Profoundly original yet insistent on the derivative quality of his work, transgressive yet affirmative of tradition, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a generative force among American poets, and in his poetry and poetics was a major figure in mid- and late- 20th-century American letters. This, the second volume of Robert Duncan’s collected poetry and plays, presents authoritative annotated texts of both collected and uncollected work from his middle and late writing years (1958-1988), with commentaries on each of the five books, The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and the two volumes of Ground Work.



The biographical and critical introduction discusses Duncan as a late Romantic and postmodern American writer, his formulation of a homosexual poetics, his development of the serial poem, the notation and centrality of sound as organizing principle, and his relations with such fellow poets as Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, and Jack Spicer, his indebtedness to Alfred North Whitehead, and his collaborations with the painter Jess Collins, his lifelong partner. Texts include his anti-war poems of the 1960s and 70s, his hommages to Dante and other major figures, and his translations from the French of Gérard de Nerval, as well as the complete “The Structure of Rime” and “Passages.”

Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was one of the major figures in the San Francisco Renaissance movement and is considered one of the most accomplished and influential of the postwar American poets. A foremost figure of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College, Duncan, following the death of Charles Olson, became the leading practitioner of a nontraditional open form poetry. He is the author of The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow, among other works.



Peter Quartermain taught contemporary poetry and poetics at the University of British Columbia for over thirty years. He is the author of Basil Bunting, Poet of the North; Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe; and Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde. He is the editor of Robert Duncan’s Collected Early Poems and Plays (UC Press).