Robert Duncan

Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet. 

Duncan was born in Oakland, California. His mother died at his birth. He was adopted by a couple who taught him the occult religion of theosophy which believes in reincarnation and spiritual oneness. He decided to be a poet when he was in high school.

He had two years of college at the University of California-Berkeley. Then he tried Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1938, he moved to New York City. He met abstract expressionist artists. He started a magazine that printed writing by Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Durrell and others.

Duncan was drafted into the U. S. Army in 1941, but he was rejected because he came out as being gay. In 1944, his essay called “The Homosexual in Society” was an early statement about the difficulty of living as a gay writer in that time. In 1951 he met his lifelong partner, the artist Jess Collins.

He went back to the University of California at Berkeley in 1947. He studied medieval and renaissance literature. In 1956, the poet Charles Olson asked Duncan to teach at Black Mountain College. During his year there he wrote most of the poems that were collected in his important book The Opening of the Field.

Duncan returned to San Francisco where he lived until he died of kidney disease in 1988.

Books
 Selected Poems (1959)
 Letters 1953-56 (2003)
 The Opening of the Field (1960)
 Roots and Branches (1964)
 Medea at Kolchis; the maiden head (1965)
 Of the war: passages 22–27 (1966)
 Bending the Bow (1968)
 The Years As Catches: First poems (1939–1946) (1966)
 Play time, pseudo stein (1969)
 Caesar's gate: poems 1949-50 with paste-ups by Jess (1972)
 Selected poems by Robert Duncan (1973, 1959)
 An ode and Arcadia (1974)
  Medieval scenes 1950 and 1959 (1978)
 The five songs (1981) 
 Fictive Certainties (Essays) (1983)
 Ground Work: Before the War (1984)
 Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987)
 Selected Poems edited by Robert Bertholf (1993)
 A Selected Prose (1995)
 Copy Book Entries, transcribed by Robert Bertholf (1996)
 The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004)
 Ground Work: Before the War / In the Dark (2006)
 The H.D. Book (The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan) (2011)
 The Unruly Garden: Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram, Letters and Essays (2007)
 A Poet's Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan,1960-1985 (2012)

 Related pages 
List of poets from North America

References

Other websites
Robert Duncan at PennSound

Category:1919 births
Category:1988 deaths
Category:American LGBT writers
Category:American poets
Category:Writers from Oakland, California