During my reading of this week’s selection, I became drawn especially to the poems of Robert Duncan because of how they flowed together, but also because of what they were saying. My favorite of the three that we were assigned was “Passage Over Water” which took the reader on a journey across the poem. Duncan was born in Oakland, California in 1919 and later adopted by a couple based on his astrological signs. His early family relied heavily on astrological signs, religion, and the occult to influence their course of action. This way of living would have a stronghold on his writings and his poetry. He chose to become a poet in his teens and never looked back. I became very interested in how Duncan chose to bring his ideas together and why he made certain decisions within his writing. Through Kylan Rice’s ““In Couples, In Small Companies”: On Robert Duncan and Sentimental Modernism,” the reader looks at why Duncan chose certain placements for the words within his poems. Word placement is very important and certain lines are designed to go together where they interact and compliment each other. Many of Duncan’s poem function in this way where they are dependent on another line or a couple other lines to derive meaning from. The article successfully recollects the works of Robert Duncan while focusing on the style and ideas that made him into the poet that he was. Rice notes in his thesis that Duncan sought for the reader and the poem to have an intimate relationship that would bring everyone closer together. These “Intimacies, for Duncan, are productive of the expanding communities at the heart of the poet’s work” were integral in the poems (88).
Rice reminds the reader of the iconic poems and poets that inspired Robert Duncan’s writing as heroes often inspire creative works. Duncan had his “poetic guides” that he followed and revered as a “mediator” between the poet and the world around them. Many of his works drew heavily on Dante’s Inferno and the roles of “Beatrice and Virgil” within Dante’s journey. Duncan had his guides which played their part is his journey such as his high school teacher who introduced him to poetry and served a mediator, translator, and guide into the worlds of Virginia Wolfe, Freud, and Euripides in a way that Duncan could not have gone into on his own. He could not have become intimate with their work without patience and guiding hand, and he knows this, so he has to place a guiding hand inside his own poems to serve as a guide to the readers. The modernist movement built a focus on the “community of feeling” and a “transtemporal kinship” that allowed the writer to connect with the reader across a page even if they were not physically in the same roll. The reader, in Rice and Duncan’s opinion, should feel the poem and connect, but that connection needed to be a deep feeling that stuck with the reader long after they lost touch with Duncan.
Within the overreaching themes of his poems, Robert Duncan was fascinated by “Eros” as we sought to connect even the smallest of words together. On the page, every word had a reason for being there and often it was because another word needed an article or adjective to go along with it. Duncan had his “theories on community” and those intermingled in every poem where he sought to keep away loneliness amid his modernist ideas. The perfect poem had paired lines, and often times, poems could be paired with one another to continue to connect with each other. He referred to “communities” as the “in-group” or the “domestic” to describe their place in everyday life where Duncan felt they deserved to exist repeatedly together and not separate because words were a community that he was building on the page and the community that he built on the page would bring together a community in real life as well. Duncan was a part of the “romanticism” movement which uncovered poets and writers who looked at the world as it could be and in Duncan’s perfect world everyone had a match and every line paired with another line because in his modernist movement, no one sat alone.
Robert Duncan’s poems are built on the basis that no man is an island and that everything has a place in the world with a guide, a friend, or a partner with whom they can share their life. In Duncan’s world, the “communities of feeling and expanding companies” were important and continuously growing as people made connections and came together.
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