Mystic Realism & Collage: Robert Duncan’s THE WAR (1968)

Robert Duncan’s “Introduction” was the final piece that he composed for his 1968 collection of poetry Bending the Bow. The effort preoccupied him throughout much of 1967, a year in which Duncan, alongside many other creative practitioners, recognized that his art was undergoing a formal crisis that stemmed from an increasing awareness of US atrocities in Vietnam.[1] Duncan’s effort to reckon with this crisis of practice yielded a startling manifesto that, despite being positioned as the “Introduction” to the collection he had already composed, in fact theorizes an aesthetic orientation that appears only occasionally and nascently in the collection itself. The piece, written in a dense, vertiginous, and original prose, comes in five short sections. In this article, I focus in particular on the first section, titled THE WAR, which Duncan recited at readings as a prose-poetic work that seeks to exemplify on the spot the practice it theorizes (Quartermain, “Notes,” 797–798). For Duncan, it is the term “collage” that enables him to think of problems of artistic form as problems existing “on the same level” as larger social forms amidst historical crisis and to renovate a dynamic relation wherein the old power of high, idealizing forms of Poetry might be made to cathect pressing political contexts with new force.

To those familiar with Duncan, a “sister arts” study that raises the importance of collage will not seem surprising, given Duncan’s close personal relationships with collage and assemblage artists such as Jess (his husband), Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and George Herms. Yet, my claims in this article might run counter to expectations raised by this context. Often, such collage practice has been understood as a means of undercutting the authority of its component materials, which are made to no longer speak in the might and right of their traditional site of origin, so that they might constitute a new significance in ironic relation to the other components with which they are collaged. Collage juxtapositions may perform the work of a subcultural, synthetic self-styling, and/or they may work to elicit a cultural criticism, but, in either case, a disillusioning image of what has been received as culturally authentic seems characteristic. The collagist, for example, may like a religious image that they choose to bring into their composition—but in a way that secularizes that image by treating it as “material.” The culturally constructed problematic of such a figure, rather than the expressive raising up of its underpinning religious impulse, seems more what is at stake. Critics thus tend to recruit such practices to a paradigm of the “post-,” such as postmodernism.[2] But Duncan, due to his extreme identification with a vaunted sense of Poetry as his vocation, does not land in this postmodernist version of collage. Duncan’s collage logic proves surprising because it does not deflate the high thing that is brought in but rather sustains its “high-expressive” character.

On the face of it, then, Duncan’s grandiose conception of collage might seem to have more in common with the high modernist collage poetry of Pound, H.D., and Eliot than with postmodern collage. After all, Duncan explicitly claims that he derived his poetic from these poets.[3] In this modernist version of collage, syncretistic poetic powers web deep psychic homologies and renew high figures of old wisdom toward synthetic, idealizing alignment under the epiphanic sign of something sovereign. H.D., for example, claims a project of “spiritual realism” that aims to see recurrence in history, amidst World War II, so as to “re-vivify the eternal verity” in a way that will bridge “schism in consciousness.”[4] Similarly, Eliot writes of recurrent War, “Below, the boarhound and the boar / Pursue their pattern as before / But reconciled among the stars.”[5] Thus, while Duncan shares with his modernist sources a concern for registering recurrence in history, he rejects the modernist collage poem’s location of unity within a realm of the ideal that supersedes and is dislodged from social action, such that the registration of recurrence doesn’t motivate political engagement. Duncan wants attachment not detachment, fire not quietism. 

Duncan thus identifies a deficit and an affordance within both modernist and postmodernist versions of collage. He seeks to yoke the performativity of the postmodernist (but without disillusionment), so as to spur an involving effort of transvaluation, with the spiritual authenticity of the modernist (but without quietism), so as to irradiate the historical with a mighty inrush of idealizing force. As we will see, the dynamics of formal relation suggested by collage, for Duncan, connect to what he calls the problem of the “back of” relation, where, as a matter of a kind of imaginational-spiritual discipline, the emblematic level of high figurality needs to be felt as “back of” the most present and pressing history (or vice versa), so that the collaged levels enjoin the reader, not to one or the other kind of disaffected sapience, but to a restless affectedness that puts a responsive demand on them. Perhaps surprisingly, amidst Duncan’s efforts to wrestle toward such a practice, it is Picasso’s 1937 mural Guernica that strikes him as just such a “collage,” one that confronts him with the challenge of a social realism capable of spurring ethical-imaginal involvement with a distant, mediated war and that, simultaneously, empowers his sense of the potential of high and prophetic means to cathect emergency conditions. Finally, Duncan’s vision of collage, although it does take a certain secular-constructivist step that seems more or less inherent to collage, simultaneously reactivates a distinctive kind of aesthetico-religious belief (a Whitmanian faith that exceeds what we see in Guernica). That is, although “collage” inspires Duncan’s sometimes granular thinking about form, it most of all becomes a tool for articulating a “mystic realist” project.

i: collapsing world, collage, and the problem of the “post-”

We enter again and again the last days of our own history, for everywhere living productive forms in the evolution of forms fail, weaken, or grow monstrous, destroying the terms of their existence. We do not mean an empire; a war then, as if to hold all China or the ancient sea at bay, breaks out at a boundary we name ours . . . And in this drama of our own desperation we are drawn into a foreign desperation.[6]

The first sentence of Duncan’s “Introduction” introduces a major problem that preoccupies Vietnam War-era artists broadly: recourse to existing formal means seems to fail, to look facile or even obscene, in the face of the violence of contemporary events. Duncan, in his invocation of the apocalyptic “last days,” adopts a prophetic voice. And yet, we come into last days’ temporality not as part of a final eschaton, for which Judgement Day is imminent, but “again and again.” “Again and again” refers in part to the wars of Duncan’s lifetime. His lifetime, counting back to his birth amidst World War I, frames a contemporary age of perpetual war: wars that threaten to swallow up the entire world and that look capable of total destruction; wars that thus tax the credibility of responsive cultural representation; wars that thus prove hostile to whatever faith an Artist needs, for their Art, to sustain. And does this not imply that one’s own disillusionment, as one registers an apparent blanching of poetic means, requires the counter of some “faith” that will enable one to level up, once again, to the historical, a faith perhaps like that of apocalyptic believers who feel themselves to be perpetually reentering “last days”? Recourse to apocalyptic rhetoric appears symptomatic of creative crises that are precipitated by historical crises, when the very urgency of the question of “how to represent,” amidst a moment that again looks apocalyptic, makes almost any cultural response appear inadequate. “Last days,” that is, are those of an apocalypse of method, one that must somehow be made to yield an emergency method.

