March 26, 2020 33
for Montana Xibalba is from the Mayan
book of creation, about a ballgame in
the underworld. The photograph, from
a college yearbook, is juxtaposed with
an ancient American myth. The fruit of
this unexpected confrontation is unlike
any other image I know.
The slippage between the present
and the past and the ordinary and the
mythic was as essential for Duncan as
it was for Jess. In an essay, “Ideas of
the Meaning of Form,” Duncan com-
plained that for all too many poets—
the ones, so he believed, who were
“obsessed by convention”—form was
only “significant in so far as it shows
control.” What interested Duncan
were the structural possibilities that
defied all conventional principles of
artistic control. The Opening of the
Field, a book of poems published in
1960, is generally regarded as the key
to his work. There, in a series of poems
collectively titled “The Structure of
Rime,” he describes discovering “a
snake-like beauty in the living changes
of syntax.” The life of the poem can’t
ever really be separated from life itself.
“In the feet that measure the dance
of my pages,” Duncan writes, “I hear
cosmic intoxications of the man I will
be.” To shape the poem isn’t about
closing down experience but opening it
up. “I in the guise of a Lion roard out
great vowels and heard their amazing
patterns.” It is the writing, which takes
place in real time, that shapes poetic
time. Inevitably, Duncan’s meaning
turns out to be slippery, elusive. “The
Master of Rime,” he writes, “time after
time, came down the arranged ladders
of vision or ascended the smoke and
flame towers of the opposite of vision,
into or out of the language of daily life.”
Duncan’s poetry—and there is a lot
of it—can shock with its shifts from
off-the-cuff observation to grandiose
declaration and from the private to
the public. “An Essay at War,” writ-
ten in the early 1950s, moves from the
predicaments of the poet as he strings
words into poems to the horrors of the
Korean War, and does so with a dex-
terity that discomfits and astonishes
in almost equal measure. We begin
with “the design of a poem/constantly/
under reconstruction, /changing, pusht
forward.” The design, so we are told,
is “a conception betrayd.” Some pages
later—this is a long poem—we find
ourselves confronting the war. “We are
fighting over there/Without a plan.”
Men, Duncan writes, are “orderd to
stand—there being/no order— /we do
not understand.”
The yearning for order, Duncan
suggests, is there in the poem but also
there in the wider world. “What does
it mean?” he asks. “The design/con-
stantly in reconstruction. Destroyd./
Reformd.” Duncan was too fine a mind
and too ethical a man to ever suggest
any direct analogy between the dis-
order of art and the disorder of war.
What he did was something riskier and
deeper. “An Essay at War,” with its
punning title, suggests movements in
the world that might link radically dif-
ferent forms of order and disorder.
The most convincing writing about
Duncan’s poetry is by Thom Gunn,
who was born in England but lived
much of his life in San Francisco. Per-
haps because Gunn’s own poetry was
so alien to his friend Duncan’s free-
wheeling sensibilities, his admiration
strikes with a particular clarity and
force. Gunn writes of the “adventure
of entering the process of a Duncan
composition,” which is “energetic yet
tentative, assertive yet self-revising, op-
portunistic yet receptive, taking place
as it does in some area between direc-
tionless flux and rigid authorial control,
an area which the poet defines as he
goes along.” There are many modern
writers and artists whose embrace of
ambiguity leave us with a sense of loss
or defeat. What’s so invigorating about
Duncan’s ambiguities is that they move
toward affirmation and even ecstasy.
Gunn sees in Duncan’s work a con-
temporary reimagining of older forms
of romantic feeling, which Duncan
described as “the intellectual adven-
ture of not knowing.” Jess’s work also
involves that intellectual adventure of
not knowing. He once explained that
when he was learning about Abstract
Expressionism at the California School
of Fine Arts he “was really learning
Romance.” “I am insistently a Roman-
tic artist,” he said, “poetic artist, who-
knows-what-somebody-pigeonholes-me
artist.”Jess knew that he was going to be
pigeonholed and maybe even dis-
missed—perhaps as an incurable ro-
mantic, perhaps as a West Coast artist
and therefore by definition a provincial
artist. The same was true of Duncan.
There is no question that at times East
Coast and West Coast artists and writ-
ers have regarded one another with
more than a little suspicion. When
Duncan introduced Randall Jarrell
at a reading in 1956, he was hardly
complimentary, complaining that Jar-
rell “has no obsessions” and that his
poetry “never yields to unreal con-
victions.” Not long after, when Dun-
can reached out to Frank O’Hara, he
was rebuffed. O’Hara wrote to Jasper
Johns that although there might be
something interesting in Duncan’s po-
etry, “I can’t stand him myself, but he is
their Charles Olson—to me he is quite
flabby by comparison, but maybe be-
cause I’m on the East Coast.”
