• 1 The correspondence with Denise Levertov indicates that Duncan read Oppen’s The Materials not long a (...)
• 2 Duncan’s side of the correspondence, from June 1947 to February 1966, is preserved among Zukofsky’s (...)
• 3 The present essay is a follow-up to a previous discussion of these two poets (Twitchell-Waas 2012), (...)

1Duncan rarely refers to “Objectivist” or “Objectivism,” and except for Louis Zukofsky there is little evidence in his work of the other poets falling under the “Objectivist” rubric. In a late interview, while expressing warm personal affection for George and Mary Oppen, he claimed he deliberately did not read their work prior to George’s death in 1984 because they had been Stalinists (Duncan 2012, 442-443). This remark cannot be taken too literally, but it is only Zukofsky with whom he had a long-standing engagement and who came to represent a major challenge to his own poetic assumptions.1 By Duncan’s own account, his attention to Zukofsky goes back very early, to when he was a teenager, and he initiated a correspondence with the older poet in 1947, when Zukofsky had all but disappeared from public view.2 More than any other single person, Duncan was instrumental in connecting Zukofsky with the younger generation of poets that led to his gradual emergence beginning in the mid-1950s. In 1958 Duncan instigated an invitation for Zukofsky to teach a summer course at San Francisco State College, and he confided to Denise Levertov that he had anticipated that Zukofsky would act as a salutary counter to himself and Jack Spicer among their younger acolytes (Duncan/Levertov 125-126). He admitted that this did not work out as he had hoped, but this gestures at the somewhat devil’s advocate role Duncan saw Zukofsky playing in his own poetic thinking and practice, which I will take as the leitmotif in what follows.3

• 4 Cf. “The Truth and Life of Myth”: “Time and again, men have chickened out in the fear of what that (...)
• 5 Zukofsky is working from Wittgenstein’s brief Preface to Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. (...)

2Indeed, one would think Zukofsky represented, in almost every respect, a version of modernism antithetical to Duncan’s own self-proclaimed propensities and would be classed with those modernists who submitted to the protocols of Enlightenment rationality, such as Eliot, Moore and Stevens.4 We can understand Zukofsky’s basic stance in the so-called “Objectivist” period (around 1930) as a rigorous demystification of the residual romantic and mythopoetic elements that still marked the elder modernists, which might be taken as one possible definition of “Objectivist.” This is the tenor of his critical writings which emphasize a realist formalism set within a thoroughly secular contemporary context. Composing the early movements of “A” (“A” 1-7) in 1928-1930, Zukofsky eschewed any overriding argumentative, thematic or mythopoetic structure, other than the search for an adequate form for the poem itself, meaning a form directly responsive to the complexity of present experience and history. In “A” Zukofsky simply wrote discrete poems whose interweaving with each other was whatever recurrences came up in composition, and in “A”-23 he evokes Wittgenstein’s image of criss-crossing, a more or less random network of intersections without center or boundary (Zukofsky 560).5

• 6 In speaking of the compromised situation of modernist poetry in the U.S. around the time of World W (...)

3In The H.D. Book, Duncan’s most elaborate account of his pedigree and self-contextualization, Zukofsky is barely mentioned. In a reading of modernism that places H.D. as central, it is not easy to see just where Zukofsky fits in.6 Duncan regularly enough mentions Zukofsky as a major mentor from early on, but when he addresses him in “After Reading Barely and Widely” in 1959 (Duncan 2014b, 80-84), the elder poet seems primarily an excuse to extemporize. Duncan’s poem registers little cognisance of the poems or implied poetics of Zukofsky’s volume but instead flaunts his own extravagant preoccupations and is liberally populated with trolls and faeries, mysterious Jews, alchemical Mercury and an array of other such figures. My sense is that it is only quite late in Duncan’s career, roughly the last decade of his writing life, that he felt compelled to confront the challenge of Zukofsky more seriously. Of course the Ground Work volumes were in large part premised on a return to the primary sources or grounds of Duncan’s poetry, not least a deliberate troubling of that ground.

• 7 Duncan’s habitual pairing of Olson and Zukofsky goes back at least to “Notes on Poetics regarding O (...)