Yet there’s an oddity to the way Duncan puts together in the same sentence language of apocalypse and of organicist evolution (“living productive forms in the evolution of forms”). One might read Duncan as meaning that, under current conditions, apocalyptic rhetoric appears triumphant relative to a secular rhetoric of progressive evolution that now appears a monstrous failure. But his point rather seems to be that, in light of the War, the teloses of the two paradigms of eschatology and evolutionary form cancel one another out, “destroying the terms of their existence” (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293). At the same time, the figures germane to these paradigms combine into something monstrous, like the monster of a body horror movie, like a “collage” without formal intent. Duncan appears novel among those on the left who identify the failure or destabilization of Western worldviews, amidst crisis, for the degree to which he sees such a moment as intensifying the relevance, danger, and potential of paradigmatic figures. Even while their coordinating paradigms and the teloses that animate them get cancelled out, figures germane to these paradigms—however monstrously they might now appear—remain alive to the imagination and alive within our actual, un-filleting world.

Duncan, in The H.D. Book, a study of his formative influences, expands on the kinds of teleo-paradigmatic worldviews he sees as in crisis—Marx’s theory of global communism, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Frazer’s theory of comparative religion—and identifies each as having arisen in the nineteenth century on the back of imperialist expansion and a resultantly greater global awareness.[7] Each paradigm’s problematic, however much it would envision something counter to imperialism, inheres, like an inverse face, within the problem-form of imperialism. Not only, then, the theory of the nation and its co-emergent, supremacist theories of race, but also theories of dispensations or higher syntheses and—the paradigm in which Duncan’s work is most of all implicated—mysticism (with its quest for an ultimate Vision disclosive of the real), each, as a “supra-paradigm,” enters into crisis in the face of the very different than dreamed co-dependency, now in the horror of War, of the fates of who we are as peoples. Duncan sees back of each of these theories a Platonism, wherein synthesizing concepts or, what’s the same, archetypal forms, yield to “identification with a paradigm in a hierarchy of higher forms,” a problem also shared by Poetry, with its mode of poetic idealization (Duncan, H.D., 154). Duncan seeks a modification of theoretic and poetic idealism in order to make it less hierarchal and more immanent, transitive, and timely. Formal problems of art and theory, for Duncan, have roots in the historical problem-form of imperialism, and thus what have been global imaginations must get partialized and provincialized, an impetus that is often evident in postmodern collage. While Duncan is indebted to modernist collage poems, he aims less for visionary poetic means of collage to show History as universalized than for these means to register with particularized force “the last days of our own history”: a moment when disastrous War at once irretrievably makes history more global and reveals the geographic particularity of one’s conceptual personae, in a way that inhibits syncretistic poetic powers and raises the monstrosity of universalizing paradigms (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293).[8] And yet, whereas the impetus of postmodern collage has usually meant either appropriation of other cultures or deflation of the high, idealizing impulse relative one’s own culture, Duncan sees the collapse and monstrosity of paradigmatic forms not as the demise of their relevance but as a heightened moment—because newly unequilibrated—of their potential worldliness. 

At the same time, despite Duncan’s wariness of supra-theoretical paradigms, the rhetoric of collage might seem to tempt him toward imagining a work on the model of “ecology,” a “supra-paradigm” of ecology that might pose as a disarming alternative both to the horrors of conflict and to worldviews now flounderingly entangled with the problem-form of imperialism. Near the end of THE WAR, Duncan writes of a visionary flash through which he has seen the horror of war as a bellowing ox in a ditch: “All my common animal being comes to the ox in his panic and, driven by this speech, we imagine only man, homo faber, has, comes into a speech words mean to come so deep that the amoeba is my brother poet” (293). Homology between the collage relation and ecological relation asserts that, in striving, we find the agency of a collateral life, within a larger ecology, striving to speak in me: the collage relation is not one driven solely by this poet’s intent but by a bi-directional intent of agential expression. But in the context of the whole sentence, this bi-directional intent of agencies proves a panicked cry within cataclysm. The Janus face of the mutual destruction of eschatology and organic evolution proves their identity within a model of ecology that seems an inversion of our usual rhetoric of ecology: a struggling trial of inter-webbed forms surviving and perishing in again last and again new days. The amoeba-as-my-brother-poet demonstrates that the mutual destruction of worldviews maximally impacts mythic dimensions of ready-to-hand discourses together, in a relation that, in Duncan’s work, is performative but not ironic and neither reduces their relevance nor straightforwardly cancels belief. Spiritual warfare, for Duncan, requires that one sustain the moment of creative crisis exactly with such figures, even as what had seemed ready-to-hand newly appears as requiring desperate strain. Spiritual warfare requires an engaged torquing of idealizing figures and conceptual personae—and not withdrawal from idealizing import—because it’s not as though such withdrawal is, in earnest, an option for homo faber.

Duncan, in all of this, faces a problem of the “post-.” On the one hand, he envisions imaginative engagements: post-theological teloses; post-humanist hierarchies that inscribe a supremacy of the human cognate with hierarchizing the great man over the common person and all other kinds of supremacism; and post-mystic subordinations of daily and historical experience to an ultimate Real. On the other hand, Duncan’s collage conception is not a post-paradigm in the sense of critiques that, in identifying problems that inhere within a paradigm, discourse, or episteme, posit the requirement of a radical break, the means toward which cannot include tainted terms of the parent paradigm. Such theories decline the difficult task of thinking historical change, in favor of a philosophical hypostasis of the “radical” (in the sense both of root and of political posture). This position yields pessimism or prophecy of something ineradicably distant (however much we are claimed to be on its cusp) and, in seeing inadequacy, tends toward increased abstraction, thereby disabling commitment to seeking out particularizing concretion relative to the class theorized, as part of a struggle of entanglements toward adequate historical engagement and, thereby, transformation. We might find one relevant example of a post-paradigm that ends up positing the need for a radical break in Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in which the death of the great dreams of the nineteenth century has yielded the hard-to-make-coherent period of postmodernity and a culture of postmodernism that reflects this incoherence. At the end of the article, Jameson, referencing Althusser, posits a “new political art” that, by operating within a symbolic order “beyond” the ideological struggle of an “Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions,” might “achieve a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing.”[9] For Duncan, the relation of the imaginary to real conditions defines the reality for us at stake, and he would see Jameson’s suggestion of a tertiary category that finally cleaves from the imaginary as much more a fantasy than anything for which he had been accused by the same word.

