Meanwhile, if Duncan did not see what was obvious in that poem of mine, he certainly did see the war. Increasingly, from the mid-sixties on, its dark, dirty, oppressive cloud pervades his letters. In 1965, responding to a form letter I sent out to gather money and signatures for a full page ad in The New York Times—“Writers and Artists Protest the War in Viet Nam”— he had written,
We feel as we know you and Mitch must feel—a helpless outrage at the lies upon which the American policy is run, and at the death and suffering “our” armaments, troops, and bombers have inflicted upon Viet Nam. Count on us for all protests and write if the protest needs more money. We will tell you if we can’t make it; but we want to do whatever we can.
And along with his sense of helplessness in the face of the outrage—where for all of us the horror itself was compounded by being committed in our name, as Americans—he began to worry about my increasing involvement in the antiwar movement.
Denny, the last poem [it was “Advent 1966”] brings with it an agonizing sense of how the monstrosity of this nation’s War is taking over your life, and I wish that I could advance some—not consolation, there is none—wisdom of how we are to at once bear constant (faithful and everpresent) testimony to our grief for those suffering in the War and our knowledge that the government of the U.S. is so immediately the agent of death and destruction of human and natural goods, and at the same time as constantly in our work (which must face and contain somehow this appalling and would-be spiritually destroying evidence of what human kind will do—for it has to do with the imagination of what is going on in Man) now, more than ever, to keep alive the immediacy of the ideal and of the eternal. Jess and I have decided that we will wear black armbands (as the Spanish do when some member of their immediate family has died) always and keep a period of mourning until certainly the last American soldier or “consultant” is gone from Viet Nam—but may it not be the rest of our lives? until “we” are no longer immediately active in bringing; grief to members of the family of man. I started to wear a Peace button for the first time during the Poetry festival in Houston, and I found that it brought me to bear witness at surprising times—a waitress, a San Salvador millionaire, a Texas school teacher asked me what it meant. And I rejoiced in being called to my responsibility. Just at times when I was most forgetting myself and living it up.
Just over a year later, again, February 1967—
I have thought often how, if the outrage and grief of this war preoccupy my mind and heart as it does, the full burden of it must come upon you and Mitch with Nik so immediately involved. [Our son Nikolai was by now of draft age.] And I was fearful in January that you were having a bad time compounded with that other constant claim upon one’s life the whole literary structure would make, and where you have a greater exposure in New York…. I think also of how much [anti] war groups and other organizations would lay claim. … it seems to me too that whatever is not volunteered from the heart, even goodness and demonstrations against the war, when it is conscripted is grievous.
There is, I feel, a confusion here. Certainly, as that poem “Advent 1966” and others attest, the ever-present consciousness of the war darkened my life as it darkened the lives of us all. Yet Duncan’s affectionate anxiety about me and Mitch was in a sense misplaced. Duncan himself suffered, surely, a greater degree of frustration than we did, because we lightened that burden for ourselves by taking on the other burden of action. Duncan did bear testimony with his peace button and black armband; he attended a number of demonstrations, including the rally of writers, artists, and intellectuals at the Justice Department (which led to the conspiracy trial of Dr. Spock and four others, of whom Mitch Goodman was one) and the huge march on the Pentagon the following day, in the fall of 1967; and he participated in group poetry readings given as benefits for the Resistance movement. But he did not join with others on a day-to-day basis in organizing antiwar activities. Meanwhile, even though grief, rage, shame and frustration inevitably continued, and indeed even grew as my political awareness grew and I began to see how this war was only one facet of a complex of oppression, I nevertheless was experiencing unforeseen blessings. Not only was ongoing action a relief, an outlet for frustration, however small a drop in the bucket of resistance to that oppression one knew it to be; but—much more importantly—there was the