Robert Duncan Web Feature

America Runs on Duncan

Robert Duncan, “Self-Portrait” (1939), featured on the cover of Chicago Review 45:02

Robert Duncan often wrote in multiple directions at once. His poems, laden with allusions and images, dart around the page as they explore art, myth, and intimacy through polyvalent movements of wordplay and allusion. Similarly, celebrating a centenary involves thinking across multiple temporalities. While the event marks a hundred years since someone’s birth, we more properly celebrate all the life that followed from that birth as well as the legacies that will endure past this hundred-year mark. Any such easy marking of dates seems even more complicated in the case of Duncan, whose personal mythology stretched from his adoptive childhood in California, back to Homeric epics, upward to astrological signs, and inward to psychoanalytically inspired explorations of our subconscious life.

January 7, 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of Robert Duncan’s birth. We take this opportunity to return to some of Duncan’s past work published in Chicago Review, which we are happy to say was a frequent home for his writing over the years. This web feature includes two poems published in 1958 and 1959 and selections from a 1976 interview with Duncan, conducted by Robert Peters and Paul Trachtenberg and first published by CR in 1997. Along with Duncan’s self-portrait and a childhood photograph, these selections span Duncan’s career and life. The earliest of these illustrates Duncan’s childhood that intimately shaped his poetry, whereas the interview captures Duncan as he prepared for his final major project: Ground Work (1984). This breadth of documents testifies to the expansiveness of Duncan’s work and its varied influences and materials. We also include two commentaries on Duncan’s work, one by longtime friend and collaborator Helen Adam, along with a poem that Adam wrote about Duncan toward the end of his life, as well as Duncan’s own introduction to his work, delivered at the Poetry Center in San Francisco.

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This feature’s two visual contributions capture images of Duncan before his writing career really began. The 1921 photograph portrays the setting of his mythologized childhood. The young Duncan (then christened Robert Edward Symmes) stands in a garden in Alameda, California, where his adoptive family lived until 1927. The child turns in two directions simultaneously, inspecting something with his hands—perhaps a leaf picked from one of the plants that surround him—while his head turns toward the camera that captures the moment. There’s a similar divergence of attention in his 1939 self-portrait, drawn with wax crayon. Duncan’s likeness stares calmly, resting his head as his nude body extends outside the frame, extruding into the life that animates the portrait. This calm depiction changes when we consider the production of this self-portrait: rendering his body as passive, at rest, Duncan elides the very process of composition. The active body drawing with the crayon calls attention to its own artifice through this very elision. The separation of a representation from the object to which it refers fascinated Duncan throughout his poetic trajectory, especially shaping his early poetry.

Duncan was first published in CR 12.1 (1958) under Irving Rosenthal’s editorship. The poem “Upon Taking Hold” appeared in the contentious “From San Francisco” feature, alongside work by Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. Compared to something like Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Duncan’s poem probably did not directly contribute to the University of Chicago’s censorship of CR and Rosenthal’s subsequent resignation along with most of the rest of the editorial staff. (This episode is detailed in Eirik Steinhoff’s essay, “The Making of Chicago Review: The Meteoric Years” in CR 52.2/3/4 as well as our forthcoming Big Table web feature.) However, “Upon Taking Hold,” dedicated to Charles Olson, captures a less overt but still vivid sensuality at play in all of Duncan’s poetic creation: “It is to grasp or to measure / a hand’s breadth, / this hand—mine / as I write—.” These lines collapse the objects and agents of representation, allowing these images to ricochet through meditations on the paintings of Paul Cézanne and echoing Duncan’s early experimentation with visual representation in his self-portrait. His play of visual and verbal representation manifests in the phonic and graphic similarities of words, such as his juxtaposition of the words “altered” and “altar,” which turn “the poetry—now—a gesture” laden with concrete and tangible qualities.

Poetry’s gestural qualities also shape Duncan’s poem “The Natural Doctrine,” published in CR 13.4 the following year. The poem meditates on possible inspirations from nature and artifice. Pondering the wonders of nature, language, and the divine, Duncan hopes: “there may be such power in a certain passage of a poem / that eternal joy may leap therefrom.” To resolve these deliberations, Duncan again turns to pictorial representation, quoting J. M. W. Turner’s last words “The Sun is God, my dear” before adding that “the actual language is written in rainbows.” This modified quotation collapses the many materials that compose the poem—the Sun, God, and Language—to inscribe a linguistic underpinning in purely natural phenomena. However, this gesture, which establishes a privileged position for poetry, removes surety in the authority of that written expression, as nobody actively writes this “actual language.” Poetry occurs in the passive voice; it “is written.”

Duncan thought poets must discover such language, rather than craft it authoritatively in their hands. This conviction led the poet to spend his life occupied with intellectual friendships, collaborations, classrooms, and other forms of experimental thinking together, such as in his time at Black Mountain College, where he taught theatre and poetry and worked closely other artists like Olson. Some of this energy is captured in his free-wheeling interview, conducted by Peters and Trachtenberg and excerpted here. In the interview, Duncan discusses the politics of literary publishing, including John Crowe Ransom and the Kenyon Review’s treatment of him as a gay writer, his interest in Jung and H.D., and his hiatus from publishing and preparation for Ground Work, the first volume of which would be published, eight years after this interview. As the interview conveys the power of Duncan’s vision, it also exhibits some of its limits, especially pertaining to race and gender. Such moments let us examine our political and aesthetic pasts from multiple directions, as Duncan might have done—recognizing their achievements alongside their errors—as well as the work yet to do in our own present. Even as we celebrate the past, we might also reconsider the future of poetry and its politics.

Duncan’s centenary year shares the bicentenaries of similarly exploratory American writers Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. His work shares the same enthusiastic sensuality that these earlier writers seized through their own literary experiments. In many ways, he expresses possibilities that these earlier queer writers would not have thought possible. Duncan moves us to explore many more directions, looking to the future and imagining the potential, as-yet-unimagined, unfoldings of literary experimentation. Happy 100th Birthday, Robert Duncan.

