I have been sitting in the chair by
the window and the biography of Robert Duncan by Lisa Jarnot is now to gather
dust though I have now again read the
death of the poet scene. One always
reads that scene first in any biography.
I also have the first of the collected poems of Robert Duncan from
University of California Press and I have the complete GROUND WORK published by
New Directions.
And that is as far as I have
gotten. Really. Does a single poem of Duncan’s remain in common
currency, a poem a person might open their own shroud to be with?
I think not. He “lives” on in the publicity of San Francisco,
a background to the story of Jack Kerouac sending his creations Sal Paradise
and Dean Moriarity…. Duncan, part of that “ever expanding American Bloomsbury”
as Fank MacShane labeled them too many
years ago… with the same proliferating biographies and collected works by every
single person who can in anyway be connected to the foundation book by Jack
Kerouac, ON THE ROAD.
And no matter: ON THE ROAD is fully
secure as MOBY DICK in the imagination of American literature.
The Jarnot
biography is the last biography of a poet I will ever attempt. A catalog of trivia: and this happened and then this happened and
then this happened… if only there had been some real attempt to let the reader
into the why of Duncan which of course is poetry… but I think I was hoping for
some attempt to give me a reason to read Duncan… it is more just a listing of
readings, classes taught, men groped…feelings, feelings for something.
Duncan’s
work arrives after Eliot, after Pound, after Zukofsky… after Olson and Olson just about exhausted my patience
which is actually sustained by the memory of John Currier a native of Gloucester---
you can see the connection to Olson--- but remembering Dahlberg’s objection to
Olson: he wanted to be original--- John who died too young and at whose wedding I was
best man and to my regret did not make better my case for becoming the husband
of the woman who I had introduced to John and with whom… a walking about with
this widow in England near Brighton… the ravens in the trees and just apart:
Denise is now in Trinidad… she who I showed Patchogue to… John whose work is
only remembered now in the stacks of the Hollins University library: the only American heir to Firbank and Lewis
Carroll. (poetry division)
Yet there is room for Ronald Johnson
and Lorine Niedecker and Jack Spicer and Susan Howe who seem at this moment of--- as they say--- an urgency as I
am also attempting to read the notebooks of Leopardi, the Zibaldoni (2502 pages
including introduction, indexes and notes…)…
And of Duncan: “The Mind
---the fucking Mind! The
stars in Its thought/shine forth in abysses, “night” spaces,/ the fucking alone
brought us deep into.? Circling.
Circling, circling, the matter of Love. (GROUND WORK pp 184-5)
On 19 March 2013: I am neither strong enough nor weak enough to
continue.