4A probable factor in Duncan’s increased attention to Zukofsky in his later work was the death of Charles Olson in 1970. If Dante and Shakespeare define the larger possibilities of poetry, Duncan repeatedly paired Olson and Zukofsky as the two antithetical contemporaries who defined the “polarities of what poetic consciousness might be” (Duncan 2014a, 355; Duncan 1995, 145) for himself and his fellow poets who situated themselves as following in the wake of Pound and Williams.7 Personally and poetically Duncan was obviously much closer to Olson, who he credited with calling his generation to order, instilling a sense of mission and community among the younger mid-century American poets committed to innovative practices, so that with Olson’s death he felt that a period had come to an end (Duncan 2012, 104-109; Duncan 2011, 217-218). At roughly the same time Duncan turned 50, his relationship with Levertov conclusively unravelled and he announced his 15 year hiatus from publishing a new book. Clearly Duncan saw himself moving into a late phase of his poetic career that required new and more troubling challenges.

• 8 “As Testimony: Reading Zukofsky These Forty Years” (1978) and “In Introduction: John Taggart, Dodek (...)
• 9 Palmer seems to have been an important mediator for Duncan in the 1970s, feeding his French interes (...)

5The superficial evidence for Duncan’s intensified engagement with Zukofsky in the Ground Work period is an unfinished serial essay on Zukofsky, plus further remarks in the introduction to John Taggart’s Dodeka, both written 1978 (the year Zukofsky died), as well as mentions and allusions to Zukofsky and “A” scattered throughout the late volumes.8 It is worth pointing out that Zukofsky of the mid-1970s is quite a different proposition from the Zukofsky of the late 1950s since during this period he produced and published the bulk of his major work: “A”-13 through -23 as well as Catullus and 80 Flowers, and even Bottom, although finished earlier did not appear complete until 1964. It also seems to me relevant that Robert Creeley brought out the minimalist Pieces, in 1969, dedicated to Zukofsky, and perhaps Michael Palmer is part of the mix as well, although I cannot say exactly how.9

• 10 A recording of the reading, “Reading in Buffalo, 1982,” is available at PennSound, http://writing.u (...)

7I may be wrong, but I cannot think of any other poem across Duncan’s entire body of work that is quite like this, overtly manifesting what he refers to as the “functional” tendency of modernism (Duncan 2011, 337, 363), against which his self-proclaimed romanticism is opposed. The prepositional title that calls on a doubled reading and the very narrow lines are signature Zukofsky, while the concluding lines with the centered capital A followed by “music / at rest,” clearly enough signal Zukofsky as well. If we require further confirmation, there is a recording of this poem in which Duncan states he is thinking of Zukofsky.10 “With In” mimics a typical Zukofsky technique whereby the lines can be simultaneously read as discrete units or as syntactically flowing into each other. Conceptually one could read this poem as a single line, although actually, in reading it Duncan strongly emphasizes the discreteness of each very short line or even each word (portentous emphasis on distinct phrases and words is characteristic of Duncan’s layout and readings of the late poems). In any case, it is precisely the formal interplay between these possibilities, a kind of doubled syntax, that is so typically Zukofskian and makes for the fugal dynamic of the poem. Duncan characteristically foregrounds this interplay by immediately introducing the topic of form, and while the poem has a quite Zukofskian sinuousness that eludes ready paraphrase, it is not a particularly difficult poem. Inside/outside, bounded/unbounded, and/or, him/her – this is about the dialectic of forms, the poem as active form or the forms within which we necessarily live, which both limit and define while also opening up and including. As the poem proceeds, we discover it is a love poem or what Zukofsky would call a valentine. For Zukofsky “valentine” simply designates any poem, since they are stripped down versions of what is implied in every poem, that is, the desire to exist with others, in other words the desire to be with readers. And in that desire for others is at base a desire for rest, for balance, a sense of completeness. But of course if music is Zukofsky’s reiterated image of this desire achieved or at least its possibility, music never rests but always dissipates in time – just as the poem “A” goes on and on without any pretence it could come to conclusion other than in an arbitrarily constructivist sense: the proposed form filled in so one moves on to something else. Of course this concluding “at rest” rimes with the final line of Duncan’s book, “– an eternal arrest,” which is another way to end the job (Duncan 2014b, 733). This is all the more striking in that “rest” is not something we generally identify with Duncan, the self-declared Heraclitean.