Of course, there were also friend-
ships and alliances with artists whose
sensibilities and careers had been
formed back east. Gunn has written
of the “immediate mutual attraction”
between Duncan and Elizabeth Bishop
when they met in 1969. Duncan’s long
and for many years enthusiastic friend-
ship with Denise Levertov would have
been unimaginable without the enor-
mous number of letters they sent back
and forth between the coasts. As for
Jess, although firmly planted in San
Francisco, he exhibited throughout his
life with the Odyssia Gallery in New
York, and as early as 1974 a show of his
Tra n s l a t i o n s was mounted at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art.
The story of the artistic and poetic
life of the West Coast has all too often
been told from the vantage point of the
East Coast. There has long been a feel-
ing in some circles that it took “The
San Francisco Scene,” a special 1957
issue of the New York–based magazine
The Evergreen Review, to put the Bay
Area bohemia on the national map.
There is certainly something to be said
about the chauvinism of New York, but
only when we have put that aside do
we come to the really interesting ques-
tion of whether there is some particular
cluster of qualities or characteristicsthat sets San Francisco and its artists
and writers apart. If for some the city
would always look like a cultural out-
post, for others its outsider status made
it something of a cultural mecca.
Duncan and Jess and some of their
friends believed that living at a remove
from the center of things had much to
recommend it. In a fascinating essay,
“Provincialism,” the English art histo-
rian Kenneth Clark muses on the par-
ticular qualities that may inhere in an
art formed outside of the great urban
centers. He suggests that “provincial
painting is at its best when it is poetical
painting” (he cites the Pre- Raphaelites
and Caspar David Friedrich). And he
describes what he regards as “the char-
acteristics of a positive and indepen-
dent provincial art: it tells a story; it
takes pleasure in the facts; it is lyrical,
and it achieves a visionary intensity.”
These words bring to mind not only
Jess’s but also Duncan’s work; perhaps
theirs was an art that could only flour-
ish at a remove from the cultural center.
Christopher Wagstaff and Michael
Duncan (no relation), who have writ-
ten a great deal about Jess as well as
Duncan, believe that we need to see
these men within the larger Bay Area
community. In their 2013–2015 exhibi-
tion “An Opening of the Field” and the
accompanying book, Duncan and Jess
are joined by more than two dozen art-
ists and writers who lived or spent time
in the Bay Area or at least shared many
concerns. In addition to Kael and Kitaj,
they include the assemblage artist Wal-
lace Berman, the poet Helen Adam,
the filmmaker and poet James Brough-
ton, and the painters Lyn Brockway,
Harry Jacobus, and Norris Embry.There are motifs, themes, and even
obsessions that link many of the Bay
Area figures. They valued the intuitive,
the quotidian, and the fantastical—and
they liked to mix it up. What was it that
held them together? Did they all feel
the strong impact of the teaching at
the California School of Fine Arts? Or
did Jess function as a sort of diffident
chef d’école and Duncan as the ate-
lier’s exegete, the couple’s interests so
captivating that they influenced what
their friends were doing? It’s also pos-
sible that these artists and writers were
under the spell of something more per-
vasive and elusive—what we might call
the spirit of San Francisco.
In “The Ballad of the Enamord
Mage,” the poem from which Jess took
the title for his portrait, Duncan wrote
with tempered optimism about the
evolution of an art “informd by Grief,
Joy, insatiable Desire/And cold Re-
morse.” Perhaps San Francisco, where
seventy-five years ago you could still
feel the pull of the city’s Barbary Coast
beginnings, was conducive to an art
that rejected definitive statements and
embraced extreme and even reckless
emotions. Could it be that the city of-
fered a riposte to Manhattan’s hard,
clear geometry? Could it be that San
Francisco, with its precipitous hills and
mysterious fogs, set the stage for an
art that celebrated uncertainty? Such
speculations can’t be proven or dis-
proven. What we are left with are the
works that individuals made. In “The
Ballad of the Enamord Mage,” Duncan
wrote that “Worlds out of Worlds in
Magic grow.” And so they did, in the
homes that Jess and Duncan shared for
so many years. QThe University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Chancellor Ronnie GreenCelebrate and Honor
KWAME DAWES
Chancellor’s Professor of English
and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie SchoonerMapmaking
The Poetic Art of Kwame Dawes
A Retrospective
Lincoln, Nebraska | March 18–20, 2020Winner of the
Windham-Campbell Prize,
the Musgrave Medal,
an Emmy Award for
multimedia documentary, and
a Guggenheim FellowshipAuthor of 21 books of poetry
including Nebraska,
published by the
University of Nebraska PressEditor of the renowned
African Poetry Book Series