Title: A selected prose /
Authors: Duncan, Robert, 1919-1988.; Bertholf, Robert J.; Woodberry Poetry Room (Harvard College Library).
Publisher: New Directions,
Year: 1995
Subjects: American poetry History and criticism; American literature History and criticism
Abstract: A Selected Prose represents the most wide-ranging collection to date of Robert Duncan's essays and talks and is a companion volume to the Selected Poems (1993). Editor Robert J. Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan's writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer. Included as well are "Rites of Participation," an excerpt from the still unpublished "H.D. Book"; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan's controversial and provocative essay of 1944, "The Homosexual in Society."
Contents: Towards an open universe -- Pages from a notebook -- Ideas of the meaning of form -- The homosexual in society -- [The matter of the bees] -- Changing perspectives in reading Whitman -- The last contribution of Ezra Pound -- Notes on the poetics of Marianne Moore -- Rites of participation -- As testimony : reading Zukofsky these forty years -- As an introduction : Charles Olson's Additional prose -- After For love : Robert Creeley -- Introductory notes : Denise Levertov -- Preface : Jack Spicer's One night stand & other poems -- Iconographical extensions : on Jess -- Statement on Jacobus for Borregaard's Museum -- Of George Herms , his Hermes, and his hermetic art -- Wallace Berman : the fashioning spirit -- Afterword : Beverly Dahlen's The Egyptian poems -- The delirium of meaning : Edmond Jabès.