Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime
Title | Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime PDF eBook |
Author | James Maynard |
Publisher | University of New Mexico Press |
Total Pages | 232 |
Release | 2018 |
Genre | Sublime, The, in literature |
ISBN | 0826358896 |
This book examines three historical phases of the poet Robert Duncan's writing within the aesthetic and philosophical context of a pragmatist sublime. The author traces Duncan's poetics of process - which like process philosophy is predicated on conditions of change and plenitude - to the pragmatist tradition of William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. Working from this theoretical framework, and using the archival resources of the Robert Duncan Collection housed in the University of Buffalo's Poetry Collection, James Maynard examines Duncan's understanding of excess in relation to poetry.
Architect of Excess
Title | Architect of Excess PDF eBook |
Author | James Maynard |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 301 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
"Architect of Excess: Robert Duncan and the American Pragmatist Sublime" examines three historical phases of the poet Robert Duncan's writing within the aesthetic and philosophical context of an American pragmatist sublime. With its constitutive view of the poem as a "multiphasic" experience of language, Duncan's poetics of process---which like process philosophy is predicated on conditions of change and plenitude---can be traced to the pragmatist tradition of William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. Implicit in their conception of a multifarious, non-totalizable world is a pragmatist sublime that, against the continuing legacy of the Kantian sublime, reorients the concept as a pluralistic, ontological, and relational phenomenon of experience. Working from this theoretical framework, and drawing upon such archival materials as the poet's notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, and correspondence, each chapter examines a different stage in Duncan's understanding of excess in relation to poetry. These include: (1) his early years writing and editing in New York during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Duncan's ideas about desire and the social function of the poet as a shaman exploring larger forms of consciousness first developed under the shadow of Surrealism; (2) the poetics of organism in The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968) that emerges out of Whiteheadian notions of extension and multiplicity as a response to the sublime conditions of "What Is"; and (3) the architectural complexities of Ground Work (1984, 1988), including Duncan's related notions of the pragmatist poet as an architect building with language, and of the poem as an architectural space of dwelling with otherness. Underlying each of these periods is a sublime poetics (and poetic politics) of process corresponding to Duncan's pluralism.
Robert Duncan
Title | Robert Duncan PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Duncan |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Total Pages | 926 |
Release | 2014-01-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0520259297 |
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 DuncanÕs 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 GŽrard de Nerval, as well as the complete Structure of Rime and Passages series. Ê
The Householders
Title | The Householders PDF eBook |
Author | Tara McDowell |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Total Pages | 245 |
Release | 2019-10-01 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0262354128 |
How the poet Robert Duncan and the artist Jess made the household part of their separate and collaborative creative practice. “I'm a householder,” the poet Robert Duncan once explained. “My whole idea of being able to work was to have a household.” In this book, Tara McDowell examines the household (physical and conceptual) that Duncan established with the artist Jess, beginning in 1951 when the two men exchanged marriage vows, and ending with Duncan's death in 1988. For Duncan and Jess, the household—rather than the studio, gallery, or collective—provided the support structure for their art. Indeed, McDowell argues convincingly, their work was coextensive with their household. The material surroundings of their house in San Francisco and the daily rhythms of their domestic lives became part of their creative practice. Duncan wrote poetry that is romantic, ornate, and obscure; Jess (born Burgess Franklin Collins) created multi-imaged, complex collages and assemblages. McDowell explores their life and work—reading Duncan and Jess with and against each other, in alignment and misalignment. She examines their illustrated book Caesar's Gate, a collaborative effort that led them to reject collaboration; considers each man's lifelong preoccupation with an unfinished project, Jess's Narkissos and Duncan's The H.D. Book; and discusses their “origin myths” and self-made genealogies, describing them as a form of witness in the face of the calamities of the twentieth century. Duncan and Jess made the household a necessary precondition for their art making. Doing so, they reclaimed and rehabilitated the domestic—from which gay couples were traditionally excluded—for their own uses. The household permitted them to reimagine the world. McDowell's portrait of a couple expands to encompass broader issues, urgent in midcentury America and still resonant today: belonging and kinship, alienation, and catastrophe.
American Poetry as Transactional Art
Title | American Poetry as Transactional Art PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen Fredman |
Publisher | University Alabama Press |
Total Pages | 257 |
Release | 2020-06-02 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0817359818 |
Explores the ways American poetry engages with visual art, music, fiction, spirituality, and performance art Many people think of poetry as a hermetic art, as though poets wrote only about themselves or as if the subject of poetry were finally only poetry—its forms and traditions. Indeed much of what constitutes poetry in the lyric tradition depends on a stringently controlled point of view and aims for a timeless, intransitive utterance. Stephen Fredman’s study proposes a different perspective. American Poetry as Transactional Art explores a salient quality of much avant-garde American poetry that has so far lacked sustained treatment: namely, its role as a transactional art. Specifically Fredman describes this role as the ways it consistently engages in conversation, talk, correspondence, going beyond the scope of its own subjects and forms—its existential interactions with the outside world. Poetry operating in this vein draws together images, ideas, practices, rituals, and verbal techniques from around the globe, and across time—not to equate them, but to establish dialogue, to invite as many guests as possible to the World Party, which Robert Duncan has called the “symposium of the whole.” Fredman invites new readers into contemporary poetry by providing lucid and nuanced analyses of specific poems and specific interchanges between poets and their surroundings. He explores such topics as poetry’s transactions with spiritual traditions and practices over the course of the twentieth century; the impact of World War II on the poetry of Charles Olson and George Oppen; exchanges between poetry and other art forms including sculpture, performance art, and ambient music; the battle between poetry and prose in the early work of Paul Auster and in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. The epilogue looks briefly at another crucial transactional occasion: teaching American poetry in the classroom in a way that demonstrates that it is at the center of the arts and at the heart of American culture.
Unpacking the Personal Library
Title | Unpacking the Personal Library PDF eBook |
Author | Jason Camlot |
Publisher | Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press |
Total Pages | 256 |
Release | 2022-07-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1771124644 |
Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel’s account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces. Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.
The Unruly Garden
Title | The Unruly Garden PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Duncan |
Publisher | Peter Lang |
Total Pages | 262 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9783039113941 |
Robert Duncan was a defining figure of twentieth-century American poetry. Eric Mottram was a pioneer in the field of American Studies in the UK and a key contributor to the British Poetry Revival. In the 1970s the two men conducted a wide-ranging dialogue on poetry, politics and the religious through an exchange of intense and often expansive letters. Mottram continued the dialogue in two substantive critical examinations of Duncan's work. The Unruly Garden presents an annotated edition of the complete available correspondence along with the two essays. The first essay was heavily edited when originally published and is included here in its restored form. The second essay appeared in a small press magazine and now receives the wider circulation it deserves.