See the Dying, Up Close

Duncan, Robert

I just bought my ticket for a talk on occult poetics with CAConrad in Greenfield, Massachusetts. I contemplated securing my spot several times—Robert Duncan finally inspired me to finally do it. Set on a path towards esoterica early on, Robert Duncan’s parents adopted him “on the basis of his astrological configuration.” His parents were involved in Theosophy, an occult religious movement. They believed Duncan had been a poet in a past life. He decided to be a poet in this life at age seventeen, after an encounter with H.D’s poem “Heat.” Duncan wrote in a notebook: “There is a natural mystery in poetry…a poem, mine or another’s, is an occult document.” He saw poets as being explorers rather than creators: “I work at language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a course…” In the introduction to Duncan’s The H.D. Book, Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman write,“‘Occult’ is a loaded word…But beyond the organized ritual cults lay all that is outside the ‘normal’; the worlds of hidden fact, hidden history, hidden mind, hidden body…” Duncan, they write, in his appreciation for H.D., emphasized “...the dismissal of the authority of both actual women and that range of human experience identified as the feminine, occulted beneath layers of patriarchal authority…” David Levi Strauss for The Brooklyn Rail, writes that among the esoteric knowledge that he learned from his teacher was what a good marriage looks like (hired as their gardener, he was able to closely observe Duncan and his partner, the painter Jess Collins), and also, how to die. Duncan had the generosity to “let a few of his students in to see the dying, up close, and this was part of the teaching.”