Robert Duncan

‘The fact of her witness’

Kathleen Fraser and the poetics of empathic witness

Cynthia Hogue
Image from 'WITNESS' (2007) by Nancy Tokar Miller, courtesy of Chax Press.

As I begin writing this essay, a fragment of an interview that I conducted with Kathleen Fraser more than two decades ago mysteriously pops up on my screen: 

finding my own pen to do my work, in order, I think, to embody “a self,” in order to discover that there is an evolving being in there, living, changing, breathing.[1]

January 25, 2022

Horizon

Pt. 3

Cy Twombly, ‘Treatise on the Veil (First Version),’ 1968.
Cy Twombly, ‘Treatise on the Veil (First Version),’ 1968.

For Leslie Scalapino, the poem’s an apparatus, no mere mimetic catch to reproduce world(s) as a backdrop for the poem’s disclosures. That it can be used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s) is also mere axiom; more crucially, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (in this case, where flesh meets florescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.

June 27, 2019

Worlding

Pt. 2

Michael Heather and Nick Rossiter, “A Schematic World-Universe Relationship”
Michael Heather and Nick Rossiter, “A Schematic World-Universe Relationship.”

Givenness is a veil. As proof, the first words of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity chop and screw Rimbaud’s oft-quoted “The true life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.” For Levinas, it’s a crucial corrective: “‘The true life is absent.’ But we are in the world.”[1] Truer words were never slowed and throwed.

June 19, 2019

The Duncan/Olson dichotomy

A review of two volumes

Adam Katz
Photos of Robert Duncan (left) and Charles Olson (right) by Jonathan Williams, from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection. Used with permission of Thomas Meyer.

Here are two elusive pieces of the context of midcentury American poetics. The Robert Duncan/Charles Olson letters have been available, until now, only in the brief reviews of each other that the poets extracted from them (“near-far Mister Olson” and “Against Wisdom as Such”), passages quoted by scholars who have been able to visit the archive at Storrs, and handfuls in Sulfur, Poetry, and Olson’s Selected Letters.

February 11, 2019

Often I am permitted: Jess and Robert Duncan

Jess, Emblems for Robert Duncan II: #4 “the ayre off the music carries,” 1989, collage ( 4 1/4 x 5 5/8 inches, tondo). Tibor de Nagy Gallery. (My photo.)

This work of Jess (Colins) (Duncan’s lifelong love) echoes Duncan’s iconic poem with the image of the meadow (“the opening off the field”) in the background and the game of “Ring a Ring o’ Roses” in the foreground; as well as, perhaps, intimations of the “Queen Under The Hill”/likenesses of “the First Beloved.” The collage is on view till May 6 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. 

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,   
that is not mine, but is a made place,
April 28, 2018

Caterpillar

'A magazine of the leaf, a gathering of the tribes'

Caterpillar colophon
Caterpillar colophon

Begun in 1966 by Clayton Eshleman as a series of chapbooks by writers such as Jackson MacLow, David Antin, and Louis Zukofsky, Caterpillar Books became Caterpillar: A Gathering of the Tribes (though the subtitle was quickly dropped) in October 1967 when Eshleman realized he “could cover more ground with a literary journal than with undistributable chapbooks.” In a 2008 dialogue in Jacket, Eshleman says that he “wanted to do a magazine based on Cid Corman's Origin, but one that was bigger and more burly, taking on more ‘fronts’ than Cid had engaged.”

June 23, 2016

'It felt like many lifetimes'

The last issue of Angel Hair

Angel Hair 6, cover art by George Schneeman

“Only three years had passed,” Lewis Warsh writes of publishing the journal Angel Hair, “but it felt like many lifetimes.” By 1969, when the last issue of Angel Hair appeared, Warsh and Waldman had begun publishing books--mainly because many of their poet friends needed publishers for their book-length collections, but also because The World, a new magazine published by the Poetry Project, was covering much of the same ground as Angel Hair. “I also felt,” Warsh says, “that we had made our point in trying to define a poetry community without coastal boundaries--a community based on a feeling of connectedness that transcended small aesthetic differences, all the usual traps that contribute to a blinkered pony vision of the world.” 

May 17, 2016
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