Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation

3. Textual Poetics and the Politics of Reading in Duncan’s “Night Scenes”

chapter three Textual Poetics and the Politics of Reading in Duncan’s “Night Scenes” siobhán scarry Robert Duncan’s 1964 collection Roots and Branches opens with the fig-­ ure of the Monarch “tracing out of air unseen roots and branches of sense / I share in thought.”1 It is a fitting way to begin a collection in which the poet will so thoroughly and with such a capacious vision explore the literary and personal influences on his work. True to the movement of the Monarchs, which “sail” and “[flit]” in the opening poem, the derivations and inspirations throughout Roots and Branches range widely, from H.D. to Charles Baudelaire and from William Blake to Jesus to Erik Satie. Michael André Bernstein suggests that critical traction for highly intertextual work such as Duncan’s can best be gained through a “willingness to attend to the intricate and enormously diverse modes of its realization.”2 In the case of Duncan, this diversity of modes can occur even within a single poem, as the text and textual history of “Night Scenes” attests. This essay explores this single poem from Duncan’s 1964 collection, tracing its derivations and its genetic history and opening a reading of the poem that may help to expand the critical conversation about both the textual practices and political import of Duncan’s derivative poetics. “Night Scenes,” a three-part serial poem that explicitly takes up the affective and material practices of gay male cruising, is a derivative poem in 46 Textual Poetics and the Politics of Reading myriad ways, engaging in a textual practice that, as Duncan himself later describes, pulls from “multiple kinds of source.”3 Part 1 of the poem, which opens onto the New York streets at night where those “seeking to release Eros” must contend with the pressing threat of the police, exists in fascinating relationship to an epistolary corpus between Duncan and Bay Area poet Mary Fabilli.4 Letters and an unpublished poem of Duncan’s reveal the interpersonal context and the body of accompanying texts around which Duncan composes and frames “Night Scenes.” In the second part of the poem, Duncan provides a rereading of Shakespeare ’s Ariel from The Tempest. Genetic study of this section also uncovers a revisionary praxis that submerges the “textual derivations” of early drafts in service to bringing forth the sexual content of the poem as material fit to stand on its own. References to and quotes from André Breton pepper the third section of the poem. More than simple appropriation or citation, Duncan ’s use of Breton is also that of literary interpretation and, as it turns out, prototranslation. Duncan pulls both text and context from Breton’s poem “Pleine marge” (“Full Margin”), refashioning, dislocating, and reinterpreting the poem in ways that not only produce a rereading of the source text but also serve the larger vision of “Night Scenes.” Duncan’s translation of “Full Margin,” which he produced in the year following the first publication of “Night Scenes,” was never published, though others of Duncan’s Breton translations found their way into print. Though “Night Scenes” proceeds through the disjunctions and discontinuities one often encounters in serial poems, and though the derivations range in catholic fashion from Renaissance drama to contemporary surrealism , Duncan’s use of derivations within the poem reveals a surprising unity of vision. Michael Davidson, among other critics, has pointed to the ways in which Duncan’s use of literary texts within his poems permit him “to write himself into a tradition . . . [and] [refigure] the tradition as sexual.”5 Whether choosing the placement of a phrase from Breton or working to revise the punctuation in part 2 of the poem, at every textual turn Duncan puts derivation to the task of writing homosexuality back into the canon. In “Night Scenes” this is not simply a celebratory or uncomplicated move, nor is it merely an end in itself. With cruising as the through-line among Siobhán Scarry 47 the three parts of the poem—from the New York streets at night to the sexual consummation “stumbling, / into whose arms” (“Night,” 7) to the morning streets of Paris, where “half-naked men” (9) draw the speaker’s attentions—Duncan figures desire throughout as mobile and circulating, all within the mediated space of urban environments. In linking mobility, sexuality, and urban modernity, “Night Scenes,” for all else that it does, may also...