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Robert Duncan reading from his own work Wednesday, October 10, 1956

Biographical Particulars:
Born in Oakland, California, January 7, 1919. Studied the civilization of the Middle Ages with Ernst Kantorowicz at the university of California, Berkeley. Poems and essays have been printed in The Phoenix, The Experimental Review, View, The Art, Origin, The Black Mountain Review, Botteghe Oscura, and in the recently published local magazine Ark II, Moby I. In 1954 with Norman MacLeod he conducted the Poetry Center Workshop. After a year in Europe, in the spring of this year he taught classes in writing at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Since September, he has been Assistant Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College, a position provided by [a] Rockefeller Grant.

Of his work Robert Duncan writes:
Decisive influences in my work have been from the first the great inventive Masters of our day: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, among Americans, and from three Masters of English poetry: Yeats, Lawrence, and Edith Sitwell. The music of Stravinsky, Satie, Schönberg and Webern, and the sculpture of Brancusi, the painting of Bernard, Mondrian, and Matisse have all had a major role in the development of my concept of form. I am an Orthodox “Modernist” and formalist. I write for an ideal reader who is more learned in the Art, in the lore of spirit and language, than I shall ever be. No, not for a Grand Master, but for that perhaps even more rare Grand Reader whose subtle mind, demanding as it is, will yet recognize my devotion to subtlety of mind. And thus, extend Grace. Then, in a way, I write for all who have a like devotion.

Upon Taking Hold

for Charles Olson

the world as we reach stretches,
      a hand in sight.
Thumb, Mountain, Tidelands of Lines,
      the heart and head lines,
the palmist said—stars,
      shatterings from Moon
                              to
                  slumbering Venus.

Mt Tamalpais.

      Cézanne restored the destroyd mountain.
And the hand in the painting
      comes up from its illusion
—a man shaped to the world’s fate
      stretches upon his face

to wear the given mask.
Shaking himself from his wars,
      a ready dog.
It is to grasp or to measure
      a hand’s breadth,
      this hand—mine
      as I write—
dares its contradictions,
      comes to rest,
tenses, shakes, seizes or is seized by the mind:

mind, hand, eye,

moves over the keys. It is the exercise.
The poetry—now—a gesture,
a lifting of sentence as the wind lifts,
palm outward in address,
      fingers
               exactly
      curld

—it is a fact—

the words not to be alterd.

Is there another altar than the fact we make,
the form, fate, future dared
desired in the act?

Words can drop as my hand drops (hawk
      on wing
               waits
      weight and

drops
to conquer inarticulate love
leaving articulate

the actual mountain.

This is the bunch of ranunculus,
      rose, butter, orange crowfoot
      profuse bouquet in its white china pitcher;
this is the hookd rug workd in rich color
      the red, blue, ochre,
      violet, emerald, azure,
      the black, pink, rose,
      oyster white, the orange…
this is the orange measurement of the lines
      as I design them.

The joys of the household are fates that command us.

First published in Chicago Review 12:01

The Natural Doctrine

As I came needing wonder as the new shoots need water
to the letter A that sounds its mystery in wave and in wain,
trembling I bent as if there were a weight in words
like that old man bends under his age towards Death?

but it is the sun that sounds day from the first brink,
it is the sea that in its dazzling holds my eye. How
under the low roof of desolate gray
a language not of words lies waiting!
There’s depth, weight, force, at the horizon
that levels all images.

Rabbi Aaron of Bagdad meditating upon the Word and the letters
Yod and Hé
came upon the Name of God and achieved a pure rapture
in which a creature of his ecstasy that was once dumb clay,
the Golem,
danced and sang and had being. Yes, it is true.

Reading of this devout man, I thought:
there may be such power in a certain passage of a poem
that eternal joy may leap therefrom.

But it was for a clearing of the sky,
a blue radiance, my thought cried.

Sublime Turner who dying said to Ruskin,
The Sun is God, my dear, knew
the actual language is written in rainbows.

First published in Chicago Review 13:04

A Conversation with Robert Duncan (1976)

by Robert Peters & Paul Trachtenberg

The following interview was conducted at Robert Duncan’s request in Huntington Beach, California, on May 29, 1976.

Robert Peters: Robert, it is a pleasure to have you here with us, and we hope that we can range over many aspects of your life so far inadequately treated in other interviews and conversations.

Robert Duncan: I have felt dissatisfied with most of my interviews to date, and they have been numerous. So I have come here to you and Paul, to see if I can’t do better. Until now, I’ve had trouble sorting out the matters that pertain to my writing, and those that appeal to the gossipy side of my life.

RP: I see the risks. But why not talk right off about homosexuality, and where models for your life have come from?

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RD: Primarily, our notions of how we should approach our readers derive from psychiatrists’ case histories. This is a case history of Duncan. My first impulse is to tell the story of my shock and personal alienation when I was a hustler. And the topic is salacious. A hustler’s story, including mine, belongs to storyland. We as yet haven’t had our homosexual Proust who relates his personal story in depth. If we had, it might be easier to avoid more superficial stories. We need to understand our gay selves better.

RP: I envy you for living an active gay life from the time you were a young man. Apparently you didn’t sit around in the libraries as I did reading Krafft-Ebing to educate myself and understand that I wasn’t the only male in the world suffering sexual turmoil.

RD: Oh, no. I did read Krafft-Ebing, and I’ve seen my own life in terms of those case histories. When I was interviewed by this guy from The Advocate, I tried to explain why I don’t go in for drag. In the process I obliged him by talking about how I felt about buggering and about cocksucking, and how I was afraid of these experiences, and then not. If I were writing all this myself, I would be less controversial, kinky, and would explore the stages of my homosexuality. But, being interviewed, I was trying to lay a claim, “Yes I am a homosexual. And I am not a boring homosexual.” As William Carlos Williams in Patterson said, “I AM A POET! I AM A POET! I AM A POET!”

You realize the proud pathos Williams felt that he was opposing a society where it was profoundly embarrassing to declare you were a poet. When he says it up front, recites it, he touches upon part of the courage and the importance of what for gay writers who publicly acknowledge their gayness is their contribution to “gay liberation.” Eventually acceptance and tolerance wouldn’t require our making such assertions, especially exclamatory ones.

