood-mother died in giving birth to him), it is not surprising to discover that Duncan had difficulty in balancing everything against everything else, that the question of “unity” would be a major issue in his work. Pound’s Cantos provided one of the solutions for this dilemma, but, at the same time, throughout his life, Duncan remained close to many painters—some of whose works he and his lover of nearly forty years, the artist Jess, collected and kept. As Duncan was a kind of “Sunday painter,” so Jess was a kind of “Sunday poet,” and the interpenetration of these art forms, writing and painting, seems to have been...

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