Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation

5. Is the Queendom Enough (without the Queen)? Poetic Abdication in Robert Duncan and Laura Riding

chapter five Is the Queendom Enough (without the Queen)? Poetic Abdication in Robert Duncan and Laura Riding gr aha m lyons The best writers . . . have succeeded because they chose to enter the prison house of language. It is, of course, where we all live, but only those who inhabit it deliberately are able to tell the truth about it. Jerome McGann The privilege of individual freedom of word that poetry bestowed could not be itself a warranty of truth of word. Laura (Riding) Jackson I don’t seek a synthesis, but a melee. Robert Duncan In his 1953 “Statement on Poetics” appended to Donald Allen’s pathbreaking New American Poetry anthology, Robert Duncan lists Laura Riding among his poetic sources. She is one of the “heros, gods and models” he wished to “emulate, imitate, reconstrue, approximate, duplicate.”1 In his characteristically multivalent way, Duncan is quite right: on several counts, Duncan followed Riding’s example. Most in evidence, I suggest, is the way both poets problematized their authorial identity—Duncan by way of a “derivation” from the poets who came before him (undercutting his own originary voice) and Riding by way of a renunciation of a poetic self that fluently “expresses” (an abdication of poetic authority in the service of “truth”). In the only extended examination of the interface between Duncan ’s and Riding’s work, Jeff Hamilton points to another “emulation” (or 90 Is the Queendom Enough? perhaps a “reconstrual”) when he claims that the productive confusions and conflations in their poetics stem from a shared understanding of the limitations of the symbolic and from the humanistic responsibility attached to this knowledge; according to Hamilton, both Duncan and Riding encouraged a poetic oscillation between “communal and inner lives” and saw this structured indeterminacy as a profoundly social obligation—an obligation to articulate the problematics of representing truth.2 Indeed, we could say that Riding foregrounded the problematic tripartite relationship between self and collective and language for Duncan, who then picked it up and sought to attenuate its difficulties through a radical (though “derivative”) poetics. The responsibility—one is tempted to say the burden—of this task led both poets to take a poetic hiatus of sorts for an extended period of time: Duncan waited sixteen years (1968–84) between major publications, and Riding abandoned poetry altogether in 1938 and never returned to it.3 Riding was convinced in the end that poetry unnecessarily and amorally valorizes the poet as subject, that it ultimately fails in an idealized “attempt to make language do more than express; to make it work.”4 Unfortunately, as Riding informs us in The Telling many years later, “Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.”5 Because of this inherent dishonesty, Riding “ended, in [her] movement in the poetic path, at no-end.”6 That Duncan chose to reenter the realm of mainstream publishing in spite of the compromises and frustrations that came along with that process suggests that his faith in poetry—in his compositional apparatus, in its potential effects, in its participation in a community of readers, in poetry’s claim on “truth”—endured Duncan’s doubts in a way that Riding’s, up to her death in 1991, did not.7 One might speculate, then, that Duncan found a way to “reconstrue” Riding’s “model” into a poetics that could move beyond the singularity of the “poetic path” Riding lays out for him. Indeed, Duncan’s poetics move toward a “field” wherein the singular voice of the poet could join in a sort of collective participation of readers and writers that makes up the idealized and complex space of poetic composition. I would like to sketch out further this as yet infrequently explored relationship between truth, poetic identity, and composition strategies in the Graham Lyons 91 work of Laura Riding and Robert Duncan, to begin to work out how Duncan ’s poetics manage to incorporate and answer Riding’s critique of poetic identity and her call for “abdication” in Anarchism Is Not Enough. What enables Duncan to return to that broader audience with the publication of Ground Work yet still hold himself to Riding’s standard? Can we read Laura Riding’s abdication—the aporia of her poetic hiatus—in Duncan’s derivations from her work? As a schematic starting point, I propose that Duncan’s “imitat[ion],” “emulat[ion],” “approximat[ion]” of Riding’s poetics take...