"After the excitement in the authenticity of masterpieces..."

So here's a thing: Robert Duncan was a genius. There's no two ways about it, and anywhere the crow flies it'll come back and affirm this truth.

However, the problem is this: like all geniuses, his work is often uneven. On the one hand you have the brilliance of a poem like this:

Just Seeing

takes over everywhere before names
this taking over of sand hillock and slope
as naming takes over as seeing takes over
this green spreading upreaching thick
fingers from their green light branching
into deep rose, into ruddy profusions

takes over from the grey ash dead colonies
lovely the debris the profusion the waste
here — over there too — the flowering begins
the sea pink-before-scarlet openings
when the sun comes thru cloud cover
there will be bees, the mass will be busy
coming to fruit — but lovely this grey
light — the deeper grey of the old colonies
burnd by the sun — the living thick
members taking over thriving

where a secret water runs
they spread out to ripen

Unfortunately, on the other, there is complete tripe like this:

Let my verse be high and dry until
your mind flows in its own waters.
Let my rimes flow then into a rivering
until the feeling fires I mean

the whole to shine! It is a song of praise
in which the wound into its river runs
and winding shines from time to time,
dark and daylight glimmering

with hints of an ever happening rime.
It is a painting of the ephemeral
where what we took to be water glares
and in the heart of a solar mirror flares.

And yes, I know: its really, really well written. But its still a terrible poem: all cliche and silliness. It reads like some terrible hunk of horror foisted on us by the likes of Robert Frost or Sylvia Plath.

But I forgive Duncan these kinds of foibles (unlike Frost and Plath, who are both on The List... which will be discussed another time), because I appreciate the fact that he was a poet dedicated to experiment; dedicated to restlessly playing with words and rhythms, exploring the possibilities of form and content.

So, with all of this in mind, I was psyched, yes psyched, when the University of California Press finally released Duncan's The HD Book earlier this year. Never mind that its $50 (a price that has Duncan, a lifelong anti-capitalist anarchist, rolling and spitting in his grave, for true), and never mind all the Academic Hogwash that has surrounded the book and its legend for decades, I was just excited to finally read the thing...

And, well, huh.

The blessing and curse of this book is that I'm not even sure where to start talking about it. It has been compared to both Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project and Louis Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare, which I get. But, in truth, it supersedes both of these books in terms of innovative structure and in terms of successfully conveying the plethora of themes and possibilities embedded in the potential of such genre-busting, expectation overhauling badassary.

I'm more inclined to compare it to the ongoing work of Susan Howe, particularly the Howe of The Birth Mark and The Midnight. In all of her work, but in both of these texts in particular, Howe manages to defy the genre expectations of poetry and prose-criticism to create open field texts that expand the possibilities of meaning implied by words-in-themselves and the spirit that underlies them. In much the same way, Duncan, in The HD Book, is able, through his examination of the poems and prose of HD and how her work relates to his own working-poetics, to ground out the restrictions of language by exploding meaning and opening the potential of words toward both infinitely transcendent and imminent expansion.

Contra this, both Benjamin and Zukofsky get bogged down in labyrinths of language (a la Derrida), trapped in their structures, trapped in their assumptions. I think this is due to the similar sets of presuppositions each of them carried: both were girted with a Marxist-Leninist conception of materialism, with perhaps some Spinoza and/or pantheistic readings of Jewish mysticism thrown in for good measure, that locked them out of the openings they were looking for.

Duncan and Howe, on the other hand, are both more "spiritual", for lack of a better word, in their outlooks, allowing the possibilities of infinity, and hence the possibilities of transcendence-through-imminence / imminence-through-transcendence. Howe, from "Silence Wager Stories" (from The Nonconformist's Memorial):

1

Battered out of Isaiah

Prophets stand gazing

Formed from earth

In sure and certain

What can be thought

Who go down to hell alive

is the theme of this work

I walk its broad shield

Every sign by itself

havoc brood from afar

Letting the slip out

Glorious in faithfulness

Reason never thought saw

2

You already have brine

Reason swept all away

Disciples are fishermen

Go to them for direction

Gospel of law Gospel of shadow

in the vale of behavior

who is the transgressor

Far thought for thought

nearer one to the other

I know and do not know

Non attachment dwell on nothing

Peace be in this house

Only his name and truth

Duncan, from The HD Book:

The drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate, "the dream of everyone, everywhere." The fate or dream is the fate of more than mankind. Our secret Adam is written in the script of the primal cell. We have gone beyond the reality of the incomparable nation or race, the incomparable Jehovah in the archetype of Man, the incomparable Book or Vision, the incomparable species, in which identity might find its place and defend its boundaries against an alien kind. All things have come now into their comparisons. But these comparisons are the correspondences that haunted Paracelsus, who saw also that the key to man's nature was hidden in the design of the larger Nature. We are a variation among variations in the music of a natural intent in which evil as well as our good plays its part, becomes a term of the good of the totality in process.

It is through this simple, but profound, foundation in their approach to the work of poetry that they are, I believe, better able to articulate not only visions of liberation that would make Benjamin and Zukofsky jealous, but also connect that liberation into the very structures of their work. Indeed, it would seem that only through the spiritual quests they each enact in their life / work, and the inifinitude of possibilities such a quest intrinsically entails, are they able to so thoroughly interlace form and content, and thus succeed where so many others have failed.