Tag Archives: Robert Duncan

Two weeks ago, when I spoke about Duncan’s refusal of integration, I focused primarily on an integrated or cohesive text, and the ways in which Duncan works against these issues. But, in doing so, I gave short shrift to Duncan’s own views on the subject. As I quoted in that post as well, Duncan explainedContinue reading “The Self in Postanarchist Poetry: Passages of the Self in Robert Duncan”

In 2008, when Andy Weaver published his article “Promoting ‘a community of thoughtful men and women’: Anarchism in Robert Duncan’s Ground Work Volumes” in ESC: English Studies in Canada, he noted that “when it comes to Duncan’s poetry, [the] underlying political anarchism often goes unnoticed” (75). Weaver points to Duncan scholars Norman Finkelstein and NathanielContinue reading ““Do you know the old language?”: Passages as Anarchist Intervention”

When I write about Duncan’s assertion, in “Notes on Notation,” that the poems in the Passages series “are but passages of a poem beyond that calls itself Passages” and that they ultimately “belong to the unfolding revelation of a Sentence beyond the work” (5), I do not mean to suggest that these poems, while dispersedContinue reading ““O weaver, weaver”: Disapperance and (Un)Integration in the Passages”

                                                   Robert Duncan told me his poetry was picked up from other people.     The only time he felt, he said, like using quotation marks was when the words he wrote were his. (John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only    Make Matters Worse) Continued 1968 (Revised)”13) Robert Duncan’s Passages seems, to me,Continue reading ““When the words he wrote / were his”: Robert Duncan and Communal Language”