In a narrow time, Robert Duncan has written with an almost unequaled largesse of ambition and scope–historical, spiritual, and technical.

Donald Hall

The Opening Of The Field

Poetry by Robert Duncan

Speaking of his own work, Robert Duncan (1919-1987) said: “I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my faculties at large.” The Opening of the Field, his first major collection, was originally brought out in 1960; in it, Duncan introduced his “Structures of Rime,” the open series he continued in his subsequent collections, Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work: Before the War (1983), and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). “Structures of Rime” affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language. Thus in “The Structure of Rime I” he declares: “O Lasting Sentence, / sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be.”

Paperback(published Apr, 01 1973)

ISBN
9780811204804
Price US
12.95
Page Count
96
Portrait of Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan

20th century American poet affiliated with the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement.

In a narrow time, Robert Duncan has written with an almost unequaled largesse of ambition and scope–historical, spiritual, and technical.

Donald Hall

…he is and will be always the magister, the singular Master of the Dance.

Robert Creeley