experience of a new sense of community as one worked, or picketed, or even merely “milled around” with comrades. As a good Anarchist from his youth up, Duncan mistrusted group action; and he was just enough older than I to have a ready suspicion of “Stalinism” every time he confronted some action planned or carried out in a way that did not strike him as entirely “voluntarist.” This habit of distrust had shown itself to me as far back as 1959, when he expressed hesitations concerning a magazine he otherwise liked (and which in fact was quite nonpolitical in its concerns) merely because of its “exaggerated estimate of Neruda … plus the poem by Celan where I suspected the reference to Madrid as standing for Spain in the Civil War” and added that he had sent “a prodding letter” to the editor, “to see if there was any neo-Stalinism going on there.” This fear in him, by being a large factor in keeping him out of more involvement in the Movement during the sixties and early seventies, had two effects: one was that his political awareness, formed in the forties and early fifties, remained static; and the other, that he did not experience the comradeship, the recognition of apparent strangers as brothers and sisters, that so warmed the hearts of those who did feel it, giving us in the difficult present some immediate token of hope for a truly changed future—a comradeship which depended precisely upon a political awareness that was not static, but in process of becoming. Had he but realized it, the spirit of those days was (except in certain factions not central to the movement) not Stalinist, coercive, and regimented at all, but essentially as voluntarist as he could have desired. But we did gather together, and we did shout slogans—and it was perhaps due not only to ideological difference, but to temperamental distaste, that Duncan did not and could not do so. He was, therefore, isolated in his very real anguish; his blood pressure soared; and he could not see that there was nothing I was engaged in that was not “volunteered from the heart.”
But the wedge driven between us by his supposition that I was acting coercively, toward myself and—possibly—towards others (a supposition which had, as I see it, no foundations in truth) had not yet gone very deep. In December 1968, a time of private troubles for me as well as of shared political ones, he wrote,
… to reassure you my thoughts are with you. And a prayer … not to something I know, yet “to,” but from something I know very well—the deep resources I have had in our friendship, the so much we have shared and share in what we hold good and dear for human life, and the service we would dedicate our art to. My own thought has been dark this year and in some part of it I have been apprehensive of how much more vulnerable and involved you are: I mean here about the crisis of the war and then the coming-to-roost of the American furies. What we begin to see are the ravening furies of Western civilization. And it corresponds with our own creative generation’s arriving at the phase when the furies of our own art come-home-to-roost. Denny, just as I have been carried in my own work to a deeper, grander sense of the ground, I have begun to be aware of gaps and emptinesses—in my being? in the ground?—and I have now to turn next to work again on the H.D. book where I had begun to dread having to do with the inner conflicts I sensed at work there. The World Order essay, as I wrote, was written in phases of inertia, dread and breakthrus.
Docs it help at all to consider that in part your affliction is the artist’s? The personal pain is compounded in it.
Well I couldn’t speed this off. My sense that I was doing no more than identifying a brooding center in my own feeling with your inner pain halted me in my tracks. Only, this morning, to find that my thought as I woke turning to you still revolved around or turned to the concept of inner trials belonging to the testing of the creative artis
t, which we as poets and artists come to, as surely as the fairytale hero or heroine comes to some imprisonment or isolation—to dwell in the reality of how the loved thing is to be despaired of. I am thinking of the story of the forgotten bride and groom dwelling close to her or his beloved in despised form.
Only, in this fumbling, to try and say that your dread, pain, and being at a loss—personal as it must be, is also the share of each of us who seeks to deepen feeling. Not an affliction in and of itself but belonging to the psychic metamorphosis—we cannot direct it, or, it is directed by inner orders that our crude and unwilling conscious self dreads. Eros and his Other, Thanatos, work there.
