The H.D. Book
Authors: Michael Boughn Robert Duncan Victor Coleman
THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF
ROBERT DUNCAN
Advisors
Bill Berkson
Robin Blaser (1925–2009)
Michael Davidson
Joseph Donahue
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Susan Howe
Nathaniel Mackey
Marilyn Schwartz
Mary Margaret Sloan
Christopher Wagstaff
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book from the Jess Collins Trust and the ongoing efforts of its trustees.
The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
The H.D. Book
The H.D. Book
Robert Duncan
Edited and with an
Introduction by
Michael Boughn and
Victor Coleman
University of California Press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit
www.ucpress.edu
.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2011 by the Jess Collins Trust. Used by permission.
Frontispiece: Jess (1923–2004), “his mind / ours a sublime community,” from
Emblems for Robert Duncan,
1989, paste-ups, 6¼′ × 5
. Seven ovals (with seven alternates) were created by Jess especially for this edition. Courtesy of the Jess Collins Trust.
For acknowledgment of previous publication, see credits, page 659.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duncan, Robert, 1919–1988.
The H.D. book / Robert Duncan ; edited and with an introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman.
p. cm. — (The collected writings of Robert Duncan ; 1)
A collection of 17 essays, composed from 1959 to 1964.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978–0–520–26075–7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Poetry, Modern—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Boughn, Michael. II. Coleman, Victor, 1944– III. Title.
PS3507.U629H3 2011
814'.54—dc22 | 2010005640 |
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z
39.48–1992 (
R
1997) (
Permanence of Paper
).
Chapter 6
Rites of Participation
Appendix 1: Preliminary Notes toward Book 3 of
The H.D. Book
Appendix 2: Composition and Publication History of
The H.D. Book
Appendix 3: A List of Works Cited by Robert Duncan in
The H.D. Book
Robert Duncan, circa 1960, at the time of his meeting with H.D.
H.D. in 1960, at the time of her meeting with Robert Duncan
Duncan’s typed title page for the aborted Black Sparrow edition
Duncan’s typed copyright page for the aborted Black Sparrow edition
A page (173) from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript C) showing Duncan’s early wording
A page (174) from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript C) showing Duncan’s holograph revisions
A page from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript D) showing Duncan’s revisions
A page spread from Duncan’s notebook containing his preliminary notes for Book 3
Acknowledgments
All the manuscripts for
The H.D. Book
are housed at the Poetry / Rare Book Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo. We would like to thank the staff at the Collection, and especially the curator, Michael Basinski, and the assistant curator, James Maynard, for making us welcome and for their help in locating Robert Duncan’s materials and making them available to us. James Maynard, in particular, not only quickly provided all the materials we asked for, but used his extensive knowledge of the collection to go out of his way to suggest material we would have taken weeks or months to otherwise locate. Without his generous assistance this project would have taken much longer than it did. Christopher Wagstaff, Mary Margaret Sloan, and the Jess Collins Trust have also been extremely generous and timely in their support of this work.
In addition, Mr. Maynard generously read an early draft of our introduction. His support and criticism were essential in helping us shape it into its final form. Peter Quartermain also took valuable time out from his own editorial tasks to offer us support and criticism. For that we are deeply grateful.
We would also like to thank our respective spouses, Elizabeth Brown and Kate Van Dusen, for their patience and support during our various trips to Buffalo and the cottage.
Without Laura Cerruti’s trust, we would never have had the opportunity and the privilege to live so closely with Robert Duncan’s mind and language for so long. And without Rachel Berchten’s patience and dedication, we would never have gotten this far.
Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman
Today I will allow myself whatever projects of what might come of this mining (You’ve to dig and come to see what I mean/where I, in that poem, almost wanted to point to that word “come”; because there is something about real thought that is as autonomous as ejaculation; and has the further mystery of the orgasmic if it have spirit). —Robert Duncan to Norman Holmes Pearson, July 2, 1960
The H.D. Book
is one of the great “lost” texts in the history of American poetry. In 1959, when he began writing the book, Robert Duncan was already an accomplished and well-known poet, connected with the Berkeley renaissance and the San Francisco renaissance, as well as Black Mountain College and the Beat poets. He had published a number of important works—including
Heavenly City, Earthly City; Medieval Scenes; Fragments of a Disordered Devotion; Caesar’s Gate; The Venice Poem;
and
Letters—
and was about to appear in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology,
The New American Poetry.
His mature work, however, had yet to come.
The H.D. Book
would be the alembic in which that work was gestated.
Composed from 1959 to 1964, various chapters of
The H.D. Book
appeared in little magazines between 1966 and 1985 (see appendix 2). It was never published as a completed book, however. Perhaps
lost
overstates the case, since it was never forgotten, but for some forty years, the only access to the text was photocopied assemblages of the various magazine publications, treasured—and sometimes passed from hand to
hand—by Duncan’s loyal readers. In 2001, we posted a transcription of the magazine publications on the internet; while this made the existing text available to those who did not have the photocopies, it did not include the many revisions Duncan had made over the years to his ever-changing text. A complete, edited version of the book remained elusive, the stuff of endless complaint and speculation.
Duncan began writing
The H.D. Book
when H.D.’s friend and literary executor, Norman Holmes Pearson, asked him for a short homage to present to H.D. on her birthday in 1960. Duncan had long admired H.D.’s work. As he tells the story in the opening chapter of
The H.D. Book,
her poem “Heat,” read to him by a high school English teacher, was his first experience with the magic of poetry, an experience that led him into his life-long devotion to the art. What began as a simple homage quickly turned into an epic meditation and exploration of what Duncan felt were the hidden springs that fed the roots of modernism and the work of the poets and writers he took on as masters: H.D., Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, among others.
Duncan’s early work on
The H.D. Book
coincided with his correspondence with H.D., which lasted for about two years (not including an early letter from 1950), from July 1959 until her death in September 1961.
1
Much of the thinking that began to take shape in
The H.D. Book
was echoed in these letters. Their talk of myth and Hermetic philosophy mixed with and informed their talk of other poets. Both shared a history of connection to outsider or repressed spiritual knowledge and practices. H.D. had been raised in the Moravian Church of Count Zinzendorf and had traveled in circles during the 1920s that engaged with magic and various occult practices. Duncan had grown up in a family with connections to Theosophy and spiritualism. This, too, bound them together.
Both had also turned away from such practices. H.D. wrote in a letter (October 27, 1960) to Duncan how Yeats and his wife, Georgie, had invited her to Oxford—presumably to participate in some Rosicrucian ritual—but “something held me back.” Duncan interpreted this as “the disinterest of a growing thing for possibilities outside its law, its real” (October 31, 1960) and proposed that Yeats (unlike H.D.) seemed not to have known “the numinous woodland and shoreland, the events of god outside the ritual.” Duncan, an inveterate anarchist, was always loyal to the sense of an inner law, often, if not always, in the face of an outer law, a demand by society to conform to its practices, even when they were the rituals of obscure cults. What Duncan (and H.D.) derived from that youthful experience was not a set of beliefs or practices dictated by churches or cults, but a deep sense of the possibility of other modes of thinking the world.
2
These modes of thinking, grounded in the freedom of the imagination, were fed by hidden or lost or excluded material, material deemed silly or superstitious or heretical by a society whose forms of life dictated a totalitarian “normality.” For both poets, the matrix for poetry was in the spaces between those given forms. They shared a commitment not to the
this
or the
not this,
not to the
self
or the
other,
but to the fissure from which such forms arise into the conditioned contingencies of the given.