ii: mediated War and the problem of the “back of” relation

Let’s look again at the opening of THE WAR:

We enter again and again the last days of our own history, for everywhere living productive forms in the evolution of forms fail, weaken, or grow monstrous, destroying the terms of their existence. We do not mean an empire; a war then, as if to hold all China or the ancient sea at bay, breaks out at a boundary we name ours. It is a boundary beyond our understanding. Now, where other nations before us have flounderd, we flounder. To defend a form that our very defense corrupts. We cannot rid ourselves of the form to which we now belong. And in this drama of our own desperation we are drawn into a foreign desperation. For our defense has invaded an area of our selves that troubled us. Cities laid waste, villages destroyd, men, women and children hunted down in their fields, forests poisond, herds of elephants screaming under our fire — it is all so distant from us we hear only what we imagine, making up what we surely are doing. When in moments of vision I see back of the photographt details and the daily body count actual bodies in agony and hear — what I hear now is the desolate bellowing of some ox in a ditch — madness starts up in me. The pulse of this sentence beats before and beyond all proper bounds and we no longer inhabit what we thought properly our own. (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293)

Surely, we’ve been justified in first reading the opening sentence of this introduction to a collection of poetry as raising a problem of poetic forms. And yet, the following sentences indirectly name the US nation-state as the primary form destroying the terms of its own existence and thereby throwing forms “everywhere” into crisis. The form of our nation-state destroys its existence as such by growing monstrous, in the ambition of “empire.” The boundary of “our” nation-state is claimed as “there” and thereby corrupts, out of bounds, its own form. No term, including that of the nation-state, can be sanely understood so long as that boundary is named as ours. Duncan makes the “Introduction” feel vertiginous, in a way that’s mimetic of and responsive to a widespread experience of the historical moment, in part by plunging us, in medias res, into a discussion that we expect to be about poetic form but that turns out to be a discussion of the form of the nation. Duncan’s reversal of expectations implies that this latter problem is the primary one and that art problems subtend from their relation to problem-forms of the historical world. And Duncan also thoroughgoingly employs the defamiliarizing technique, here, of indirection, of never directly naming the War as what we know it as: Vietnam—a strategy that, among other things, instills a resistance to seeing this war as discrete, rather than as a signal war with a much larger problem-form back of it.

Ian Balfour, in The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy, identifies indirection as a convention of prophetic language, in ways that enable us to see it as apiece with the prophetic mode Duncan has invoked from the opening moment of THE WAR. As Balfour explains, prophecy requires “indirection,” along with some quotient of “generality, and obscurity,” no matter how obviously one may be pointing to specific events, because only “resistance to naming” allows for the reader’s startling realization of the prophetic word applying in the world.[10] Indirection thus supplies prophetic speech with a “peculiar temporality” that looks responsive less to a predicted future than to a present that looks unpredictable (Balfour, Romantic, 71). And indirection enables the prophetic tradition’s driving impetus, as it reemerges in times of tumult: a ramified reconfiguration of figurations that already, at earlier moments in the prophetic tradition, had seemed to predict discrete historical events, which thereby are revealed as not “discrete.” Present-historical events and preexisting prophetic figures co-appear in the flash of a dialectical image, whereby events appear signal, not discrete. “Moments” of prophetic textuality jump into new cathexes. Balfour glosses: “The attitude most characteristic . . . is the sense of urgency prompted by a vision of a world and words being overwhelmed” (Balfour, Romantic, 32–33).[11] The prophetic thus appears problematical: a resource for and predicament of interventional expression; a revelation given to personal witness of the age—but by an external prosopopoeia that feels “beyond the control . . . of the prophetic character” and that turns out to be almost entirely derivative (Balfour, Romantic, 44). 

Duncan characterizes the scary scope of the US’s ambition through an indirect, hyperbolizing reference to the Vietnam War, “a war then, as if to hold all China or the ancient sea at bay” (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293). In the nation’s overreaching motive to global domination, it courts the very destruction it pretends to defend against. The strange alternative Duncan offers here, “or the ancient sea,” indirectly references the deluge that devoured Atlantis, a matter that might only be clear with knowledge of Duncan’s personal biography. Duncan was raised by occultists to believe that he was a reincarnated Atlantean, a leader of an Atlantean generation whose reckless unleashing of technology had precipitated their continent’s destruction—and whose destiny was to again bear witness to global destruction by leaders’ terrible misuse of new technology.[12] Duncan then translates this feeling of bearing (again) witness to a collective feeling, wherein “we flounder” in a recurrence “where other nations before us have floundered” (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293).[13] Indeed, the form of the nation-state, amidst imperialistic war, becomes self-corruptive and makes the subjective formation of the “we,” of forms of subjective identification and of responsive forms of representation, problematic: “we cannot rid ourselves of the form to which we now belong” (293).

And it is just at the moment of registering our implication that, in the building rhythm of Duncan’s prose, description of the War comes in: “Cities laid waste, villages destroyd, men, women and children hunted down in their fields, forests poisond, herds of elephants screaming under our fire” (293). “We” enter last days not as spiritual elect but as perpetrators of apocalypse, now. In the following sentence, Duncan indicates that he is reaching toward “moments of vision . . . back of photographt details” (293). We feel, then, that Duncan has already been synthesizing his description from documentary war photography. In sympathy with his writing, we see what he says through the lens of realist detail. And yet the list begins with a Biblical cliché, from the Book of Ezekiel, “cities laid waste.”[14] Duncan’s reference to a book of prophecy marked by a confusing, unsettled temporality perhaps deepens our feeling of an ancient-end times vertigo of times. But it also seems bathetically general, a “universal” expression of the destruction of War, even if the very resort to “bathetically” general prophetic rhetoric indexes urgency, amidst events that overwhelm words. Duncan’s list continues with a Biblical phrase that defines massacre (“men, women and children”).[15] The penultimate phrase of Duncan’s list, “forests poisond,” although apocalyptic, lacks Biblical reference and seems much more particular to Vietnam. Finally, the climatic image, “herds of elephants screaming under our fire,” in coming together with the ancient dictums that precede it, might seem an archaism borrowed, if with war elephants of ancient Vietnam in mind, most likely from Persian miniatures of Alexandrian conquest or histories of the imperial wars of Carthage and Rome. And yet, Duncan may have in mind scattered reports of US fire on domesticated elephants, sometimes used by the People’s Army of Vietnam to pack supplies, or, image of gratuity, wild elephants, which were driven to near extinction by “forests poisond” by defoliants like Agent Orange.[16] Duncan’s rhetoric manifests a vertigo of times, in the confusion of propheticism, archaism, and realism and in the desperation prompted by vision of a world and words overwhelmed. And yet, in reflection on the problem of mediation in his glosses of horror, Duncan interrupts his list across a dash “— it is all so distant from us we hear only what we imagine, making up what we surely are doing” (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293). Surely, any made representational detail is “made up” and requires the imagination. And yet, distance from a War one’s nation inflicts not here but abroad appears a problem. How does one reckon with such a desperate situation, when this situation of alarm is distant, even if images of the War arrive, inundating, each day? 

