Selected PoemsDuncan, like Dante, was a poet of cosmic imagination, intensely aware of his and poetry's role in the ever-expanding logos of creation. His Selected Poems, first published in 1993, is a "useful and portable compilation," says critic Tom Clark, that "provides the most comprehensive available look at the career of the Bay Area's greatest lyric poet." Editor Robert J. Bertholf has enlarged the original collection to include eleven additional poems and excerpts. The second edition of the Selected Poems fully fleshes out the retrospective of works chosen from the whole of Duncan's writing life. From his early poems through his final Ground Work volumes, as well as his serial poems, "Structures of Rime" and "Passages," composed over the course of thirty years, there emerges a prophetic voice of great perception. |
Contents
STRUCTURE OF RIME XVII | 92 |
From The Mabinogion | 98 |
Before the War 1984 | 124 |
from Dante Études | 140 |
11 | 168 |
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Common terms and phrases
beauty Beloved Bernadette Mayer birds blood body burning cast Charles Olson damnd dancing Dante dark darken Death deep depths dream earth Eternal evil eyes Ezra Pound face falconress fall Father feeling fire flame flowers Geryon gold gone green hand head hear heart Hell Hesiod horizon human language Leuke light lion listening living Lord Lou Andreas-Salomé lover lustrum magic Malebolge melody mind morning Mother mouth move night PASSAGES poet poetry prayers song Princess and Curdie rememberd ring rise ROBERT DUNCAN round San Francisco Renaissance secret seed seeking Selected Poems sentence sfumato shadows sight singing sleep Solar Councils song soul sound speak speech spirit splendor spring stars STRUCTURE OF RIME things Thomas Carlyle thought thru thruout tongues truth turns voice waiting wake wind window wingd words workt wrist writing
Popular passages
Page 4 - And all their echoes, mourn. The willows and the hazel copses green Shall now no more be seen Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. As killing as the canker to the rose, Or...
Page 54 - OFTEN I AM PERMITTED TO RETURN TO A MEADOW as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Page 64 - The light foot hears you and the brightness begins god-step at the margins of thought, quick adulterous tread at the heart. Who is it that goes there? Where I see your quick face notes of an old music pace the air, torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre.
Page 104 - She wanders, by what campfire at evening, among tribes setting each the City where we Her people are at the end of a day's reaches here the Eternal lamps lit, here the wavering human sparks of heat and light glimmer, go out, and reappear. For this is the company of the living and the poet's voice speaks from no crevice in the ground between mid-earth and underworld breathing fumes of what is deadly to know, news larvae in tombs and twists of time do feed upon, but from the hearth stone, the lamp...
Page 67 - amid lanes and through old woods" echoes Whitman's love for Lincoln! There is no continuity then. Only a few posts of the good remain. I too that am a nation sustain the damage where smokes of continual ravage obscure the flame. It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! "The theme is creative and has vista.
Page 64 - In Goya's canvas Cupid and Psyche have a hurt voluptuous grace bruised by redemption. The copper light falling upon the brown boy's slight body is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing up from blind innocence, ensnared by dimness into the deprivations of desiring sight.
Page 68 - These are the old tasks. You've heard them before. They must be impossible. Psyche must despair, be brought to her insect instructor; must obey the counsels of the green reed; saved from suicide by a tower speaking, must follow to the letter freakish instructions. In the story the ants help. The old man at Pisa mixd in whose mind (to draw the sorts) are all seeds as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill had part restored by an insect, was upheld by a lizard (to draw the sorts) the wind is part of the...
Page 69 - India ... all the blazing armies spent, he must struggle alone toward the pyres of Day. The light that is Love rushes on toward passion. It verges upon dark. Roses and blood flood the clouds. Solitary first riders advance into legend. This land, where I stand, was all legend in my grandfathers' time: cattle raiders, animal tribes, priests, gold. It was the West. Its vistas painters saw in diffuse light, in melancholy, in abysses left by glaciers as if they had been the sun primordial carving empty...
Page 129 - Spirit, and the stars, mothers of light, remain, having each its own "organic decorum, the complete loyalty of a work of art to a shaping principle within itself"— that lonely spirit having in its derivation likewise the quality of the stars and yet a severd distinct thing; and the stars also are and remain severe and distinct, each being of the universe free to itself having its own law. Yet the quality of the stars reigneth in the spirit; tho the spirit can and may raise or drown itself in its...
Page 59 - TO HAVE BEEN SODOM might have been. Certainly these ashes might have been pleasures. Pilgrims on their way to the Holy Places remark this place. Isn't it plain to all that these mounds were palaces? This was once a city among men, a gathering together of spirit. It was measured by the Lord and found wanting. It was measured by the Lord and found wanting, destroyd by the angels that inhabit longing. Surely this is Great Sodom where such cries as if men were birds flying up from the swamp ring in our...