That beautiful letter, in which the feeling-tone of an earlier time in our friendship resounds at a deeper, darker pitch, and which sums up, or rather, is representative of, the rich, the immeasurable gift given me by this association, seems almost valedictory. Yet it was not yet so, in fact, for a month later Mitch and I arrived on the West Coast to spend six months at Berkeley. During this period, though my teaching job and participation in current events (this was 1969, the spring of the Third World strike and of People’s Park) prevented me from seeing Robert as often as I had hoped, there were some quiet times of reading current poems to one another (and to Mitch and Jess) and at least one or two walks in the mimosaand eucalyptus-scented lanes above Berkeley, a terrain he knew intimately and seemed curiously at rest in.
It was not until after that, in the early seventies, that our correspondence faltered and jarred to a halt. I will not deal here with the way every negative element that had ever arisen between us, but especially the false interpretation begun in his questioning of “Life at War,” began to take over in our letters, each of us taking fierce, sutic, antagonist “positions,” he of attack, I of defense. It is a conflict still unresolved—if this is in some sense a narrative, the end of the story has perhaps not yet been reached. But I think of my Duncan letters as a constellation rather than as a linear sequence. And in that constellation the major stars are without question the messages of instruction by means of which my intelligence grew keener, my artistic conscience more acute; messages of love, support, and solidarity in the fellowship of poetry. None of my many poet friends has given me more; and when I look back to Florence, 1948, I know I came then upon what was for two decades a primary current of my life.
AFTERWORD, 1991
Sadly, Robert Duncan and I were never properly reconciled during his lifetime. I wrote to him when I heard of his illness (he was on dialysis for some years before his death of kidney failure in 1988) but he had, I knew, given up all letter-writing and I did not expect to hear from him—nor did I. Exactly a month after his death I had an extraordinarily vivid dream about him, however, which left me with a strong feeling that we were, in fact, truly reconnected. I sent “To R.D., March 4th 1988”* to Jess, who assured me that Robert’s affection for me had remained intact. I subscribe to that old tradition which claims that sometimes the souls of the recently dead hover around the living for a short while, taking care, in some way, of unfinished business.
To R.D., March 4th 1988
You were my mentor. Without knowing it,
I outgrew the need for a mentor.
Without knowing it, you resented that,
and attacked me. 1 bitterly resented
the attack, and without knowing it
freed myself to move forward
without a mentor. Love and long friendship
corroded, shrank, and vanished from sight
into some underlayer of being.
The years rose and fell, rose and fell,
and the news of your death after years of illness
was a fact without resonance for me,
I had lost you long before, and mourned you,
and put you away like a folded cloth
put away in a drawer. But today I woke
while it was dark, from a dream
that brought you live into my life:
I was in a church, near the Lady Chapel
at the head of the “west aisle.” Hearing a step
I turned: you were about to enter
the row behind me, but our eyes met
and you smiled at me, your unfocussed eyes
focussing in that smile to renew
all the reality our foolish pride extinguished.
You moved past me then, and as you sat down
beside me, I put a welcoming hand
over yours, and your hand was warm.
I had no need
for a mentor, nor you to be one;
but I was once more
your chosen sister, and you
my chosen brother.
We heard strong harmonies rise and begin to fill
the arching stone,
sounds that had risen here through centuries.
* Rexroth had struck up a correspondence with me at that time, for he was editing New British Poets. He was the first American writer I knew personally—but I had not met him except through letters.
* And, as in this instance, the different perception of parts of speech, the English retaining has as an objective, and Americans creating compound noun, hotcakes.
* Robert Duncan had, however, sent Medieval Scenes to Olson as early as 1948.
* This does not necessarily imply that the poet should erase his signature from his works nor that poetry or other art work is best undertaken oommuunally. To me the sense of chronology, the cumulative power of a lifetime’s work, is of profound importance; and it can only be experienced if authorship and sequence are known. As for “group poems,” I find them superficial: each individual needs solitude in order to bring his or her experience in life and language to fruition in the poem, and it is through communion with ourselves that we attain communion with others. Duncan’s own practice seems sufficient evidence that he would agree.