Today, what’s so interesting is that it’s now possible, regardless of whether you’re searching to understand your own homosexuality or not, to find many published treatments of the subject, ones that extend knowledge about this condition. We don’t read Crime and Punishment because we are going in for crime and punishment. We read it to understand more of the human condition. And that’s why Dostoyevsky wrote for us, not for a friendly murderer who had just broken open the head of an old lady who had loaned him money.

As for “homosexual literature” in America, even now the word homosexual has not yet transcended prejudice where you can write about your gay life because it is a human life and not a bizarre anomaly; we still invite hatred and bigotry. We can, of course, go back the other way. When we were searching Krafft-Ebing we weren’t really searching for the man Krafft-Ebing; but we did learn a lot about human lives extending beyond ours. I know that I judge sexual acts outside my own areas of feeling with much less sense that they are unnatural because homosexual acts (mine) have been declared “unnatural.” So I do have a glimmer that I’m not “unnatural,” that this business of drawing a line around nature diminishes us, for we reject performing acts that are frowned on by society. You are expected to agree that homosexual practices are horrible; you are so aghast that you yourself wouldn’t perform them. Well, there are plenty of people today who in fighting to dismiss violence from literature would argue that if you begin a novel with an old woman being murdered then you should never, that you could never, have any human community with the murderer, a perpetrator of an “unnatural” act. So, this is one area that opens up.

Though I used to go to the Krafft-Ebing volumes to search for myself, as I’m sure you also did, I didn’t find much help. The self I sought, I knew, was not really different from the self I was in the family I grew up in. I was looking for another story, possibly, and certainly took a long time before I was comfortable living that story, a homosexual one.

RP: When did you first begin to live the story?

RD: Well, I was all along inside that narrative; but, of course, I couldn’t locate it. In my earliest poetry, when I was still in college, I was very attracted to Ezra Pound’s Cantos and to T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. I read them as rituals of identity, earth rituals that struck me in the early Cantos< particularly. In the first place, I obviously loved fun and adventure, and adventure beyond my being able to understand it. Today it’s hard to explain what it was like in the 1930s. While people were beginning to accept Eliot, there were few essays explicating The Waste Land, there were no essays at all exploring The Cantos. So The Cantos were more exciting to read. I’ve always wanted to be inside an unexplained poem, a poem that was an adventure that you couldn’t sum up. I loved that.

§

RD: We talked before about where I wanted to put the picture of my life. I’d inherited the conventional fairy-tale idea of a household, consisting of wife and husband. So I actually married, and always felt guilty in the marriage, although I married because I was in love. I felt guilt because in dreams and in poems it was the male I craved for marriage. In fact, my first poems where a woman really appears came some years after my marriage, and had to do with fairy-tale experience.

RP: You didn’t rush into your marriage. You lived with a woman for two years.

RD: Yeah. I didn’t rush into it. Or maybe I did rush into it, because we may have gotten married because it’s a way for both to say, “We are not at the end,” when that was what was really on our minds. In other words, the marriage was a step that itself had built into that act once we both realized that we ought not to have married.

RP: How does homosexual marriage differ?

RD: I feel homosexuality, in marriage, creates the same bind; and it happens because it must find out how it feels about marriage. I recall the first of my poems where the word marriage comes forward naming, “Yes, it is a marriage between Jess Collins and me,” was in Passages, about the ring and so forth; and marriage is referred to. It was a very sweet pang indeed that I felt, having taken a terrible risk, for I was not at all clear about marriage. Was marriage a church sacrament or was it a life sacrament? And had I intruded upon a sacrament? Obviously, in the poem the idea appears, and from then on I felt that with Jess I had a true marriage.

RP: How formalized was the marriage? Paperwork? Rings?

RD: We’ve never had a license or a contract or an agreement, and I mean we don’t have such governing us. That’s a great gain, because we’ve always known why we are together. Yet after twenty-six years we’ve accumulated such real estate that our money has never been in a separate account; it’s always been in common; and everything is hidden in common. That itself comes to be a marriage. It’s an economic agreement, isn’t it? Economic agreements are contracts. So I have very mixed feelings still about “marriage,” Bob. I realize I have inner contracts, deep inner contracts with Jess. For one thing, I knew him six months before I moved in with him. And moving in then was not yet a deep inner contract although I knew I would never move away from loving him. That would be disastrous! In prior relationships I had such needs and they were under such compulsion that I had no confidence they would continue. And I’m not talking about would you live together always. I now understood that you don’t move away from loving as a matter of fact. Where you have terminated a relationship the love continues. You can’t wrap up and destroy the fact that you love. So, by thirty-one I did know that much.

RP: How long has your friendship with Jess lasted?

RD: We met in the summer of 1950 and I moved in in 1951. So this is the twenty-sixth year.

RP: Have there been times when you’ve both had to get distance from one another?

RD: No. Never. I have fallen in love with others. I don’t understand the mystery of falling in love. And I have sometimes been ruthless. In the beginning, when I first fell in love, because of my commitment to Jess, I both had to consummate it and at the same time had to cut it off entirely. I had such powerful feelings almost immediately, reaffirming my love for Jess. But I also felt his pain more than I could feel much pleasure in consummating with someone else, so I simply backed off. We went off together to Europe, Jess and I. I knew that distance would help, and I have always felt that Eros would punish me no matter what I did to try to rectify matters. I still had erotic feelings I attributed to the ancient, priapic Greek gods. And more than that the sense of being punished was reaffirmed because I’m deeply Freudian, not Jungian. Freud places the burden on Eros and Thanatos. Not a lot of fancy archetypes. In recent poems I’ve been writing about He coming to attend me. This He consists of all the lovers I have had, and is the figure in the fairy tale. Jess is of far more value to me than the figure in the tale. He is not, in fact, that figure. He’s Jess.