This problem of mediation becomes, in Duncan’s theorizing, a problem of the “back of” relation. Duncan writes, “when in moments of vision I see back of photographt details and the daily body counts actual bodies in agony and hear,” before interrupting himself across a dash: “— what I hear now is the desolate bellowing of some ox in a ditch” (293).[17] Before we address the specifics of this image, we first need to grasp that the ambition of the back of relation is to unite galvanizing, visionary power with a force of realism ripped from the headlines, unto hallucinatorily intense witness.

The phrase “back of” riddles Duncan’s oeuvre and most especially The H.D. Book, where the phrase provides a persistent refrain.[18] In The H.D. Book, the phrase refers, first of all, to something that lives behind a conventional, Establishment paradigm. In the dynamic of discovering what’s “back of” official “truth,” one feels a quickening alliance with a more secret, more demanding, and more personal counter-truth. And yet, “back of,” in The H.D. Book, also sometimes refers to neo-Platonic truth, a soul or intellectual Real, back of a concrete presentation or moment. Duncan identifies these uses together as defining what he calls “visionary realism,” an aesthetic project wherein an emblematic power drawn at once from traditional-archetypal and personal sources counterintuitively combats Establishment forms of occlusion and subordination (Duncan, H.D., 48). If this formulation, despite having a kind of realist mission, had granted a degree of epistemological privilege to the visionary emblem, now in wartime crisis, the back of relation, for Duncan, would articulate a striking conjuncture of the seemingly contradictory forms of emblem and realist image. For Duncan himself, it is the startling experience of realist war images striking him in the appearance-form of emblematic images that have recurred in his dreams that has induced a desperate, socio-personal response. In seeking to relay this experience to readers, Duncan wants to key us to the ways that emblematic, traditional images are already adumbrating in palimpsest with any given, documentary realist “photographt details,” in our reception, as we attempt to ethically reckon with what these details dispatch. In both his own wartime experience and his effort to turn his practice to engage the social reality of the War, here, documentary photography provides a touchstone for a larger, abstractive inter-media collage. However, Duncan’s increasing sense of the importance of the documentary image does not result in writing that’s deeply anchored in realist detail. Rather, Duncan is most of all concerned with registering matters such that the epistemological and social orientations associated, respectively, with realist image and emblem will charge one another, without any distance of irony between them. In place of the supremacy of either pole entailed in this relation, it will be the startling charge of relation itself that appears to him most crucial, to the degree that it induces a restlessly affected experience, orients one to wrestle toward something more true than official rhetoric, and enjoins one to mission-bearing responsiveness.

iii: Guernica

Duncan begins his sentence, “When in moments of vision I see back of the photographt details and the daily body counts actual bodies in agony and hear — . . . ” wanting to claim that moments of mystic vision reveal to him the actual agony of War “back of” war reportage (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293). But what Duncan says he hears, across an interruptive dash “— what I hear now is the desolate bellowing of some ox in a ditch —” is not the agony of a human body but a dialectic image, an allegorical image, of a bellowing ox that, I want to say, with some certainty, derives inspiration from the bellowing figures of a bull and javelin-pierced horse, straining upward in its death throes, from Picasso’s Guernica (293). Back of the photographt details lies not actual bodies but the reactivated impact of Guernica, an image constellating to Vietnam in an (again) rising cry.

Guernica massively impacted Duncan’s social and aesthetic imagination, at crucial moments across his life. In The H.D. Book, Duncan writes of a coinciding initiation into modernism and left-political culture as a UC Berkeley undergraduate. Duncan felt himself awakening to “the great vision of . . . a communism in which old dreams of a brotherhood of man survived, the acknowledgement that all goods belonged to a creative order, the gospel that the socialists of the nineteenth century had raised in terms of a new idealization of the working class” (Duncan, H.D., 67). When, in 1936, a fascist military coup plunged the young Spanish Republic into Civil War, the war became a signal event for Berkeley leftists (Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 48). Duncan joined the American Students Union, which advocated for an end to compulsory ROTC training and to free speech limitations targeting leftists at the UC, and sought to raise emergency medical relief funds for the Spanish Republic (Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 48–49, 43–44). Meanwhile, Duncan was immersed in World War I-era modernist poetry, which seemed, in its Kairotic exclamations, to enjoin one to a sensitivity that countered the psychic bludgeons of war. In a central episode of The H.D. Book, Duncan reads Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land” on a hill within earshot of gathering ROTC drills he was supposed to join, when one of his leftist friends commands “Stay with Joyce” (Duncan, H.D., 65, 64). The poem and sponsor-goddess-like directive instill in Duncan the “visionary” courage to refuse ROTC training. In part as a result, he soon dropped out of college. But as his closest friends gained art jobs with the WPA, Duncan felt alienated from the proletarian movement (Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 57). He would confess, “my rebellion is no proletariat consciousness, but . . . a sort of furious snobbery” (quoted in Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 57). Duncan’s ‘30s politicization imparted the idea that political consciousness is necessary to the progress of an artist. At the same time, Duncan’s snobbish feeling about most social realist art and his commitment to modernist poetry led him to spiritualize a high contest between the living sensitivity of art and the empty technology of death. Duncan, soon relocated to Manhattan, would aim to self-educate at the MoMA, where, during Alfred Barr’s landmark Picasso retrospective, he first encountered Guernica (Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 61). Guernica struck Duncan as an emblem of his politicization and of social realist culture largely—but one that also seemed compatible with his “furious snobbery.”

