Robert Duncan, _Poems 1948-1949_

  I CONTINUE TO find out how wrong I was about the shape of Robert Duncan's career prior to The Opening of the Field. He published quite a few collections, it turns out, although with small presses and in small runs. Duncan's Collected Early Poems and Plays, published in 2012 by the University of California Press, runs to hundreds of pages. 

This volume was published by Berkeley Miscellany Editions in, I guess, 1949 or 1950 (it bears no date), printed by the Libertarian Press in Glen Gardner, NJ. It collects the poems Duncan was writing after those gathered in The Years as Catches (see post for August 18). 

Duncan is getting franker, more audacious, in some ways more playful than in his earlier poems. Duncan is more obviously out in these poems, the love poems more plainly addressed to other men, and the language saltier, although I know that mainly thanks to the efforts of a previous reader of the copy I obtained from a local university library.

(By the way, I was a little surprised to find this book in the public stacks, not in special collections.)

For instance, "The Venice Poem" has expurgated lines on pp. 31 and 32, Some prior reader of the copy I read had supplied the missing lines, e.g., "the forlorn c********* is not wonderful." (Written out in the book was a 10-letter vulgarism for one who performs fellatio, a word unprintable in 1949 and even now one that gets flagged by Blogger's vigilant bots.) I thought at first that someone was just taking liberties, but no, a cross-check of "Venice Poem" as published later confirms that the added lines are accurate. Interesting, no?

Even more interesting, the saltier, more audacious Duncan is also a more visionary Duncan. Wings are being stretched and readied for flight. The most obvious sign of this, I thought, was "I Tell of Love," a post-Pound refashioning of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega." The presence of Cavalcanti's poem in Pound's Canto XXXVI, in Zukofsky's "A"-9, and here makes me wonder about it being a kind of modernist touchstone--mainly due to Pound's standing, I suppose, but some possibility of modernist-poetry-as-mystery-religion is shimmering here too. 

I would love to see a performance of "A Poet's Masque," with which the volume concludes, but I am not getting my hopes up.