And since one’s actual love for a living person is always stronger than any in a fairy tale, I could tell the fairy tale to go and fuck itself. I mean, the fairy tale of the ideal lover is not anything tremendous. But I was raised by my adoptive parents as a reincarnated person, as one in a fairy tale. I came to feel, “OK, fairy tale, you can lay it on me over and over again and remind me that that’s the order, but here and now is the only time I’m…and as long as the two of us are alive together, and all your heavy orders, and I know they can be heavy from the gods, I stand solid, and I’ll take the full consequences. But you don’t get to conquer in this area, fairy tale, because my simple human life is stronger. I don’t care if Jess were to die and it was revealed that I was totally dependent on him, and the hill came crashing down on me, and because of the many times I fell in love and did not obey that primal order of Eros, so Jess gave me the works. You can give me the works, fairy tale, but not while Jess is here.”

PT: There’s more than a little mysticism in what you are saying.

RD: True. My magic now is stronger than any other magic. And if it is a mere magic, I don’t care. Later, give me Reality. I’ll take all the reality Eros or Fairy Tale can dish out. You can land on me again. You can throw me back. Say that I’m meant to go to Hell. I wouldn’t drag Jess to Hell for company; but I’m not going to make a Hell here and now in order to practice being in Hell. This all has all along been my reaction to Good and Evil. If there’s a war between them, tell me that Evil will conquer. I don’t take Good because what I understand is Good is going to win. As a matter of fact, I choose Good over Evil because only if I practice it will it exist. Its existence is more important than its winning.

RP: I’d like to return to your household idea, because I assume from what you’ve said that much centering is required. Perhaps you’d review the idea. Say that your center is not Jess. Yet you imply that you have an energy source, a place of quietus you can visit to be restored and refreshed, and move into the external world of your numerous readings, lectures, public appearances. You know that Jess is there securing the “home.”

PT: Haven’t you been lucky to have found a beautiful man to work all this out with?

RD: We are so close, very cooperative in temperament. We had that point of decision: I was able to move in with him only by realizing that I felt as enthusiastic about his painting as I did about my own poetry, that it was a “thing,” a process of art taking place, and I would not worry about whether we would be successful or not. I had in my own work, especially in the late 1940s, tried to aim at qualifying in the full profession as one would understand that state of poetry, which meant being drawn to something we call “English literature,” a dual attracting force. Initially, Robert Browning’s monologues, as I’ve said, showed me how to expand a person within a poem. My family had valued Browning as much as they valued architects, painters, and doctors. So they gave me a sense of qualifying professionally for what a poet was, a faith that beautifully contained the promise of the poet me who was yet to emerge. And this: my family was achievement-centered, as the professional middle class is and I was blessed to be nurtured in such an environment.

RP: I’d like to hear more of your connection with earlier critics, as it explains the development of your poetry.

RD: One of the first things that gave me shell shock was the question I’d framed for myself: “Are you going to qualify among THE poets?” I read statements by other poets and critics about how they value originality, and then how they value the presence in poetry of immediate experience recollected and defined. Poets who admire these two qualities greatly derogate poets who derive more from literature than from life.

The poet I so much admired, Ezra Pound, disturbed contemporary critics because he derived so directly from Homer, the purest in a sense of all literary sources, and from other ancient poets, some of them “anonymous.” In Robert Browning’s day it was taken au naturel that you derived from other poets. In his day he was fantastically admired. Today, though, he is in great disrepute. This great poet, so seminal in the development of my own work, is now viewed as having no psychological depth, an ersatz monologist. When I was in my early twenties I was aware, and, gee, wondered whether I had any style of my own. Did I have originality? The part of me wanting to qualify as a poet would see this lack as a real disqualification. I could see that if I were to complain of the style and originality I saw in most known, active poets, I would be disqualified by the Establishment poetry world. In 1950-1952, the period when I came to know Jess, I went way beyond where I’d been before, absorbing being a “poet,” and became almost entirely a “consequence” of The Pisan Cantos and of Patterson. I had written a long poem in the manner of Williams. I had not yet found the “hard line” I was driving towards, one that I hoped would distinguish me from other poets who were also following Williams, now an acceptable model, almost a tradition.

I sat down, and for two years wrote entirely like Gertrude Stein. I had her recordings, owned the first ones when I was seventeen, so I could hear her voice and imitate both her writing and her speaking manner. I wanted to think like Stein. I gave up completely any possible originality of my own. I had been drawn to Stein because what she had done had been so despised by people as a fake or a fraud. She wasn’t thought of as being sufficiently derivative of the “literature” readers and critics were comfortable with. She insulted the profession of writing! So I took her indifference to public acclaim and her listening to her own voice as my identification with the god Mercury, or the Mercurial element of my professional drive.

§

RP: I’m fascinated by the immense influence you mentioned earlier of Judy Garland as a homosexual icon. I think also of Mae West, perhaps an even greater image, and she looks to me like death warmed over. That she is herself in drag means symbolically that we’ve killed her as a woman, or perhaps she has set about killing herself, by being a parody of the feminine. She’s a sort of Lazara (as distinct from Lazarus) come from the grave to regale us, and we’ve exaggerated her makeup…

RD: And we love her in part because she is so death-white.

RP: And then I wonder about homosexuality in such public guises, and necrophilia, and the latent death wish, if there is one, behind much homosexuality. I may be forcing this, but it strikes me as possible, and funny.

RD: I agree mostly, and three of my own personal icons, Ophelia, Desdemona, and Virginia Woolf I envision as death-pale. And since neither Ophelia nor Desdemona were writers that means that my obsession with them has killed the womanly writer inside me. And what’s happened? This male Robert, this raging Othello, has taken over.

Two years ago I published a poem in The Museum, announcing this. The figure of a poetess appears, as arising from my psyche, at a time when I was suffering from an anima rebellion. In order to reject that period in high society where I found my effeminacy socially and acutely painful, I had to assert a more masculine identity. I felt literally sick, as though I’d eaten food waiting to be vomited forth. That masculine self, secure within me, now began to control situations and dominate them and to come on strong. No one could possibly picture the vulnerabilities plaguing me. These do show up through the grace of a poem at times, or in the confidence I feel in a few long lasting love relationships. In such a context, everything is finally there, including your being more vulnerable than ever. You discover how vibrantly alive you are; your shamed anima is not dead.

RP: Are you referring to Jungian matters?

