A Selected Prose - Hardcover

Duncan, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811212785 ISBN 13: 9780811212786

Publisher: New Directions, 1995

Synopsis

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 Included as well are "Rites of Participation, " an excerpt from the still unpublished "H.D. Book"; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan's controversial and provocative essay of 1944, "The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."

About this title

About the Author

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

From the Back Cover

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 Included as well are "Rites of Participation", an excerpt from the still unpublished "H.D. Book"; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan's controversial and provocative essay of 1944, "The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".

Reviews

This collection assembles a variety of prose pieces by poet Duncan (Fictive Certainties), some previously unpublished.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.

After the publication of Fictive Certainties in 1985, which included none of his prose written after 1955, the late Robert Duncan's essays disappeared from the world until now. At last we have an eminently respectable survey of a lifetime of prose, written by one of the few poets of the country concerned with the soul in a Blakean sense and the precision of language envisioned by Pound, Moore, Williams, and Zukofsky. Duncan's work in this collection is elegant--the equivalent of Whitman's or Mallarme{‚}'s in its insistence on the spiritual basis of democracy. It is refreshing to rediscover a writer so versatile and imaginative that his words on the habits of poets rank with his comments on bees, the troubadours, and the poetics of Dante, Moore, Spicer, and Olson. The life of the free mind can survive here. For instance, gays who thrive on "alternative lifestyles" will have to read Duncan's essay "The Homosexual in Society," questioning their own desire: fashion or truth. Straight or not, reading Duncan is like finding shelter for your soul. Greg Burkman

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811212785
• ISBN 13: 9780811212786
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 230
• Editor: Bertholf Robert J.