This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919–1988), one of America’s great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan’s birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan’s notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.
Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus A Biography
About the Book
Reviews
“A comprehensive, well-researched, and beautifully written biography. . . . Jarnot brings Duncan to life as a gay man and a brilliant poet engaged with the cultural and political issues of his time.”—Publishers Weekly
“It is a testament to Jarnot’s mastery of her craft that she can simultaneously tell a good story, imbue her prose with a subtly dry sense of humor, and write a balanced, critically astute biography of one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. . . . Jarnot’s biography is an edifying study of a poet who did much to inspire the next generation of poets, and it is an entertaining life story. This book should be looked to as a template for other biographies of twentieth-century poets.”—Daniel Coffey Foreword
“Jarnot has seemingly discovered every scrap of Duncan’s life-itinerary and every other literary figure he ever encountered and has fashioned a chronicle that should be utterly absorbing for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.”—Ray Olson Booklist
“Jarnot's biography offers an eloquent testament to an American poet trying to be responsible to the human spirit. . . . It will compel us all to reread Duncan's poetry—breathtaking as it is.”—Seth Lerer San Francisco Chronicle
“For many younger readers, the members of the post-World War II ‘San Francisco Renaissance,’ like their cohorts among the Black Mountain poets, are little more than names. Once the poems of Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan were ‘required texts.’ Today, with luck, they might make it into ‘recommended reading.’ Posterity winnows ruthlessly, and, rightly or not, the American poets of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s who seem to be passing into the canon are largely East Coast folk—elegant Elizabeth Bishop, confessional Robert Lowell, howling Allen Ginsberg, formalist Richard Wilbur and perhaps a half-dozen others. This makes Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan all the more valuable.”—Michael Dirda Washington Post Book World
“Jarnot has done her homework, and she gives readers an exhaustive, meticulously detailed account of Duncan’s life. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice
“In organizing a mass of previously unavailable archive material, Jarnot's study will serve as an indispensable reference text—if not the first port of call—for anyone hoping to make headway through the metaphysical tangle of Duncan's oeuvre. . . . Readers of Jarnot's biography will find Duncan's life realized, at last, in all its fictive certainty.”—Stephen Ross Times Literary Supplement (TLS)
"Jarnot is a sensitive reader of literary history and an admiring but not uncritical biographer. She is also not above serving up the scuttlebutt that we’ve come, as readers, to expect as our literary-biographical due."—Robert Baird London Review of Books
“Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan should only stoke further interest in his work. She avoids the usual two pitfalls—worship and apostasy—by cleaving to a style so clean and free of editorializing or psychologizing that it reads like reportage. . . . To do more, she avers in her introduction, would have meant taking a turn toward criticism—something she wanted to avoid. The result is a book of just the facts: what, where, when and who. And yet Jarnot, a poet herself, is sensitive to the symbols and cycles that defined Duncan’s imaginative life.”—Ange Mlinko The Nation
"This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan."—BMS Book News“This is a book of wonders, beautifully written and brilliantly researched. Lisa Jarnot offers a work of devotion to the truth and spirit of Robert Duncan's life and art, the result of twenty years of study and reflection. A great story as well as a rigorous exploration of the poet's art of the imagination, it will pull readers back into Duncan's poetry at the same time that it recounts his rich, adventurous, and always creative life.”—Robert Adamson, author of The Goldfinches of Baghdad.
"Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Robert Duncan represents an essential contribution to our understanding of this complex, inspirited man, his life and art, and the many circles in which he moved through the years. It is one of those rare works that melds scholarly diligence with poetic comprehension."—Michael Palmer, author of Thread.
"Robert Duncan was a poet of enormous means and complexity, one of the last to pursue a truly cosmological poetics. In that pursuit he was a poet (even a great poet), who created – like Whitman before him – his own life with all its openings & pitfalls as beyond all else a life-of-poetry. Lisa Jarnot's biography now gives us a first, richly detailed depiction of that life, a powerful and necessary complement to Duncan’s poetry itself. A product of the century behind us, it offers up a lasting legacy for the century to come."—Jerome Rothenberg, author of Technicians of the Sacred.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Michael Davidson
Preface
Acknowledgments
Textual Notes
Part One
Childhood’s Retreat
1 The Antediluvian World
2 Native Son of the Golden West
3 The Architecture
4 A Part in the Fabulous
5 The Wasteland
6 The Fathering Dream
Part Two
Toward the Shaman
7 The Little Freshman Yes
8 A Company of Women
9 The Dance
10 From Romance to Ritual
11 Queen of the Whores
12 Enlisted
13 Marriage
14 Divorce
Part Three
The Enamord Mage
15 The End of the War
16 The Round Table
17 The First Poetry Festival
18 The Venice Poem
19 Indian Tales
20 The Song of the Borderguard
21 The Way to Shadow Garden
22 The Workshop
23 Mallorca
24 Caesar’s Gate
Part Four
The Opening of the Field
25 The Meadow
26 New York Interlude
27 The San Francisco Scene
28 Olson, Whitehead, and the Magic Workshop
29 The Maidens
30 Elfmere
31 Night Scenes
32 H.D.
33 Go East
34 Apprehensions
Part Five
The Nasty Aesthetician
35 The Will
36 The Playhouse
37 The Political Machine
38 Knight Errant
39 The Vancouver Conference
40 Bending the Bow
41 A Night Song
42 Anger
43 The Berkeley Conference
44 The Sixties
Part Six
Domestic Scenes
45 The Household
46 The Summer of Love
47 Days of Rage
48 Ground-Work
49 Helter Skelter
50 Santa Cruz Propositions
51 The Torn Cloth
52 Despair in Being Tedious
53 The Cult of the Gods
54 Elm Park Road
55 Riverside
56 The Heart of Rime
Part Seven
Troubadour
57 An Alternate Life
58 Cambridge
59 The Avant-Garde
60 Adam, Eve, and Jahweh
61 San Francisco’s Burning
62 At Sea
63 The Cherubim
64 Alaska
65 Enthralled
Part Eight
The Master of Rime
66 New College
67 Five Songs
68 A Paris Visit
69 Bard
70 The Baptism of the Blood
71 Hekatombe
72 The Year of Duncan
73 The Circulation of the Blood
74 In the Dark
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Awards
- 2012 PROSE AWARD Honorable Mention, Literature, Association of American Publishers, Inc.
- Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, National Book Critics Circle