A Selected Prose - Softcover

Duncan, Robert

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811217728 ISBN 13: 9780811217729

Publisher: New Directions Publishing, 1995

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A Selected Prose represents the most wide-ranging collection to date of Robert Duncan's essays and talks and is a companion volume to the Selected Poems (1993).

Editor Robert J. Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan's writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer. Included as well are "Rites of Participation, " an excerpt from the still unpublished "H.D. Book"; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan's controversial and provocative essay of 1944, "The Homosexual in Society."

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About the Author:

Robert Duncan (1919–1988) was a 20th century American poet affiliated with the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement.

From Publishers Weekly:

This collection assembles a variety of prose pieces by poet Duncan (Fictive Certainties), some previously unpublished. Ranging from notes to close readings of his contemporaries, the writings convey a sense of Duncan's poetics, which owes much to William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and Whitman. Indeed, the long essay "Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman" is perhaps the most interesting in the volume. In it, Duncan finds a precursor of his own theory of emergent form: "Whitman was the poet of primary intuitions, ancestor of Whitehead's Process and Reality and of our own vision of creation where now we see all of life as unfoldings, the revelations of a field of potentialities and latencies." In his emphasis on discovery rather than the imposition of order ("I don't seek a synthesis, but a melee."), Duncan prefigures chaos theory and process-oriented pedagogy. Politically, his idealism of openness led to a radical conception of democracy. While the essays often employ a difficult syntax that seems anything but spontaneous, they make a strong case for Duncan as a thinker.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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