‘Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus,’ by Lisa Jarnot

For many younger readers, the members of the post-World War II “San Francisco Renaissance,” like their cohorts among the Black Mountain poets, are little more than names. Once the poems of Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan were “required texts.” Today, with luck, they might make it into “recommended reading.” Posterity winnows ruthlessly, and, rightly or not, the American poets of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s who seem to be passing into the canon are largely East Coast folk — elegant Elizabeth Bishop, confessional Robert Lowell, howling Allen Ginsberg, formalist Richard Wilbur and perhaps a half-dozen others.

This makes Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan (1919-1988) all the more valuable. Duncan taught briefly at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (and was an admirer of Olson and a friend of Creeley, the two literary figures most associated with the school), but dominated the poetry scene in the Bay Area for much of his adult life. He was gregarious and opinionated, a dazzling nonstop conversationalist, a superb reader of his own work, and a beguiling charmer of men and women. He was also an habitue of used-book shops, searching for studies of antiquity, works of cultural anthropology and psychology, collections of fairy tales and volumes of Jewish mysticism and occult learning.

(Univ. of California) - “Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus” by Lisa Jarnot

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Duncan’s early life largely accounts for these hermetic interests. Shortly after his birth, he was given up for adoption because his working-class father, shattered by the death of his wife, couldn’t support his family. Baby Robert was taken in by a family of ardent Theosophists, members of a group similar to that of the famous Order of the Golden Dawn (of which Yeats was a leading light). His new grandmother’s religious practices revolved around “tea-leaf divination, seances, numerology, and palm reading.” His Aunt Fay once sent this apparently typical holiday greeting:

“Dear Friends and Fellow Scientists . . . in line with previous Christmas letters, [I] will present my solution of another of the problems that have so long confronted scientists: namely, finding the fundamental cause of PERPETUAL MOTION.”

In short, throughout his life Duncan was immersed in the mystical, and centered much of his writing on myth and magic.

As a young poet, he seems to have learned most from the chant-like repetitions of Gertrude Stein, the imagism of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and the close attention to vocalic melody advocated by Ezra Pound. “Persephone,” the very first work in Duncan’s “Selected Poems,” includes lines that might have been written by T.S. Eliot:

. . . We heard rumor of the rape

among the women who wait at the wells with dry urns,

talk among leaves and among the old men

who sift tin cans and seashells searching for driftwood

to make fires on cold hearthstones.

Throughout his career, Duncan would regularly lecture and teach, and his classes — later called “Basic Elements” — almost always focused on technique, especially “the kinds of motion and levels of motion in poetic language: accentual, syllabic, by breath phrase, periodic, by repetition, development, variation, contradiction, disassociation, etc.” He also believed “that rime, meaning, images, color, texture, etc. should be considered as aspects of motion in a poem.”