Playing in the Planetary Field: Vulnerability and Syncretic Myth-making in Robert Duncan’s Ecopoetics, in Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. 84–101. Download from JSTOR or Academia.edu.
It is not obvious that Robert Duncan wrote ecopoetry, as that term is still most often defined: his poems do not warn or mourn about environmental damage, and they are not devoted to describing a particular place. Duncan’s work is, however, central to the projectivist ecopoetics that Black Mountain poets developed in the 1950s and 60s. Projectivist ecopoetics focus not on saving nature or lamenting loss, but on re-positioning the human in complex, planetary systems. As such, projectivist ecopoetics put the accent on participation and possibility rather than decline and apocalypse and thoroughly inform the contemporary, linguistically experimental poetries represented in Jonathan Skinner’s journal, Ecopoetics. To the projectivist focus on participation, Duncan contributed playfulness and fictionality, vulnerability, and a syncretic myth-making that embraces science while rejecting rationalism and fatalist despair. For Duncan, to participate in remaking “a Poetry”—which means to be changed by tradition as well as to change it—is to participate in Earthly and indeed cosmic orders, in “what is.”
This essay traces how Duncan theorized and practiced an avowedly queer, Romantic, and vulnerable ecopoetics of emergent form. In the first section, I show how Duncan’s poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” revises Charles Olson’s projectivist field, insisting that the poet does not oversee the systemic field of composition, but instead enters it only by invitation of its own lively orders. The second section focuses on Duncan’s prose; I argue that, through his reading of H.D.’s work, Duncan developed his concept of vulnerability and the syncretic myth of ecopoetic origins that he elaborates in his essay, “Towards an Open Universe.” In the final section, I read “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” a poem in which Duncan rewrites Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook” and responds to John Crowe Ransom’s rejection of his work, countering both entropic fatalism and conventional definitions of poetic naturalness.
Michelle Niemann 