RD: Yes, what I’m saying is Jungian. Usually I am very anti-Jungian. Jung’s difficulty is that he tried to talk about an anima, an intuition that seems to have nothing to do with what we call “womanly.” His anima has its source in a conscious, collective image, one to which women seek to conform. You can see that by the 1920s these social images had become so extreme that on one side you had frigid but hot women seated opposite stupid, stultified, clunky males like Ernest Hemingway, who not only wrote about their macho selves but actually committed suicide in the person of their fantasies as determined by society. If we could have an appropriate dual suicide, we might pair Woolf’s and Hemingway’s, the suicide of the anima and the death of the archetypal male. Ironically, by the time they got around to killing themselves, society had already vomited up these images of self-destruction.

My mother was very much a woman of the 1920s, the imaging shaping much of her life. As she aged she relaxed, knowing she was no longer the image of her young womanhood. When I’m called “young” today, it means that the image of youth has been fought for and won, really an image of a manhood that a twenty-year-old reveres. So I’m not that complimented when I’m told that I look younger than I am, for that’s a superficial response to my skin, face, and body. I don’t have to let go. I’m not talking about letting go in that way. But as I—like my mother—relax, they—the younger ones—are out there winning that space.

Now, when the compliments come, I want as much as ever to find out what is behind the images. What do I mean by my own womanly possible things?

PT: Wouldn’t your assertiveness here be your animus!

RD: Yes. That would be in Jungian terms. He reads it as entirely negative because that’s how he experienced it.

PT: But you don’t see it as negative, right?

RD: I wish to look like an exaggerated animus figure, because I’m also an intellectual.

RP: Does your fascination with HD tie in with that?

RD: Oh, yes. Well, HD was an intellectual poet, remember.

RP: But the fact of “HD,” the initials of the name…

RD: Like “RD,” right?

PT: What were her literary influences?

RD: She was in a group with Pound and Eliot. Of considerable American poets of that generation, three stayed in this country: Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. And a trio went abroad: Pound, Eliot, and HD. The latter was also close to D.H. Lawrence; and Edith Sitwell was terrifically important, especially to me. HD’s poetry I studied as chapters for the women in my life; and I see them all as a series of tremendous powers, a series of contemporary women. From my student days I knew how such females had shaped me, and were shaping me: my mother, my grandmother, Marjorie, and, eventually, my cousin. And when I came to teach English literature, I found it remarkable that Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, particularly, were entirely the equals of Joyce and Lawrence—and those weren’t the estimates of prevailing academic tastes. And there is no question in my mind at all but that Dame Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein and HD are the equals of Pound and Eliot. I had to proclaim the high creative order of these intellects, and to recognize their immense importance in my own intellectual, creative development. I could build a whole picture of a poet entirely around HD.

PT: Among all these poets, male and female, do you consider Pound the giant?

RD: No. Only because they are all so interlinked. I can’t view Pound alone; D. H. Lawrence must be there. Modern poetry is a tissue, a strange cooperative tissue, although Williams lived long enough so that in his old age he was writing a poetry that surpassed the thing I’m talking about. If you limit your discussion to Lawrence, you can talk about his consumption, or something; but his greatness is not a question of illness, but rather of a great change of feeling he inspired, as did Pound. Many of these older generation poets didn’t write the lines we were later to, advancing the art of poetry.

Those of us associated with Black Mountain succeeded, I think. Our work was never straight out of Pound. It came, in fact, more from Williams than Pound, and Williams in his work affirms both Lawrence and Pound. Williams clearly knew the difference between himself and Lawrence. Kenneth Rexroth very early said that you can’t just have a Poundian line, you must also have a Lawrentian one. But Rexroth turned against Lawrence, against Pound, and against Robinson Jeffers: Lawrence didn’t have any children, so he’s an incomplete man. Rexroth wanted to emerge as the ideal man. At that point he—Rexroth—was doing something I could see: “he’s denying his sources,” I said, “and is thereby denying the self.” We are back at my own picture, one that’s very strong: I have no sources that aren’t ultimately offensive to my spirit and even hostile to it. Pound’s anti-Semitism is offensive. As were his stances on usury and on sodomy. The latter was an act against nature, something that I knew in my heart to be untrue: sodomy is the opposite of being “against nature.” Yet, Pound was fond of me, and was responsive to my “Venice Poem.” So I overlooked the nitty-gritty Pound of unsettling attitudes. I wasn’t going to argue with him any more than I’d argue with my mother about the nature of society. He was of another generation. Inside my own generation, I would roar!

RP: But back to John Crowe Ransom. Was he less bigoted or as bigoted as Pound? Did he accept your poem and then send it back because he finally caught on to its homosexual theme?

RD: Yeah. He accepted it in the spring and that summer when it was to have appeared, he substituted a poem by Wallace Stevens—which one I’ve now forgotten. He put the matter this way: “I have a major poem from Stevens, and I don’t want it to shadow your poem, so I’m postponing your poem until fall or next spring.” He ended up actually postponing it until fall. In the meantime my article “The Homosexual in Society” appeared in Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, in the Nov-Sept issue 1944, and made a stir in the intellectual community. Within two weeks Ransom wrote me a fairly brief letter, informing me that he was returning the poem. He was uncomfortable that I had spoken of it in the article; in fact, I was thinking of Charles Henri Ford’s View Magazine, and the idea that the ambience of many poets was a kind of advertisement for their homosexuality, a covert advertisement. I called for overtness, for declaration. My premise was that if a poet like Auden had finally declared himself, choosing not to continue redundantly giving hints and providing innuendoes of self advertisement, others of us should. Ransom wrote that he would not abide any overt “homosexual advertisement” in The Kenyon Review.

I sat down and wrote him a letter debating him, and pinning him into place, using each of his words. He said he didn’t want “overt” allusions to homosexuality. I said, “Does this mean that you would favor ‘covert’ allusions?” I then threw Milton at him, ten-tons strong from Aeropagitica. Since discovering that amazing document when I was seventeen or eighteen, I understood that we need to know all the “truth,” that society must know everything. Any censorship is “evil” because it’s keeping secret and covert things we must know and face, regardless of whether or not mainstream opinion finds them good or bad. Truth, therefore, is not always “nice.” There must be nothing hidden from us.

