Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation

4. The Airs of Duncan and Zukofsky

chapter four The Airs of Duncan and Zukofsky jeffrey t witchell-wa as No one was more responsible than Robert Duncan for initiating the remarkable public reemergence of Louis Zukofsky during the late 1950s and 1960s, yet in many respects the elder poet’s poetics were antithetical, indeed antipathetic, to Duncan’s own. Zukofsky would appear to represent those tendencies of modernism that Duncan characterized as “Puritan,” against which he posed his own poetic values.1 Whereas Duncan advocates mythopoetics, esoteric knowledge, romanticism, extravagant poetic rhetoric , and an insistent dramatization of the poem within a cosmic framework, Zukofsky is this-worldly, rationalist, rigorous, and restrained and projects a deheroicized role of the poet. That Duncan placed Zukofsky in his pantheon of mentors was, however, more than merely another instance of the infinite elasticity of his self-declared derivative poetics, for in many respects Zukofsky was important to Duncan precisely as a challenge and poetic antagonist. By Duncan’s own account, he came upon the objectivist Zukofsky early, in the late 1930s, digging in libraries for an alternative modernism to counter the conservative version being established under the aegis of T. S. Eliot. In this context, Duncan’s advocacy may have been nothing more than that Zukofsky was associated with the right party, so to speak, sponsored by Pound and representing the next generation of an intrepidly experimental American poetry pushed underground by the conservative realism of the war emergency. By the late 1940s Duncan was in correspondence with Zukofsky, and in the spring of 1955 he carried several of Zukofsky’s works with him 68 The Airs of Duncan and Zukofsky to Mallorca, where he shared them with Robert Creeley, who immediately became a lifelong enthusiast. Zukofsky’s appearance in the Black Mountain Review a few months later was his first significant appearance among the as-yet-undesignated “New American” poets, and Creeley publicly advocated Zukofsky’s works whenever and wherever he could. Duncan also urged Jonathan Williams to publish Zukofsky, resulting in the beautiful Jargon Press edition of Some Time (1956). Both of these publications alerted Cid Corman to Zukofsky, eventually resulting in the Origin Press publication of “A” 1–12 (1959) and the collection of short fiction, It Was (1961), as well as featuring Zukofsky in the second series of Origin magazine (1961–64). For Zukofsky , now well into his fifties, these volumes represented his first books that were not more or less vanity publications and laid the groundwork for his remarkable renaissance among young poets throughout the 1960s. Meanwhile , Duncan himself was responsible for Zukofsky’s invitation as poet in residence at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College in the summer of 1958, for which his major statements on poetics were gathered together as 5 Statements for Poetry and published in a mimeograph edition. Duncan’s role in such familiar networking is merely a small example of his lifelong endeavor to uncover and promote an alternative, underground modernism as a context for his own work, which always relied heavily on the idea of a conducive, if contentious, sense of poetic community and tradition.2 In Duncan’s various critical comments on Zukofsky—never extensive and often found in interviews—he frequently places him in antithetical relation with Charles Olson.3 As Duncan liked to say, these two poets could not read each other, yet for him and many of his contemporaries they defined a range or field of “what poetic consciousness might be” (Fictive, 213). While the older modernists defined the tradition within which Duncan identified himself, their achievements were already largely complete, whereas Zukofsky and Olson, slightly older bridging figures in the 1950s and 1960s, were still very active in forwarding the developments of experimental modernism . Yet in Duncan’s mind they virtually spawned each other as necessary and dialectically related mappers of the way forward from the heroic generation of modernists. At various times Duncan describes their effect on him as “a call to order,” although in very different senses.4 Olson’s explosive, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas 69 brilliantly speculative explorations of the repressed unconscious repositories of psychic energy contrast sharply with Zukofsky’s disciplined, rigorous formalism. While Duncan knew both poets personally, his relationships with them were asymmetrical: obviously, in the case of Olson he was much closer in terms of friendship, exchanges, and a general sense of collaborating in a larger poetic scene, whereas Zukofsky insisted on a formal...