Opening the Field

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Robert Duncan’s poetry when I was in my early twenties, and I had no idea what to make of it. I knew Duncan was connected to multiple twentieth-century avant-garde poetic movements and practices. I knew he had spent most of his life in San Francisco, and that he was one of the earliest American writers to come out as gay in print. Yet when I began reading his work, what struck me was the strange, idiosyncratic antiquity that seemed to permeate nearly every line: rhythms that sounded Victorian, words with odd, medieval-ish spellings, and a robustly baffling quality, as if he were writing not to be understood but for some other purpose entirely—perhaps more like an ancient mage inscribing runes than any other modern poet writing poems.

To be clear, at that time I already knew and loved poetry that was baffling. I loved the permissive idea itself: that poetry be baffling. But the baffling poetry I’d encountered before I came to Duncan had a way of making me feel complicit in its bafflingness, of opening one or another door in itself that I could step through. In Duncan, meaning and context felt like a fast stream of water forever swishing past and around me. I tried to baptize myself in it, but when I emerged again hours