* It is possible Duncan had some half-conscious memory of this moment when years later he spoke of his special feeling for a poem called “Shalom”. The “man/going down the dark stairs” in that poem was not he, but is has come to seem to be as much about him as, anyone, in the way poems do, with time, come to admit more than their first inhabitants.
* By the summer of ’63 he had somewhat relented, however; “Oh yes. It‘s true I’m most likely to bridle at the mention of ’Jung.’ But, while there is an argumentative cast always in Jung that I find exasperating and dislike finally (the having the answer to things in a schema), there is always much and often so much else that I find revelatory. I look forward with the usual mixture of prejudice and expecution to reading the Autobiography.” It is amusing to see Duncan claim to dislike argumentativeness. given his own contentiousness!
* I.e., whether or not it takes place on the same day as a first draft or over a span of months or even years.
* My error, I see now (1992) was that I did not make it clear that “crumbled’’ was not in an appositive relation to “washed away,” but in alternative one—the word ’’or” should have preceded “crumbled.”
* From “Life as War.” The Sorrow Dance.
* From A Door in the Hive, 1989.
From Robert Duncan: Sales of the Marvelous, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Ian W. Reid (New York, New Directions. 1979).
Rilke as Mentor
(1975/1981)
I HAVE ONLY A smattering of German, and consequently know Rilke’s prose far better than his less satisfactorily translatable poetry, yet he has been for me an important influence. There is a depth and generosity in his perceptions that made them go on being relevant to me through the decades. I had already been writing for many years, and had been reading Rilke for seven or eight, when I first came to America and began to read Williams, Pound, and Stevens. Before long I met Robert Creeley and through him I encountered Olson’s ideas. I remember Creeley’s grimace of distaste for Rilke, or for what he imagined him to represent; but though I was excited by the new ideas, and open to their influence, I didn’t give up on
what Rilke meant to me, for I knew it was not the mere web of sentimentality Creeley accused it of being. It is true that Rilke could be pompous and sanctimonious at times—but those episodes are minimal in proportion to his strengths. Thus all the useful and marvelously stimulating technical and aesthetic tendencies that I came upon in the 1950s were absorbed into a ground prepared not only by my English and European cultural background in general but more particularly by Rilke’s concept of the artist’s task—a serious, indeed a lofty, concept, but not a sentimental or a smug one.
Although I went on to read other volumes, it was through my original encounters with him that his influence continued to hold. The first of Rilke that I read was the 50 Selected Poems (from Das Buch der Bilder and from Neue Gedichte) translated with notes and introduction by C. F. MacIntyre (University of California Press, 1941), which my father gave me at Easter 1942—a bilingual edition. MacIntyre was a translator who exasperates most readers (he did versions of Faust, Verlaine and Mallarmé as well as of Rilke) but he did have the virtue, for which I honor his memory, of a passionate involvement with his subject and a willingness to take verbal risks to advance his peculiar, crotchety, but loving relationship to the chosen poet. This is particularly true in regard to Rilke’s work: he loved it but he was not given to swooning over it; his notes have an acerbity of tone quite free of the schwaärmerei that often surrounded Rilke both as man and writer (not without his collusion, no doubt) and which has continued to cause the kind of distrust Creeley expressed in 1950. MacIntyre helped me to place the poems in a cultural context, and also (quoting it in his introduction) first acquainted me with that famous passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge which tells, with only a slight degree of hyperbole, what a poet must have experienced in life in order to write a poem, or even a single line, of value. That was my first lesson from Rilke— experience what you live: to the artist, whatever is felt through is not without value, for it becomes part of the ground from which one grows. (Or as Goethe said— but I only read that years later—“In order to do something one must be someone.”) Rilke’s words reinforced my assumption that I did not have to undertake special (academic) studies to develop my poetry, but need only continue to read and write, and to be open to whatever might befall me; the rest must depend upon my native abilities and the degree of intensity and persistence that I was prepared to devote to the service of the art.
New and Selected Essays Page 22