He came back with a letter, and in that one he returned the poem. He was ignorant of the law, he said, but he believed that homosexuals should be castrated to prevent their breeding more homosexuals. Then I came back, not with a biblical argument, but with an argument from the very Nazi argument that homosexuals contribute to the degeneracy of the race. Then I realized that this very Southern gentleman, Ransom, was poring over a poem, and in it saw that negroes were no longer symbolic; they were actual negroes. There was a big black HE, and that sent Ransom up a tree. He was right as long as he took the figure as a symbol, because that was my intention when I wrote it. It didn’t dawn on me that these symbols were hiding anything covert. So you see that if you fully acknowledge in your self, and if everyone around you acknowledges your homosexuality, you’re not making an announcement. You still create covered images because they stand for depths in yourself.

I didn’t even think about what Ransom feared in that poem, other than that he was uptight about my homosexuality. He had read else where that I was homosexual. Lou Harrison, in 1944, brought some of the original cast of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts to my apartment to hear the “African Elegy.” And I read it, and when I finished, a very handsome black gentleman asked if I had any particular black man in mind when I wrote the poem. God, I didn’t know! Actually, if you read the poem, it has two figures being burned and whipped. I hesitated then to express my full emotional anguish as a social pariah. I opted for projecting these deep issues through sadomasochist figures. So, if you read it as an advertisement for my sexuality, you might have come off ten times more frightened than Ransom was.

And when I saw “African Elegy” as a psychic projection based on torturing big black men?of the sort I’d read about in The Arabian Nights, where a sadist comes and burns you and strips off your skin, I was repelled; for I am not a sadomasochist. But I did project that through some psychic need the poem projected; I had indeed projected a lie. I would have had to be a character like one in a Tennessee Williams fright story about someone living a fantasy and finding himself in a back room being eaten by cannibals. All this is projected out of Happy Wasp Lands! But not only out of Wasp Lands; for the much-loved Arabian Nights presents an Arab world of frightening black men.

PT: How do you relate your fascination with Othello as your male alter ago?

RD: Shakespeare’s Othello was me, and also potentially the person who can’t see the connections. Usually a black actor plays the role, and is supposed to die. On one point I felt Jung was right—where he felt that all atrocities we read about are psychic conjunctions of people who match; in other words, there are strange mutualities in which a murder is included, terrible scenes are included, in which all are terrible because suffering is projected against a ground we can’t remedy.

When we write a poem no one is actually burned, no one is murdered; and that’s a great discovery, when you’re a child, to know that you can draw a burning building. You’ve both burned and not burned your own house. You’ve come to terms with those dark matters. Our art shows us similarly meaningful ways to experience what we fear without feeling guilt or hostility towards our suffering. We suffer from hostility because in that hostile act we lose the relationship we sought to be related to. So I do have an argument with hostility. Hostility has lost itself when it murders, burns, destroys. Its aim should be to transform itself. It is sad, though, that until hostility has burned and destroyed the very thing it should have been transforming, it must return to it over and over again.

I wonder often about serial murderers: might they not be returning over and over again to transform killing into something other than murder, into an art. But there’s not yet an art, and they find themselves returning and returning to kill.

PT: Well, how about the art of just mowing the lawn?

RD: [Laughter.] Sure, there’s an art of lawn-mowing and poetry, and often there’s an art of murder that goes on in our magazines where poetry and poets are the victims. So there are variations on burning down a house or torturing somebody: people clobber us instead of actually communing…

PT: Psychic violence.

RD: Right, and the perpetrators do violence to themselves as well. You soon realize that what happens in a particular poem is not what the poet intended to have happen. He’s destroyed the feeling because no art of whatever feeling is getting through. So the poem turns angry because feeling is absent. The poem lacks “art.” The latter doesn’t originate in the poet; it reflects the mutuality felt by imaginary readers. The art of the poem, then, is the imagination of how all humans will hear it, the ultimate art. The angry poem that does violence to the Poem is so uncontrolled it can’t even imagine sharing itself with a single listener. It exclaims: “I hate you because you’re not listening,” and so on. We’ve gotten so angry. All forms of angry sex do violence to mutualities because they fear not being a mutuality and so haven’t even extended it.

RP: Robert, there seems to be a feeling in gay and straight connections, or mutualities, that stress, conflict, and a little sadomasochism are all salts improving the taste of the meat. I’ve known one gay couple who on splitting up took a shears and cut their Persian rug, one they’d bought together, right down the middle so that each could take his half. Of course, they devastated an expensive rug.

RD: Marvelous!

RP: Is this behavior more typical of gay than straight marriages?

RD: No, no. Straights are just as bad.

RP: Lawrence and Frieda. Dylan Thomas and Caitlin. I’m also curious about Woolf, Richardson, and Lawrence–were their masculine and feminine selves, their animus and anima, balanced?

RD: I don’t think so. I try to see them all as persons. Hemingway I usually want to discard; his maleness crippled him. Woolf was not crippled by her anima. Her insanity, I believe, originated not in her anima, but rather arose from manic-depressive rages and a hostility she couldn’t incorporate, that she turned against herself. She had been ill, and she was not willing to enter that sickness again, nor was she willing to impose it on her husband Leonard. He had become her victim.

But let’s return to Hemingway. I said that I didn’t even read him, and that in a way was true. I do remember every bit I read of him, though I read minimally. He helped me define my maleness as distinct from my manliness. From what I know of the novels, his males were of a type the 1920s gladly put away. “Manliness” and “womanliness” were terms the nineteenth century revered. Their species differed from yours. We’re awkward about the terms. We employ “manly” and “womanly” to show that we aren’t just creatures of our own historical period. We have a fashion for how men and women are supposed to behave; some have manly and some have womanly virtues. We don’t have to distinguish, as the nineteenth century did when men had “manliness,” also a virtue women could possess. Manliness was very unlike the “maleness” of John Wayne or Ernest Hemingway. The nineteenth century would never have seen this pair as “manly.” True, the young John Wayne had much charm, and that could be manly, and he often starred in manly roles. Later, in our period, to be manly is to love and perpetrate violence, to be addicted to fisticuffs, really tearing the adversary apart.