Duncan’s ‘30s-era sense of political consciousness as a condition of artistic relevance would largely lie dormant until the ‘60s. Just as the signal event of the Spanish Civil War, abroad, and suppression of the left by the UC had galvanized him in the ‘30s, so the signal event of the Vietnam War and renewed suppression of student activism by the UC galvanized him again. The connections among local events at the UC (the resignation of his mentor Ernst Kantorowicz over a newly compulsory anti-communist oath; the shooting of his friend Thomas Parkinson, a Yeats scholar, and murder of his graduate student over Parkinson’s support of students protesting HUAC; and the intense repression of the Free Speech struggle), national-scale anti-left tribunals and assassinations of organizers, and the nation’s waging of counterrevolutionary wars abroad seemed to Duncan matters of scale and not analogy (Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 109, 117, 121, 203–204, 236–239). Duncan joins the Viet Nam Day Committee, donates to anti-war organizations, attends marches, and writes his most stridently political poems to date (Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 250, 256). And, as he attempts to gather himself for the occasion, he turns to Guernica, pilgrimaging on each of his trips to New York to the mural (Jarnot, Robert Duncan, 235, 384). Guernica represented a resurgent challenge of the art and culture of the ‘30s that Duncan was trying to learn from in very intentional ways.

Picasso, in Guernica, is seeing through a channel of documentary images. Rendered in the black-and-white scheme of documentary photography and film, the work seeks to link up, as a summation expressing solidarity, with the war photographs, films, and reports that animated the painting’s primary venue of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Instead of including collage elements on the surface of the work, Picasso raises a larger idea of collage, of installation environment, in an effort to make all the contents of the Pavilion collaborate together to address the public on behalf of the besieged Spanish Republic. Massive photomurals of Republican soldiers, mounted on the exterior of the building, greeted visitors, who then entered an open-air hall featuring Guernica. To the side, a table-mounted projector displayed social realist films. The staircase, from which the photograph below was taken, swept up to the second story of the Pavilion, which displayed war photography, including photographs of the bombed-out ruins of Guernica. The Nazi attack on Guernica had taken place in three waves, first of explosive bombing that targeted an animal market, an event that drew much of the region’s rural poor population, then of machine-gunning, driving people into and under buildings and killing those fleeing through surrounding fields, and finally of incendiary-bombing, burning and collapsing most of the town’s remaining buildings on top of those who had sheltered in basements. The painting synthesizes the multi-hour waves of terroristic attack into a photographic instant at night, the time at which war correspondent George Steer had arrived on the scene amidst a chaos of fire.

Picasso sees his nation in crisis, and he sees, with Guernica, the need to change his practice, toward the practical aim of garnering aid for Spain—not as a separate aesthetic matter. In an interview translated for the catalogue of the MoMA show that so impacted Duncan, Picasso said:

A picture is a sum of destructions . . . It would be very interesting to preserve photographically . . . the metamorphoses of a picture. . . . When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a . . . discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.[19]

And Duncan, in The H.D. Book, writes of his own “tortuously” hypotactic method of revising sentences relative the revising destructions of Guernica: “passages of fine writing, bravura, might come in, only to be obliterated in the trying, painstaking drawing out of a task he knew no other way to do . . . like the under drawing showing thru in Picasso’s Guernica” (Duncan, H.D., 405). For both Picasso and Duncan, preserving the struggle of revising that belonged to composition appears crucial both for work that aims to motivate a comparable struggle of the imagination in the audience and for the sake of historical adequacy. Only the clearly effortful work appears mimetic of history.

Simply iterating a social realist style, as it so far existed, or simply inflecting such a style with cubist line, seemed to Picasso insufficient. He sees the moment as compelling the use of a revolutionary manner of painting, such that he must gauge his practice. Social realist representation does not simply aim to realistically report the datum of any single event but rather aims to relay conditions of an ongoing situation of struggle, of sides. And Picasso’s new struggle with his medium is animated by major questions that were already preoccupying ‘30s social realists: how to confront viewers with an international fascism not only threatening a free Spain but growing in its imperial ambitions? How to exchange with a public? How to install a realist confrontation in public space?

Picasso’s non-linear process of revisions yielded an image that densely hybridizes social realist mural, neoclassical, and Romantic-prophetic visual frameworks (along with surrealist and abstract modes), because work in a single representational mode seemed unable to produce a historically-startling work. The preferred medium, for social realist painters in the ‘30s, had become the mural—an art form on the scale of History painting that addressed viewers from the walls of buildings and could be understood by a crowd. And so, Picasso works on a huge panel that would be legible, mounted wall-size across one side of the Pavilion, both from the stair descending from the documentary photography floors and from the exhibition of social realist films. Meanwhile, Picasso looks at all kinds of work, at the classical figures of Rubens’s Horrors of War, at the scary prints and paintings of Goya, especially the Second and Third of May 1808, and at the prophetic imagery of Blake’s engravings, especially War Unchained by an Angel, Fire, Pestilence, and Famine Following.[20] While Picasso employs a figural repertoire from his own precedent works, his search for art historical models derives from his having seen the need to shift this repertoire away from a basically mental, psychosexual fright and toward a fright with a physical existence, one that could register death. Picasso is hybridizing neoclassic and Romantic-prophetic figural means with the figures and grounds of documentary realist photographs from the newspapers. José Bergamín, in an early review of Guernica, writes of the “original shock” produced, here, where “realism and classicism shake hands,” or better, “raise their clenched fists.”[21] Iconographic specifics of Picasso’s art historical references here matter to him less than their visual power, whereby the most classical compositional arrangements are made to expressively animate the flash of a chaotic photographic instant.

