The American Century: Literature since 1945 605alertness of perception and precision of speech to a new extreme. In between,
he produced Slinger, a long anti-heroic poem of the American West that enacts its
significances through radical variations of idiom, surreal imagery, puns,
personifications, and jokes. Constantly allusive, packed with a range of characters
that includes – besides the eponymous Slinger – a madam of a brothel, a refugee
from a university, and Howard Hughes, it explores questions of thought and culture
(Levi-Strauss is invoked, both the anthropologist and the jeans manufacturer) and
the use and abuse of power, money, words, and weaponry, in “cosmological
america.” As far as his “personal presence” in the poem is concerned, Dorn said,
“It’s omnipresent, absolutely omnipresent,” then added, “Actually I’m absolutely
uncommitted except to what’s happening.” In its own way, in fact, Slinger is another
version of the American epic, a song of the self in which the self becomes dispersed,
problematic, part of the matter for attention. Asked what the meaning of the
poem’s actions are, at one stage, Slinger laughs. “Mean? / Refugee, you got some
strange / obsessions,” he declares, “you want to know / what something means after
you’ve / seen it, after you’ve been there.” That makes the point. Meaning and
identity inhere in the actual processes, the activities of the lines; like Olson and
Creeley, Dorn seems to be recalling what Williams meant when he said “the poet
thinks with his poem.”
“I like to wander about in my work writing so rapidly that I might overlook
manipulations and design”: that remark of Robert Duncan’s suggests that he, too,
saw the poem as a process, of being and knowing. However, another remark of his
illustrates the mystical strain that helps to distinguish him from his Black Mountain
colleagues: “Poetry is the very life of the soul: the body’s discovery that it can dream.”
With a background as a romantic and theosophist, Duncan said that he experienced
from the first an “intense yearning, the desire for something else.” “I knew the fullest
pain of longing,” he declared, “... to be out of my being and enter the Other.”
Consumed with a desire for “identification with the universe,” he was still quite
young when he recognized in poetry his “sole and ruling vocation”; “only in this act,”
he felt, could his “inner nature unfold.” His feeling for verse and its constituent
language was, in fact, prophetic, cabalistic. Language, he believed, we drink in with
our mother’s milk, possessed by its rhythmic vibrations; we acquire it “without / any
rule for love of it / ‘imitating our nurses’ ” and hardly aware of its “vacant energies
below meaning.” Poems spring from this nurture, and from our dim recognition of
the “metaphorical ground in life.” A metaphor, Duncan claimed, “is not a literary
device but an actual meaning ... leading us to realize the coinherrance of being in
being:” it reveals correspondences in that world of forms “in which ... spirit is
manifest,” and it offers glimpses of “the wholeness of what we are that we will never
know.” Language, rhythm, metaphor: all these, then, Duncan began by seeing as a
means of transcendence, an access to revelation. What the Black Mountain experience
added to this was the liberating influence of open forms. Duncan took the notion of
the poem as field and colored it with his own original impulses so that it became, for
him, the idea of the poem as a “Memory-field” in which “all parts ... cooperate,
coexist” in mystical union. Past and future are folded together in the “one fabric” ofGGray_c05.indd 605ray_c 05 .indd 605 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM