Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays(3 The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan)

Profoundly original yet insistent on the derivative quality of his work, transgressive yet affirmative of tradition, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a generative force among American poets, and his poetry and poetics establish him as a major figure in mid- and late- 20th-century American letters. This second volume of Robert Duncan’s collected poetry and plays presents authoritative annotated texts of both collected and uncollected work from his middle and late writing years (1958-1988), with commentaries on each of the five books from this period: The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and the two volumes of Ground Work. The biographical and critical introduction discusses Duncan as a late Romantic and postmodern American writer; his formulation of a homosexual poetics; his development of the serial poem; the notation and centrality of sound as organizing principle; his relations with such fellow poets as Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, and Jack Spicer; his indebtedness to Alfred North Whitehead; and his collaborations with the painter Jess Collins, his lifelong partner. Texts include his anti-war poems of the 1960s and 70s, his homages to Dante and other canonical poets, and his translations from the French of Gérard de Nerval, as well as the complete Structure of Rime and Passages series.  

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Discovery Making The Opening of the Field (1960) Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow - The Dance  The Law I Love Is Major Mover  The Structure of Rime I  The Structure of Rime II  A Poem Slow Beginning  The Structure of Rime III  The Structure of Rime IV  The Structure of Rime V  The Structure of Rime VI  The Structure of Rime VII  Three Pages from a Birthday Book  This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom  The Ballad of the Enamord Mage  The Ballad of Mrs Noah  The Maiden  The Propositions  Four Pictures of the Real Universe  Evocation  Of Blasphemy  Nor Is the Past Pure Crosses of Harmony and Disharmony  A Poem of Despondencies  Poetry, a Natural Thing  Keeping the Rhyme  A Song of the Old Order  The Question  The Performance We Wait For  At Christmas  Proofs  Yes, as a Look Springs to Its Face  Yes, as a Look Springs to Its Face,  A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar  The Structure of Rime VIII  The Structure of Rime IX  The Structure of Rime X  The Structure of Rime XI  A Storm of White  Atlantis  Out of the Black  Bone Dance  Under Ground  The Natural Doctrine  The Structure of Rime XII  The Structure of Rime XIII  Another Animadversion  After Reading Barely and Widely  Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal  Food for Fire, Food for Thought Uncollected Work 1957–1960 A Stray Poem (Notes Reading from Rene Fulop-Miller’s The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits) Melville after Pierre Solitude The Song of the River to Its Shores Pre-face I Saw the Rabbit Leap Roots and Branches (1964) Roots and Branches Roots and Branches What Do I Know of the Old Lore? Night Scenes A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s Birthday A Letter Nel Mezzo del Cammin di Nostra Vita A Dancing Concerning a Form of Women The Law Apprehensions Sonneries of the Rose Cross Now the Record Now Record Variations on Two Dicta of William Blake Cover Images Come, Let Me Free Myself Risk Four Songs the Night Nurse Sang Structure of Rime XV Structure of Rime XVI Structure of Rime XVII Structure of Rime XVIII Osiris and Set Windings Two Presentations After a Passage in Baudelaire Shelley’s Arethusa Set to New Measures After Reading H.D.’s Hermetic Definitions Strains of Sight Doves Returning to the Rhetoric of an Early Mode Two Entertainments The Ballad of the Forfar Witches’ Sing A Country Wife’s Song  What Happened : Prelude A Set of Romantic Hymns Thank You for Love From The