RP: Let’s throw Gary Cooper in also. He turned me on far more than Wayne ever did, or Tyrone Power.

RD: Robert, I strongly support the manly and the womanly in that old sense. I am more nineteenth-century than I am of any other century in my library. I actually read Charles Dickens more than I read any twentieth-century authors. I prefer to read Baum’s Wizard of Oz books than those by most of my contemporaries, and as you know Jess and I have a full first-edition collection of the Oz books.

RP: Do you read Whitman more than you read contemporary poets?

RD: Whitman really understood these polarities. But he got into some trouble because he nurtured an ideal he could not himself achieve. He wanted to become an androgynous, bisexual, god-person. He got caught out of court writing poems about a sexual desire for women that he did not have. By the way, none of his poetry proposing his bisexuality comes close to resembling true bisexual poems. Ginsberg has also had similar troubles, but he doesn’t write poems about women as sexual objects. Whitman craved to be the Adamic person, but his poems fail in this regard.

RP: Can you really appreciate bisexuality without actually experiencing it? Can you imagine it?

RD: Shakespeare was convincing in this regard. But when Whitman tries for inclusiveness, the Leaves of Grass fails. When the flow of his regular life fails in Whitman’s poems, I feel it. Keep in mind that the onus he bears is tiny; for he is so glorious anyway, in so many other ways. So, who’s going to care much?

RP: But he cared.

RD: Yes, and he’s embarrassed over and over again. I think that when Annie Gilchrist appears in Camden from England, to make good on the claim Whitman had written a blank check for, that they would spawn a child or two, she drives him up the wall. He sends out a love poem, moo, moo, moo, and eight hundred moose turn up. Whitman wonders: how come I did that? Yes, I too send out many love calls with my eyes and through my poems, pouring the same energies forth hoping to attract people to love me. My guess is that you do too. And if we send such messages, that’s very difficult on the person you’re actually in love with. The world is gentle towards poets, usually, and many of us respond to their love calls. When Whitman fails, he writes a funny other kind of speech.

RP: He succeeds for me in that marvelous “twenty-eight bathers” section of “Song of Myself.” The lonely twenty-eight-year-old woman who gets all erotic watching the beautiful male bathers displays Walt’s anima at its best. The men don’t know whom it is they souse with spray.

RD: Whitman imposes his own intense feeling for the male body over what is essentially a woman’s position. Shakespeare and Lawrence were truly gifted in absorbing dual identities. Shakespeare, though, did get caught out in Antony and Cleopatra when he identifies with the Queen of the Nile. He usually doesn’t “identify,” but rather fully creates by entering the personas he creates. There’s an important difference. Lawrence, in passages in Women in Love, quarrels with Frieda, and you just know that what he does is enter Frieda’s psyche and let him, DHL, win the argument. It’s infuriating, and I want to shake him until his teeth rattle. He enters her and savors being there, gets carried away. I often read Lawrence amazed by his identity with the woman he copulates with; he is actually copulating with himself! These scenes are, for me, overpoweringly real. He’s not created a man and a woman; he’s created a kind of duplex Lawrence. I retract some, for Lawrence has so much more range than what I’ve just said implies. And I return again to my own “African Elegy.” Only today do I appreciate how deeply I was into Virginia Woolf’s nature, the person I was creating, with Desdemona and Ophelia. I never added up the algebra that if you put these three together you find a Duncan who is the rejected Ophelia, a Duncan who is the betrayed and murdered Desdemona, a Duncan the writer who casts himself in imitation of Ophelia into a stream. And there’s also Duncan the enraged male. I was writing an elegy for Woolf, then, with a great spread of feeling. To me, though, it was Virginia Woolf, not myself, being commemorated.

Back to Lawrence: he must have felt he was talking about Frieda. I don’t feel that in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence was Lady Chatterley. The figure seems somewhat awkwardly created. Lawrence there actually creates four persons: the penis, the cunt, Lady Jane, and Mellors. The genitals are given names, aren’t they? So, four people are present. Lawrence produces magic, a fantasy, a personal charade, but he falls short. All those feelings emerging from Lady Chatterley derive from that creative heritage, not from Lawrence’s deepest self.

RP: I want to ask you something outrageous. Is your wish not to publish another substantial book of poems until the 1980s an expression of your wish to make love to yourself, to keep your body out of the world, in a kind of sexual retention, a withholding?

RD: Yes. [Laughter.] I refer to it as taking my writing back. That would mean masturbation, wouldn’t it? In sexual terms, I am retaining my poem-sperm in my own hands. I think of it also as an inner process. Your sense, Robert, is operative, as is the intuition. The name of the 1983 book will be Ground Work. I mean by that that I am at work on some “ground work” now, preparing the ground for the work I shall write in my old age. So, I have a definite concept, one that derives from Williams’ last period, from HD’s magnificent last period that began with her War Trilogy; from Henry James’s final period; and from Pound’s glorious final period that began with The Pisan Cantos. In my ground work, I hope for an intense engagement with old age and dying, experiences waiting for me. I’m enriched here by conversations I’ve had with George and Mary Oppen, now in their sixties, about to begin their seventies, and what they anticipate, and what they’ve discerned is helpful to me at age fifty-seven. They are lovely and beautiful friends, and I value them, and see them, for reasons other than aging and death—they provide splendid human testimonies for my groundwork.

PT: How will you confront your being homosexual as you create your “ground work”?