Picasso first drew larger-than-life-size, super-dramatic figures. Stretched across the lower edge, a dying soldier, arm flexed upward, sends a fist of power flying to the top of the work, to a spot marked out by the golden ratio as one of crucial visual importance.[22] In raising the emblem of workers’ power at the visual center of the painting, Picasso makes his social realist intention, with Guernica, clear. As the work continues, the fist grips a sheaf of grain, signaling agricultural and industrial solidarity, as, behind the fist, a sun of the glorious socialist future emerges, illuminating a scene everywhere else gripped by horror.[23] And yet, in seeking, more than iteration of left symbolism, to galvanize solidarity for Spain, in countries where publics were largely complacent and whose governments had agreed to fascist diplomats’ requests for neutrality, Picasso would see a single consuming question as underlying his total representational effort: how do you raise an alarm? And so, he paints over the triumphalist rhetoric of the fist and sun, and what will occupy this privileged space becomes a big problem. By the final stage of the painting, the figure furthest right, caught in a bomb blast, cries skyward, as nearby figures surge left, fleeing a burning building. Across the central base of the painting, the dying soldier has become not only dismembered and lacerated but shattered, surrealistically revealing his body as a plaster-cast studio model. On top of him, a horse bellows, his body horribly twisted in death throes. On the left, an anguished, Pietà-like mother holds her dead baby; a bull lows confusedly above them. At the final moment in the painting’s composition, Picasso covers the horse’s body with newspaper hatching—a body surrealistically punched through like newspaper—and places an electric light bulb in a pinched ovoid that, after painting over the fist of power and sun, had long served as a placeholder. In mind of his image’s source in documentary photography (and having decided on a night scene), this central figure again, but differently, announces its social realist solidarity and again provides the source of stark illumination for the painting, in becoming a surrealistically relocated camera’s flash and “camera-eye.”[24] Picasso, in conjuring a “visionary flash” that strikes together with a documentary flash, offers in Guernica a precedent for the circuit—of documentary media, apocalyptic Figures, and collage—that resurfaces, in reference to Guernica, in Duncan’s THE WAR.

Impacted social realist, abstract, and surrealist modes, in addition to precedent classical and Romantic-prophetic visual rhetoric, then, are made to contribute to raising an alarm. Picasso’s pictorial synthesis requires the abstraction of the black-and-white ground of press photography and social realist film into the ground of the painting. (The ground of a picture is, of course, a pictorial form, just as much as figures are forms.) This work of abstraction, then, does what abstract pictures more largely do; that is, it suggests extension into the larger environment (think, paradigmatically, of Piet Mondrian). Still, the picture, like social realist murals more largely, makes a class of subjects suborned by an unjust infliction clear, so that one subject, the viewer, faces another, represented subject in a clear confrontation, such that diverse people will be able to identify the scene and have their conscience and consciousness affected. Meanwhile, surrealistic depiction of surging-ghostly, stark 2D, distended, and cut-up figures means to relay to the viewer a cut-up feeling. Surrealist artistic means, speaking broadly, had sought to reveal hidden trouble in the contemporary ordering of the world, in order to trigger a comparable trouble for the viewer. Picasso uses surrealist means to register the infliction of death, the moment when subjects lose subjectivity, but also to reorder the documentary image, in order to express it more primally and to express and intensify the moral trouble instigated by such wartime media (as thematized by the surrealistic newspaper-body and camera’s flash/“eye”). That is, surreal and apocalyptic visual rhetorics peculiarly available to the medium of painting work to install the wartime relation to what really must be happening, across a distance from the scene of war, as one of anguished struggle. Picasso impacts documentary, surrealist, Romantic-apocalyptic, social realist, and classical modes of image-making together in a single image, where each image-making resource aims to quicken response.

Duncan claims Guernica as a pivotal source of artistic inspiration, and it is Guernica that appears in the flash of dialectical image with photography of the Vietnam War. Amidst Duncan’s efforts to envision a practice that would yoke the performativity of postmodern collage (but without disillusioning irony) with the spiritual authenticity of the modernist collage poem (but without political quietism), Guernica strikes Duncan as just such a “collage,” one that simultaneously confronts him with the challenge of a socially-engaged practice capable of spurring ethical-imaginal involvement with a distant, mediated war and that empowers his sense for the potential of high and prophetic means to irradiate emergency historical conditions. The touchstone of Guernica confronts Duncan, among others of his moment, with the challenge of a socially-engaged practice of the ‘30s that looks to require both modernist means and high, idealizing means of Art. Guernica inspires a struggle to renovate such techniques, rather than to renounce them, toward social realist aims.

iv: ardent self-reflexivity and multiply-conscious collage faith

This conjunction of Vietnam war coverage with Guernica both clarifies (some large-scale truth “back of” documentary media) and gets in the way of seeing “actual bodies in agony,” such that, as Duncan’s paragraph concludes: “The pulse of this sentence beats before and beyond all proper bounds and we no longer inhabit what we thought properly our own” (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293). Madness starts up as we see a hallucinatory, primal Image collaging into complex with the present instant/instance. Cathexis comes forward from the artistic remediation of a parallel historical event that, nonetheless, is clearly not identical. This cathexis of photographed details with Guernica should clarify our sense of the relation between emblematic means and historical salience. Picasso had employed apocalyptic-prophetic rhetoric and classicizing, abstractive, and surrealistic means of generalization with the aim of making Guernica optimally contextive in its installation environment of works addressing imperial conspiring and war. The work has thereby proven not universal in any absolute sense but re-contextive for those in a similar position of distance from a war that they experience as one of       major historical drama and who harbor historical expectations that align with this “negative monument” (albeit with its small flower of hope) and misalign with the triumphalist rhetoric of much social realist work. This re-contextive cathexis instances a yoking of realist image to a variety of emblems that, rather than subordinating history to the universal, leads one to see history as intensely alive. Madness starts up because Image isn’t bounded but bounds, out of bounds of anything simply aesthetic, into relevance and reckoning now.

This maddening non-identity of figural resources and the actual spurs wrestling with the “representative.” So, Duncan imagines a representative soldier. The abstract, imperialistically claimed boundary of the nation transforms, in Duncan’s writing, into an advancing line of soldiers abroad, a line that includes his representative soldier:

A boy raised in Iowa has only this nightmare, crawling forward slowly, this defeat of all deep dwelling in our common humanity, this bitter throwing forth of a wall of men moving, in which his soul must dare tender awakening or close hard as an oak-gall within him. Only this terrible wounded area in which to have his soul-life. He turns from us, my very words turn from their music to seek his deaf ears in me. All my common animal being comes to the ox in his panic and, driven by this speech, we imagine only man, homo faber, has, comes into a speech words mean to come so deep that the amoeba is my brother poet. (293)