Mabinogion Forced Lines A New Poem (for Jack Spicer) Sonnet 1 Sonnet 2 Sonnet 3 Answering Adam’s Way: A Play upon Theosophical Themes Cyparissus A Part-Sequence for Change Structure of Rime XIX Structure of Rime XX Structure of Rime XXI The Continent Uncollected Work 1961–1964 A Play with Masks Weaving the Design Old Testament New Testament Bending the Bow (1968) Introduction  Sonnet 4  Structure of Rime XXII 5th Sonnet  Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing  Bending the Bow  Tribal Memories Passages 1 At the Loom Passages 2 What I Saw Passages 3 Where It Appears Passages 4 The Moon Passages 5 The Collage Passages 6 Envoy Passages 7 Structure of Rime XXIII  As in the Old Days Passages 8 The Architecture Passages 9 These Past Years Passages 10 Shadows Passages 11 Wine Passages 12 Structure of Rime XXIV  Structure of Rime XXV  Reflections The Fire Passages 13 Chords Passages 14 Spelling Passages 15 A Lammas Tiding  My Mother Would Be a Falconress  Saint Graal (after Verlaine)  Parsifal (after Wagner and Verlaine) The Currents Passages 16 Moving the Moving Image Passages 17 The Torso Passages 18 The Earth Passages 19 Structure of Rime XXVI: For Kenneth Anger An Illustration Passages 20 The Multiversity Passages 21 In the Place of a Passage 22  Benefice Passages 23 Orders Passages 24 Up Rising Passages 25 The Chimeras of Gérard de Nerval  El Desdichado (The Disinherited) Myrtho  Horus Anteros Delphica  Artemis  The Christ in the Olive Grove  Golden Lines  Earth’s Winter Song  Moira’s Cathedral  A Shrine to Ameinias  Narrative Bridges for Adam’s Way  The Soldiers Passages 26 An Interlude  Transgressing the Real Passages 27 The Light Passages 28 Eye of God Passages 29 Stage Directions Passages 30 God-Spell  Epilogos  Uncollected Work 1965–1968 At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley after the New York Style We heard it as a cry. It was the Word. Keeping the War Inside Yes I care deeply and yet Christmas Present, Christmas Presence! From a Poem by John Ashbery If I Had Kin Ground Work: Before the War (1984) Some Notes on Notation Achilles’ Song  Ancient Questions  A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings Despair in Being Tedious  The Concert Passages 31 (Tribunals)  Ancient Reveries and Declamations Passages 32 (Tribunals)  Transmissions Passages 33 (Tribunals)  The Feast Passages 34 (Tribunals)  Before the Judgment Passages 35 (Tribunals)  Santa Cruz Propositions  A Glimpse  And If He Had Been Wrong for Me  For Me Too, I, Long Ago Shipping Out with the Cantos And Hell Is the Realm of God’s Self-Loathing  Childhood’s Retreat  Fragments of an Albigensian Rime  O! Passages 37 Bring It Up from the Dark  Structure of Rime XXVII  Structure of Rime XXVIII: In Memoriam Wallace Stevens Over There The Museum  Interrupted Forms Poems from the Margins of Thom Gunn’s Moly  Preface to the Suite  The Moly Suite  Near Circe’s House  Rites of Passage: I  Moly Rites of Passage: II  A Seventeenth Century Suite in Homage to the Metaphysical Genius in English Poetry (1590–1690)  1. Love’s a great courtesy to be declared 2. Sir Walter Ralegh, What Is Our Life?  3. Go as in a dream  4. Robert Southwell, the Burning Babe 5. “A pretty Babe”—that burning Babe  6. George Herbert, Jordan (I)  7. George Herbert, Jordan (II) 8. These Lines Composing Themselves in My Head as I Awoke Early This Morning, It Being Still Dark, December 16, 1971  Passages 36 9. Ben Jonson, Hymenæi: Or the Solemnities of Masque, and Barriers  10. John Norris of Bemerton, Hymne to Darkness  Coda   Dante Études Preface Book One  We Will Endeavor  Secondary Is the Grammar  A Little Language  To Speak My Mind  Everything Speaks to Me  In the Way of a Question  Speech Directed  Enricht in the Increment  The Individual Man  Of Empire  The Meaning of Each Particular  The Whole Potentiality  The Work  The Household  Let Him First Drink of the Fountain  And Tho They Have No Vowel  Letting the Beat Go  Book Two  A Hard Task in Truth  Lovely   The One Rule  Our Art but to Articulate  In Nothing Superior  Enacted  On Obedience  Zealous Liberality  We Convivial in What Is Ours!  