I
read Ekbert Fass’s biography of Robert Duncan when it came out in 1983, and was
floored to learn that Duncan
had a visceral first reaction to H.D. similar to my own. I believe he described his experience as one
of “sensual intensity.” On a hot Bakersfield afternoon in the 1930s, his
apparently avant-garde high-school English teacher read H.D.’s “Heat”
aloud. This simple event led to a
lifelong relationship with her that culminated—or almost culminated—in his
mythical (un?) published H.D. Book. Though they never met, he was lucky enough to
have a correspondence with her. She even
once sent him some money when he was hard up.
It’s
strange, but in high school my own first response to Duncan’s poetry was similar to both our first
readings of H.D. While reading his “The Torso, Passages 18” I had a bodily
experience, as it were: “His hands
unlocking chambers of my male body….” When the word “…homosexual?” appeared a few lines later—on a line all by itself,
preceded by ellipses and followed by a question-mark—I replaced the book (Bending the Bow) on the shelf and
practically slunk out of the bookstore, in part because I was a closeted
teenager, but more so because my physical reaction was so strong. This was better than the Playgirls my best friend stole from the drugstore.
It
may seem in these first three blog-postings that I am valorizing the visceral
response to poetry over the intellectual.
Don’t get me wrong. I get off as
much as the next poet (maybe every other?
Every third?) on Julia Kristeva’s The
Revolution in Poetic Language, or anything by Marjorie Perloff. And I find moments of reverie when, for
example, writing an article for Contemporary
Literature on Duncan and another for Xcp
on H.D. I worry that my musings here
might be taken as the nostalgia of a dopamine junkie for those sustained states
of innocence and ecstasy that we all have had—especially as younger poets and
readers of poetry—rather than a tracing of those states in order to understand
how they work.
Part
of what made my experiences with H.D. and Duncan
so raw and charged is that I misread their mythic poetry as confessional. And not just as their confessions, but mine
too! By way of allusion and imagery,
“The Torso” told the story of my loves—back to Edward II, and even farther, to
Jonathan and David! In his “‘My Mother
Would Be Falconress,’” I saw my own mother’s eyes in those “fierce eyes,” and
I, too, felt certain “dread that she will cast me away.” And who, when in despair, has not wanted to
scream something like H.D.’s Eurydice:
before I am
lost,
hell must open
like a red rose
for the dead
to pass.
Interestingly,
though, confessional poetry has not often given me such “sensual
intensity.” Of course, there really is no
confession in either H.D. or Duncan. What happens—or at least what happened to
me—is that in their words, and in the very breath of their lines, the mythic
becomes the psychic. Like alchemy. It is this quality that is so hard to find in
poetry of any age, and is even harder still to write.
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