We are following a metonymic series, in a struggle of imagination driven by the intent of sympathy, from photographt details to Guernica-adumbrated image of a bellowing ox to a boy raised in Iowa crawling forward slowly. But why “a boy raised in Iowa”? Why not a boy like himself, who was also conscripted to war? Or one of the boys from the Mission District, his majority Chicano, San Francisco neighborhood? Is this imaginative weakness, or is the fact that he sticks with his initial, culturally cliché image of an American soldier somehow a heuristic strength (ie, might there be something difficult and crucial in staying with the stereotypical subject)? But if we are willing to entertain that Duncan is being strategic in calling forth a stereotypical soldier, this is surely only due to the array of terms, here, that do not belong to the stereotypical, rhetorically-loaded invocation of a soldier from this background. Sympathy for this soldier proceeds by seeing him at the moment when, as both soldiers and war correspondents unanimously reported, one develops a protective shell necessary, within conditions of war, for psychological preservation. But, in place of the hard-headed registration of a psychologically “inevitable” condition, which might sacrifice our depth of care for what’s preciously at stake for each person wounded by trauma, Duncan describes this as a moment in his “soul-life.” The term establishes the enormity of the situation but also risks seeming idealistically diffuse—or even hectoring and sentimental. And Duncan ties this moment to the religious rhetoric of Ezekiel’s “stony heart” and “heart of flesh” and of Jesus’s parables of a seed planted in the heart.[25] And if these references risk seeming to personalize the issue as one of individual religious conscience, of moral solicitude versus moral deafness, Duncan has already framed the issue as one of larger, corruptive social forms that entail nothing less than the “defeat of all deep dwelling in our common humanity”: genocidally racist relations wherein rhetorical and literal conscription claim one in “defense” against the dehumanized menace of a “Viet Cong” fully elided with the inhumanity of “Asiatics” period.

For Duncan, powerful wartime images strike us with a force of immediacy, but these images are in fact no less mediated by the figures that are nearest-to-hand in our imagination than are other images. Indeed, for Duncan, the resonant non-identity of wartime images and our nearest-to-hand (often “stereotypical” or hieratic) figures has a special capacity to induce ardent self-reflexivity. Duncan renders this self-reflexive straining by a mimetic straining of syntactical complication, such that “the soldier” “turns from us, my very words turn from their music to seek his deaf ears in me” ( Duncan, “Introduction,” 293).[26] Invasion abroad involutes into, what it must first be for those distant from the War, an imaginal invasion. Imagining the boy raised in Iowa crawling forward, as an order of experience constituting “me” in my relations to what the other is to me, vivifies my implication in social forms and present conditions. At the highest pitch of his hectic speech, Duncan wills, as “homo faber,” to project what really must be going on—an effort that yields an irradiation of his mind with the documentary-media/Guernica cathected image of an “ox in his panic” (293). But it does so within a conscious process of persisting in searchingly making up cathexes, a persistent effort to bring home historical emergency, when distant persons, places, and events bear on one’s nearest socio-political relations. And given the implication of domestic life in an apocalyptic War, this willing, as Duncan’s shift to eco-poetic rhetoric signals, needs to be a willing with regard to a larger environment, wherein “my” fate gets comprehended as part of a communal fate.

Through ardent self-reflexivity, we come to a line within, not merely of sympathy for the soul-harm represented by the soldier’s disillusionment but of daring to refuse disillusionment within myself. Self-reflexivity prompts gloss of the human as homo faber, in an implicit claiming of homo faber (the human as maker) as a more appropriate designation for the human than homo sapiens (the human as knower). What Duncan is after is not so much the production of knowledge but the production of a critical consciousness that not only accommodates ardency but is driven by the intent of ardent agitation. Duncan at once raises the neo-Platonic figure of the soul and insists on the soul as a social form: something that exists as a member of a larger cast, is constituted by what it draws into configurative picture, and is changed by collage-like relations that are inextricable from historical events. As such, this form is thrown into especial upheaval by the monstrous form of the imperial nation-state, in which we are implicated. In raising the idealizing rhetoric of the soul, Duncan does not seek, in the way of the modernist collage poet, to align us under knowledge of a sovereign ideal that lies, somehow, back of mimesis (something meant, in the context of war, especially, to be “therapeutic”). And, in turn, Duncan’s insistent self-reflexivity, unlike many metacritical approaches, is not oriented toward a systematical knowledge of (and a purity with regard to implication within) modes of representation as apparatuses conjoined to political-economy. Duncan opposes rhetorical apparatuses that pose as “supra-paradigms” of the real, and he opposes critical approaches if and when they accommodate skepticism and ethical distance. For Duncan, the realization that there is no last “back of” mimesis, for homo faber, entails a self-reflexive reckoning with forms of implication and responsive means not tout court (a position that would seem not to have really grasped the first point) but as to motive and intent. In self-reflexively bearing the process of poetic prose-in-composition, Duncan is striving to model for us—and activate in readers—a supplementary, metaleptic enfolding of differently near-to-hand, provisional figures as an effort of mind that galvanizes social engagement.

When the state implicates us in projects of dehumanization, we need to see this as in part a problem of representation: of rhetorical alibis for the situation; of alternatively “realistic” and “idealistic” ways of distancing oneself from emergency; of figurations that would make the situation seem already settled and thereby demotivate recourse to what remain possible forms of agency. Duncan is at war with such “prepossessed” rhetoric. Duncan’s torquing and impacting of diverse modes together enables him to call forth: an idealist mode that’s not sovereignly removed from life; a religious mode that doesn’t produce a sense of spiritual cleanliness; a prophetic mode that doesn’t stun agency by removing it to ineluctable powers; a realist mode without literalistic draining away of energizing sentiment; a surrealistic mode that doesn’t detour from directive force in its attention to hidden troubles; a reflexive mode that doesn’t, in its criticality, undercut a motive passion of values. But my argument isn’t that Duncan achieves this simply by a “mad” rhetorical agility that checks or cancels out the limits and pitfalls of each of the materials he collages together but rather that, much as with Picasso’s Guernica, he does so by activating, by means of multiple aesthetic modes, multiply-conscious receptive modes. Duncan is meaning not just to refer but to motivate, to collage not just materials but modes of reception. Duncan deploys multiple modes at once in order to enjoin readers to associated modes of engagement, such that these modes, in straining concert, attach you to the present with a mobilizing moral and social tensity. It’s not through agile avoidance of the pitfalls of different modes of response to the War but through a willingness to risk what might seem embarrassing modes, as a performative mode of excessiveness, that Duncan seeks to enjoin a combinatory mode of response in readers. Indeed, for Duncan, it’s furthermore not through a higher originality that his writing will activate readers, so much as through a deeper, derivative force of relation to multiple traditions, so as to activate their modes as modes of engagement. We are perhaps used to associating such excess with “play,” with a blindness to purpose, and are perhaps unused to the social realist use, the directive intent, the orientation to aims that here drives Duncan’s courting of excessiveness.