RD: You know, Paul, how ageist the gay world is. The entire culture proclaims that the legitimate sexual object is young and virile. This applies to both straight and hetero worlds. In the latter, the business of breeding is what sexuality was mainly about. Well, we’ve come a long way. Overpopulation—there’s a great terror about overpopulation. So we now conclude that breeding may be incidental to our sexual lives, that sexuality, as Freud began to propose, involves your entire skin surface as a sexual organ. There are then no boundaries to sexuality; and in our own world of writing and poetry Lawrence realized that sexuality determined your relationship with the universe, and your connection for breeding purposes. I’m afraid, though, that most people will maintain that sex is first and foremost for breeding, and in only one area, the genitals. Yet, the minute they test it out, the entire inner tissue of the mouth is attenuated and alive, as are the two places that emerge from the interior of the body as orifices, the mouth and the anus. The entire inner skin-tube is sexuality. Sexuality is your boundary with the universe and with the person you touch. One sexual locality is for breeding, and that’s an area that becomes intensely excitable, guaranteeing that the male and female organs will contact and there will be breeding. I remember a Cousteau film of breeding squid. What do they do? The females assemble, get very excited, and deposit eggs all over the sea floor. Then a great dance of males coiling, kissing, caressing each other ensues, and they spill sperm all over the place! There’s not a female around for miles! It’s an entirely homosexual breeding process! It’s seasonal, of course, a good thing probably, for what a mess the sea floor would be if the ritual sperm-letting were perpetual.

PT: Are you saying humans should submit to similar rhythms?

RD: We’re not squid. We’ve developed intra-personal sex, so that we can enjoy one another at any time. We have susceptibilities, though. We have spring, the season when we are more sexually aroused than during the other three.

PT: Is the word “sexual” just a definition of human energy?

RD: No, it has more to do with the relationships between maleness and femaleness; in other words, we, as males, possess a surface of sexuality and skin, a connection, a relation, with the universe, a more important connection than any merely reproductive process could be. Yes, human biologists know of the chromosome identification of every cell in our body, and the cells in our brain. They are all male. The cells in your eyes, every cell in your body is male, in the way that your spermatozoa is male. Your spermatozoa is the male-ticket you are carrying. That’s sexuality, not the area that’s breeding. The latter is a complex apparatus, genitals, that include the possibility of breeding. But there are numerous other possibilities. All animals find these. Jess has a picture of homosexual snakes copulating. Here, copulating is not for breeding little animals. No animal species wants to breed little critters out of every one of its sexual orgies or engagements.

PT: Do you see us going through an evolutionary process towards hermaphroditism?

RD: No. In the first place, hermaphrodites originate in those persons who have both an X and a Y chromosome. So, I mean, there are hermaphrodites; but I don’t see that happening generally, unless chromosomes get awfully mixed up.

PT: That would be freaky.

RD: No, not freaky at all. But it’s not likely to happen. Chromosomes combine in a sheer mathematical arrangement. A long shot. A simple XY combination is massively the proposition of what’s going to originate.

RP: Would you agree that many of our dreams, perhaps most of them, are androgynous?

RD: We’re men and women, and in our dreams we are both men and women. Androgynous dreams. I’m not sure that hermaphrodites ever project androgynous dreams, because they possess a series of very literal chromosome combinations. And hermaphrodites in a population are a long shot; you aren’t apt to have very many. Men, on the other hand, since they have an X chromosome as well as a Y always have men-women dreams. It may be that since women do not have a Y chromosome they are busy telling us they don’t have “male” dreams. One wonders; for women do have male dreams. What of St. Joan, and what of those women who persist in dressing as men.

RP: Think of Lady Hester Stanhope, the Victorian, who fought in the private army of some Arab ruler, so successfully disguised as a male soldier, no one guessed she wasn’t male.

RD: We’re talking about the things we can create ourselves to be. I was saying yesterday that I can assume plantness, or sunness, a mysterious area of experience, and one with an ancient tradition.

PT: And we can choose to wear a dress one day and pants the next. It shouldn’t be a factor…

RD: Oh. Yes. Although I would view a dress as a factor because the dress is a costume appropriate to the other sex, as the leather jacket is for a class of males. There are mutual areas, of robes, say, or caftans, that belong to societies that do not regard them as suitable only for females. Those cultures don’t ask, “Is it a dress, or isn’t it?” When we wear a caftan we are neither male nor female. I want to get a caftan, but so far haven’t.

But, you know, poetry very anciently has had telling references. Among those early recitals are these: “I was the sun in the first world”; “I was the bird that flew over”; “I was the woman who sobbed at the door.” That’s the ancient litany in its honestly initiatory door.

And that I is so important. It is even present in poets we think of as mad egotists, like Diane Wakoski, who supposedly has “I am Diane Wakoski” at the top of her chapel instead of “I am the Sun,” “I am the Earth,” or “I am the Universe.” And, incidentally, down here at the bottom is the signature of someone who is not a mad egotist: “I am Robert Duncan.” Another absurdity of our magazines.

RP: But Wakoski also sobs at the door, “I am an ugly duckling.” And she writes that large all over her books.

RD: Yeah, right, oh sure. Meanwhile, I’m more fascinated by Diane DiPrima’s projection of fox woman, or is it coyote woman? Very powerful, larger than Diane DiPrima is or would ever be. She’s stepped into a larger and more intense person than her usual self, from that usual self. So there is continuity, something Wakoski lacks.

RP: Children make these transitions so easily, don’t they? Parents nag: “Straighten your head out. You’re not a little duck. Straighten your head out.”

RD: I saw a poet turn to his child who was sitting talking to his teddy bear. “Stop,” the father demanded, “You know that’s a toy, you know its not a real bear.” And I thought: “No wonder that as a poet you’re a flunk out.” I mean if you’re going to start this “real” crap where there’s something as beautiful as this child’s entire love for its bear, one most people despise as a toy, then they’re playing with their leather jacket and things. For those gifted with good imaginations, the toy, the teddy, is a personal revelation, one our imaginations are driven towards, because we’ve taken that personal revelation and transferred it to a territory rich for our art. This bear is a threat who is not a threat. A teddy does not get angry and claw you, and some people mistreat teddy bears while other people learn to treat them beautifully.

PT: Would you be disoriented if you suddenly gave up wearing neck ties?

RD: No, I don’t think so. Look, I don’t have one on at the moment. I started wearing those ties and shirt and suit coat at the time Beatniks appeared on the streets of San Francisco. Bankers there, and everybody, no longer wore ties and shirts, so I started in order to be different.

RP: Robert, I have the sense that your life now is pretty free of regrets. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that everything is peaceful.

RD: I do have a few regrets from the past.