Bending the BowIn Structures of Rime," the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself - the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series - a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson, Zukofsky's "A," and Olson's Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan's belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine's Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gerard de Nerval's Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam's Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems - "My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos" - among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience. " |
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Common terms and phrases
Abyss Adam Adam's Ahriman Arthur Rimbaud awakening beat BENDING THE BOW Bernadette Mayer body breath Charles Olson Chrysaor comes creation dance dark Death deep divine dragon draw blood dream earth Eros evil eyes Ezra Pound face falconress fall Father fire flame flowers following Lilith's GÉRARD DE NERVAL gold green head heart Heinrich von Kleist Hermes Hesiod hidden horizon human Kenneth Anger Kybele light living magic mind Montségur Moon mother moves Muriel Spark night numbers Parmenides Parsifal Passages 17 Passages 29 passt play poet poetry Posilipo rage released rise Robert Duncan Samael seance secret seed Selected Poems shadows shakes shines sight sing sleep song soul sound speak speech spirit stars stone story striking STRUCTURE OF RIME sweet things thou thought thru tree trembling Truth turn vine voice walls wave wingd words wrath wrist
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Page 9 - 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 51 - With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells?
Page 84 - Am I Amor or Phoebus? . . . Lusignan or Biron? My forehead is still red with the kiss of the queen; In the grotto where the siren swims I have had a dream . . . And twice I have crossed and conquered the Acheron: On Orpheus...
Page 64 - At the rise of the pectoral muscles the nipples, for the breasts are like sleeping fountains of feeling in man, waiting above the beat of his heart, shielding the rise and fall of his breath, to be awakend At the axis of his mid hriff the navel, for in the pit of his stomach the chord from which first he was fed has its temple At the root of the groin the pubic hair, for the torso is the stem in which the man flowers forth and leads to the stamen of flesh in which his seed rises a wave of need and...
Page 113 - Duncan, the war-maker President Johnson was indictable as a rotten poet: (Johnson now, no inspired poet but making it badly, amassing his own history in murder and sacrifice without talent) . . . irreplaceable, irrevocable in whose name? a hatred the maimd and bereft must hold against the bloody verse America writes over Asia. Commenting on the conceit of such lines, Mersmann concludes nothing more complex than that these poets regard war as an abuse of language. Saying of Viet Nam that 'the war...
Page 26 - Parker put it: ... if your big room is to be comfortable it must have recesses. There is a great charm in a room broken up in plan, where that slight feeling of mystery is given to it which arises when you cannot see the whole room from any one point Joe Price House (1 956-), Bruce Goff House 'B...
Page 81 - America become a sea of toiling men stirrd at his will, which would be a bloated thing, drawing from the underbelly of the nation such blood and dreams as swell the idiot psyche out of its courses into an elemental thing until his name stinks with burning meat and heapt honors And men wake to see that they are used like things spent in a great potlatch, this Texas barbecue of Asia, Africa, and all the Americas, And the professional military behind him, thinking to use him as they thought to use Hitler...