Each of Duncan’s rhetorical sources and representational modes have criticisms one could justly attach to them, such that at any moment dismissal is available. And indeed, Duncan wants to keep us aware of the risks, to feel ourselves with him, at each moment of his vertiginous sentences, on the cusp of defeat, and yet not to inveigh dismissal in a way that would suspend our effort to sustain consciousnesses of what is urgently at stake in those risks. Whether we trade out reckoning with our implication in the War for the distancing effects of literalism without spiritual ardor, of an idealizing vision that loses sight of the literal environment of atrocity, or of a cool meta-criticality that establishes its rightness on the grounds of the inadequacy of sympathetic means, each such move, for Duncan, represents a failure of concerted effort.[27] Emergency demands that one “live in creative crisis” without thought of overcoming imaginational struggle (Duncan, H.D., 183). For Duncan, this struggle both forms an irreducible aspect of ethical encounter and defines a practice of a realism that doesn’t imagine it can somehow de-crud itself of the imaginal. Duncan’s performatively excessive “collage” models the need to stay with the wrenching dynamic of ethical, imaginal struggle.

Duncan seeks to activate our sense of historical emergency through a strabismus, a double or, really, a multiple-consciousness armed to resist both critical resignation and critical enclosures of the imagination. For Duncan, rhetorical forms are social forms, and thus the imaginative figures that emerge from socio-culturally initiatory experience, from the “first-consciousness” cathexis of “primal scenes” (whether, say, of household, sublimity, or oppression), prove especially vivid (Duncan, H.D., 159). Such primary “Articulations” or “living words” constitute a primary order of experience primed to rush back, in collage with new moments (Duncan, “Introduction,” 299; Duncan, H.D., 157). However, Duncan means not just to thematize that socio-personal-historical experience entails “multiple-vision” but, on the basis of this understanding, to conjure as an artist with such “mystic” figures in order to relay War as an agitational, living word. The emergency represented by an Establishment rhetoric that occults what we know we are doing—and our implication in it—induces a dysphoric feeling of alienation and puts this potential power of the artist under pressure. The motive to assert idealizing figures as terms of the real, against a “they” that would trivialize and foreclose your use of idealizing figures, emerges from contestation over the means and “turf” of representation and the socio-historical realities claimed by such representations. Duncan, as an initiate both to left politics and a vaunted sense of Art, bears this dynamic in his effortful, constrained, willful writing. But what matters to me here is not simply a left (re)claiming of idealizing means at the very moment when a metacritical left had become more fundamentally suspicious of such means. Rather, what matters to me most is that we see how Duncan conjures multiple representational modes together so as to activate “multiply-conscious” kinds of powers of mind in us as readers: the presencing of some ineradicable spiritual potency germane to the modernist idealizer; the political alertness germane to the social realist; the motivating power germane to the prophetic preacher.

Duncan concludes THE WAR with an artist’s mission statement that rises to a mystic realist rhetoric of souls, whereby the theory of our made-ness and our responsive making emerges as a collage “faith”:

If the soul is the life-shape of the body, great stars, that are born and have their histories we read in the skies and will die, are souls. And this poetry, the ever forming of bodies in language in which breath moves, is a field of ensouling. Each line, intensely, a soul thing, a contribution; a locality of the living. (Duncan, “Introduction,” 293)

Duncan’s statement of artistic faith, here, draws from Whitman, whose vision of persons are of selves this potent, selves in intercourse with stars, with phenomena that are cosmic and metaphysical. Such a vision, in Whitman, is “transcendentalist,” yes, but with this modification: that the “soul” is not a valorization of anything transcendent to this-worldliness but a valorization of the this-worldly life-shape of the body. Duncan’s Whitmanesque rhetoric, in its sweeping move from a locality up to a cosmic scale and back again, supplies climatic rhetoric for his piece. But more deeply, what Duncan draws from Whitman seems to me not just another collaged rhetorical mode but an underlying, valorizing faith in the soul and its capacities. Even so, with Whitman, the ethos of starry night experience is not simple but allies with death, loss, and an “oceanic feeling” in ways that trigger confusion, conflict, and splits within the self, which then dictate the envisaging of functional poetic means for sympathetic psychic intercourse and constellated response. And Duncan’s Whitmanism is distinctive in its emphasis on the relation of self to larger scales as one of reciprocal immanence—as a “derivative-projective” relation. Homo fabers, who are made by their world-making activity, read in the sky constellations, which are themselves “souls” because they cathect with an agent’s libido and, by way of this animating feeling of correspondence, come to be experienced as a revealing opening of one’s own identity.

While this highly abstract meditation might seem to zoom us out from our preoccupying, messy implication in our nation-state’s apocalyptic inflictions, I think that the situation of apocalyptic War continues to pressure these concluding lines. In The H.D. Book, Duncan records a dream, in which he and Muriel Rukeyser see the night sky “crowded with stars, dense cells of . . . almost animal constellations . . . entities whose cells were living souls” (Duncan, H.D., 293). And “the Poetess” declaims: “‘We see these skies here . . . because we are very close to the destruction of the world’” (293). For Duncan, the view of soul-life as a function of our eidolic, world-making existence gets raised to another level of intensity and palpability within world-historical emergency. Responsive poetry then needs to absorb and turn forms of our mythopoetic world, in order to irradiate bodies of language with an intensity that might relay unto readership, a community when the very word community sounds exilic. Responsive poetry would quicken sensitivity to a time in which we see apocalyptic rhetoric as applying and would dispatch living words, words more primal than and in opposition to Establishment rhetoric, words that enjoin us to our responsive capacities. For Duncan, it’s the virtue of forms, as a socio-historical mattering, to give that which in us, in the wounded area of our soul-life, seeks responsive soul-powers, body. This does not sound like Vietnam anti-war rhetoric, but, for Duncan, this is politics, bending from Whitmanian faith toward anti-war relevance. In the pun of the collection’s title, Bending the Bow, each line strains for a tensity of form in response to the bow of war, techne of death, bending the gut-sinew of the lyre string, a techne of the locality of the living, to release what’s back of the photographt details, in faith of our inflammable, collage-able capacities for response.