A History of American Literature

606 The American Century: Literature since 1945

his verse: with the result that what the reader sees, ideally, is “no first strand or second

strand” but the “truth of that form,” the timeless “design” as a whole.

“There is a natural mystery to poetry,” Duncan wrote in 1960. In his poems,

beginning with early collections such as Heavenly City, Earthly City (1949),

The Opening of the Field (1960), and Roots and Branches (1964) and ending with

Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987), he tried to announce that mystery. His frequently

anthologized piece “Often I Am Permitted to Return to A Meadow” (1964) is

characteristic. Using plangent repetition of word and phrase, subtle verbal melody,

and a serpentine syntax that seems to fall back on itself, Duncan creates a verse that

is, in equal portions, magic, ritual, and incantation. Above all, there is the image of

an “eternal pasture” here, which gradually accumulates associations that are pagan

(“ring a round of roses”), Platonic (“light / wherefrom the shadows that are forms

fall”), and Christian (“likenesses of the First Beloved / whose flowers are flames to

the Lady”). Like the figures of H.D. (a poet whom Duncan admired), this image is at

once precise and resonant, exact and strange; and while it is possible to gather some

of its reverberations (omens and celebrations that are at once sacred and sensual, the

holy place that links “being” and “Other”), it is precisely the point that it should

remain unparaphraseable, a “releasing / word” that releases us simply into a dim

awareness of the “god-step at the margins of thought.” The last line of the poem,

“everlasting omen of what is,” in a way takes us no further than the first. Yet that,

surely, is because Duncan is intent on making us feel that we have been in the

“meadow” he describes. Like a suddenly remembered dream, an experience of déjà

vu or a half-recovered melody, its appeal depends on the suspicion that it has always

been there below “the currents of language” – and still is, even if we cannot quite

grasp it.

Restoring the American vision: The San Francisco Renaissance

Duncan gradually moved, he claimed, from “the concept of a dramatic form to a

concept of musical form in poetry.” This does not tell the whole truth, if only because

his poetry written after his initial involvement with the Black Mountain group is

capable of dramatic statement: it incorporates vigorous attacks on “The malignant

stupidity of statesmen,” vivid accounts of homosexual experiences (“my Other is not

a woman but a man”), and careful descriptions of how “The poem / feeds upon

thought, feeling, and impulse.” As a broad brushstroke portrait of the impact that

Olson and others had on him, though, it is reasonably helpful – and handy, since it

brings into focus a second group of poets who reacted, in their own way, against the

formalist and confessional establishments. The “dramatic form” Duncan refers to is

the one he favored when he emerged as a leading poet in the late 1940s, as part of

what has become known as the San Francisco Renaissance. For the San Francisco

poets, drama and performance were primary. As one of them, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

(1919–), put it in 1955, “the kind of poetry which has been making the most noise

here ... is what should be called street poetry.” “It amounts to getting poetry back

into the street where it once was,” he added, “out of the classroom, out of the speech

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