Mr. Philip Wicksteed Stumbling into Rime in Prose in Translating Dante’s Convivio  Go, My Songs, Even as You Came to Me  Book Three  My Soul Was as If Free  Nor Dream in Your Hearts  For the Sea Is God’s  Where the Fox of This Stench Sulks  In Truth Doth She Breathe Out Poisonous Fumes  Then Many a One Sang  In My Youth Not Unstaind  And a Wisdom as Such  Four Supplementary Études  Of Memory  Hers I Too Trembling  But We, to Whom the World Is  The Missionaries Passages The Torn Cloth  Songs of an Other  Empedoklean Reveries Passages Jamais Passages An Interlude of Winter Light  “Eidolon of the Aion”  The Presence of the Dance{ths}/{ths}The Resolution of the Music  Circulations of the Song  Uncollected Work 1969–1982  O tree of lights! tree of colors Childless After Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76 Second Take on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76 She Something Is Moving A Fantasy Piece for Helen Adam Feb. 22, 1973 I have{ths}/{ths}nothing to go on A Prepucal Face for Nigel Roberts Johnny’s Thing An Epithalamium Poe et Cie Let Me Join You Again This Morning, Walt Whitman Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987) An Alternate Life  In the South  Homecoming  Supplication  The Quotidian  To Master Baudelaire Toward His Malaise  Among His Words  The Face  At Cambridge an Address to Young Poets Native to the Land of My Mothertongue Le Sonnet Où Sonne la Sonnette dès Dernières Jours Toujours Fait Son Retour Pour Souffrir l’Envie Jusqu’à l’Amour en Vie  Sets of Syllables, Sets of Words, Sets of Lines, Sets of Poems Addressing: Veil, Turbine, Cord, & Bird  Preliminary Exercise Notes during a Lecture on Mathematics The Recall of the Star Miraflor The Naming of the Time Ever  I Pour Forth My Life from This Bough  The Turbine  What the Sonnet Means the Sonnet Means  For the Assignment of the Spirit  The Cherubim (I)  The Cherubim (II)  Styx  The Sentinels  An Eros/Amor/Love Cycle  Et Passages In Wonder Passages Constructing the Course of a River in the Pyrenees  In Waking  From the Fall of 1950, December 1980  Two Sets of Tens: Derived from Confucian Analects  Regulators Set of Passages The Dignities Passages The First Passages Stimmung Passages Enthralld Passages Quand le Grand Foyer Descend dans les Eaux Passages In Blood’s Domaine Passages After Passage Passages With In Passages Seams Passages You, Muses Passages Structure of Rime: Of the Five Songs The Five Songs  Whose Passages Close  At the Door  Illustrative Lines  After a Long Illness  Uncollected Work 1983–1988  In Passage Hekatombé  Appendix: Table of Contents for Roots and Branches Notes Selected Bibliography Index of Titles and First Lines

About the Author :
Robert Duncan (1919–1988) was a foremost figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and is considered one of the most accomplished and influential postwar American poets. He became a leading practitioner of nontraditional open form poetry, his later work shaped by ideas associated with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of poetry. During his lifetime, he published more than a dozen collections of poems, including those in this volume, which remain his best-known works. Peter Quartermain taught contemporary poetry and poetics at the University of British Columbia for over thirty years. He is the author of Basil Bunting, Poet of the North; Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe; and Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde. He is the editor of Robert Duncan’s Collected Early Poems and Plays (UC Press).

Review :
"Includes some of Duncan's finest essays . . . a great help to all readers." "The Collected Later Poetry and Plays represents the assured completion of the vital gathering already underway with The Collected Early Poetry and Plays. With these two volumes the canon of Duncan's poetry is fully established and readily available to a broad audience."