Abstract
After publishing The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968) and at what appeared then to be the height of his career, Robert Duncan publicly declared in his revised edition of Caesar’s Gate (1972) that he would not “issue another collection of my work… until 1983 at which time fifteen years will have passed.”2 Duncan’s remarkable gesture of postponement is, as Michael Palmer has stated, a “story… well-known in poetry circles” (GW, ix), and its implications for the poet’s future work form one of the many strands running through this anthology. All of the essays gathered here variously address the late writings of Robert Duncan, defined as those texts following the publication of Bending the Bow. In these introductory pages, I would like—after Duncan—to compose a ground for these readings by mapping out some of the historical, bibliographic, and archival contexts surrounding Ground Work, his final volume of poetry.
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Notes
Although all three are copyrighted 1968, The Truth and Life of Myth, The First Decade, and Derivations didn’t appear until early 1969. See Robert J. Bertholf, Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1986), 85–86, 95–100.
Jack R. Cohn and Thomas J. O’Donnell, “‘The Poetry of Unevenness’: An Interview with Robert Duncan,” Credences 3, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 101.
Robert Peters and Paul Trachtenberg, “A Conversation with Robert Duncan (1976),” Chicago Review 44, no. 1 (1998): 110.
Robert Duncan, “Statement by the Author on the Following Poem,” Wch Way 4 (Summer 1982): 5. See also the prose introduction to the pamphlet reproducing a holograph version of “The Feast: Passages 34” included in Tribunals: Passages 31–35 (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1970); “A Preface,” Maps 6 (1974): 1–16; and “Some Notes on Notation” (GW, 3–5).
Robert Duncan, Poems from the Margins of Thorn Gunn’s “Moly” (San Francisco: Robert Duncan, 1972)
Duncan, A Seventeenth Century Suite ([San Francisco]: Privately published, 1973). Like the 1971 Prospectus, these titles were multilithed reproductions from Duncan’s typescripts, although by the end of 1974, he had acquired his own Gestetner duplicator and a Gestetner electronic copier.
Quoted in James Olney, “Editorial Note,” Southern Review 21, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 1. See also Rodger Kamenetz’s introduction in the same issue to “Realms of Being: An Interview with Robert Duncan,” 5–9.
Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 69.
Andre Norton, Forerunner Foray (New York: Ace Books, 1973), 20–21. This exact quotation, dated March 25, [1982], appears in Notebook 66 with the note, “In the opening chapter of Andre Norton’s Forerunner Foray I think I have found the title of Ground Work IF. ‘in the dark.’ ” There are several books by Norton in Duncan’s personal library in the Poetry Collection, but this one is not there.
Michael Davidson, “A Felt Architectonics of the Numinous: Robert Duncan’s Ground Work,” Sulfur 12 (1985): 133–39
George F. Butterick, “Seraphic Predator: A First Reading of Robert Duncan’s Ground Work” Sagetrieb 4, no. 2/3 (Fall and Winter 1985): 273–83; Mark Rudman, “The Right Chaos, the Right Vagueness,” New York Times Book Review, August 4, 1985; and Ken Irby, review of Ground Work II: In the Dark, by Robert Duncan, Conjunctions 12 (Spring 1988): 281–88. Duncan himself kept a file of Ground Work reviews.
See Thomas Parkinson, “The National Poetry Award,” Sagetrieb 4, no. 2/3 (Fall and Winter 1985): 309–21, which features a reproduction of the award certificate with the names of its 300 petitioners, board member Parkinson’s description of the award’s founding, and select comments testifying to Duncan’s contributions to poetry. The full archive of correspondence relating to the award is in the Robert Duncan Collection in the Poetry Collection.
Norman Finkelstein, “Late Duncan: From Poetry to Scripture,” Twentieth-Century literature 51, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 341.
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© 2011 James Maynard
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Maynard, J. (2011). (Re:)Working the Ground: An Introduction. In: Maynard, J. (eds) (Re:)Working the Ground. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119932_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119932_1
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