• 11 Elsewhere Duncan speaks of the “ecological” in somewhat different terms, as synonymous with the Dar (...)

11The key words that structure this sentence all gravitate toward an assumption of balance or rest. It is unlikely one would characterize Duncan’s own work as either economical or ecological, but the latter term captures Zukofsky’s interest in creating a sense of dynamic presence and density, of being in the world with others, and tending toward an ideal of equilibrium, which is one way to understand “a music at rest.”11 As for the “economical” in its root meaning, both Duncan and Zukofsky are notable poets of the household, but with Duncan the household is always related to wandering and return, however often he evokes his domestic setup with Jess, because his poetics, which demand perpetual self-challenge and transformation, never allow him to sit still at home or even to feel at home in the larger cosmos. For Zukofsky on the other hand the domestic scene is the site from which he builds out his sense of existence, that is, of measure, which is grounded on a desire for dynamic balance within constraints, the recognition that a tangible world always impinges and is shared with others.

• 12 Mallarmé appears prominently in “A”-19, both his poetry and his Le Livre project, although this doe (...)

15While the late “Jamais [Passages]” explicitly refers to Zukofsky and “A”, if we simply read the body of the poem, we would never divine any particular relation to Zukofsky. The title’s evocation of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard seems a more relevant reference point, and Duncan is not alone in suggesting some deep kinship between Zukofsky and the French poet.12 However, the brief headnote positions the poem or the reader quite precisely at the point in 1928 when Zukofsky has achieved his breakthrough poem with “Poem beginning ‘The’” and now turns to “A” as the lifework that will “prove his Art” as a major poet (Duncan 2014b, 592). As we have come to expect, the poem itself is really a re-enactment of Duncan’s own essential poetics, an affirmation of poetry as a pushing “beyond,” which seems tenuously related to Zukofsky’s own practice and stance. The poem is structured as a dialectic between the articles “a” and “the,” the only details that could be construed as an allusion to Zukofsky, but here reversed as the poem begins with “a” and ends with “the.” We might understand this as any given poem begins as one among an infinite possibilities and strives to realize itself as “the” possibility, as a definite distinctive body however ephemeral. However, presumably Duncan conceives of the poem dialectically and so always dissolving even in this process of self-realization. A version of this that appears in the poem is of the “Universe” as the concept of a totality that implies “Intention” and order, of which “Verse” is a part but also breaks off from, moves beyond or is resistant to “Uni-” (Duncan 2014b, 593). Again we recognize here Duncan’s Heraclitean poetics, the ceaseless play of identity and difference as the foundational myth of existence itself that poetry necessarily re-enacts. If this is a poem in some sense about Zukofsky, it has to be said it is, unsurprisingly, a very Duncanized conception of the “Objectivist” poet, who is more oriented toward a sense of being in the world as an awareness of limits and others and who would never cast the poem so explicitly up into such a cosmic or grandiose framework.

• 13 It seems to me this is what Duncan is driving at in remarks on “A” as collage in a late interview, (...)

17Although Mac Low numbers his poems/dances, this offers an explanation for Duncan’s abandonment of numbering for Passages. Duncan often thought out loud about the form of the modernist long poem, particularly the paradigmatic examples of the Cantos and Paterson – the former’s attempt to thematically and argumentatively contain the poem’s dynamics ending in the acceptance of its fortunate failure and the latter’s various proposed forms everywhere broken open by its focus on the immediate and the possible, the poet as Madame Curie “working the pitchblende – in obscure matter” (Duncan 2011, 454, 222-226). “A” more obviously offered an exemplary collaborative model for the late Duncan, a collection or criss-crossing, rather than a series, that can be entered or centered at any point and reassembled.13 So the form of the long poem never aspires to a determinative paradigm but rather a dynamic inter-relational structure both internally and externally. This suggests a reading of “Jamais” as a meditation on Zukofsky and his long poem, so that Mallarméan chance becomes a figure for “a,” the particular specificity of the “now” that simply seems to happen as it comes, but at the same time it weaves a sense, seemingly reveals intersections and patterns as lived, a sense of existence as precisely that attentive activity of chance and its routinization, a movement toward “the.” For Duncan the latter will always gesture at grander frameworks, whatever is implicated by “the sea” or “darkness” or “IT.”