Duncan and Levertov

I spent the weekend putting together material for my visit to Naropa in July. For one thing I've been asked to give a talk while I'm there during the fourth week. Typically, I don't lecture when I teach. I preside over small writing classes and so engage students with a kind of Socratic dialogue thing. So it's been good to put a more formal lecture together.

I'll be looking at the Vietnam-era argument between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov as both worked to articulate a public response in writing (and activism in Levertov's case) to the war. Duncan's Bending the Bow and Levertov's To Stay Alive are the main texts that I discuss in relation to their letters of the period. My goal isn't really to show that one approach is better than the other, though I do lean more toward Duncan's sense of imagination (“[t]he poet's role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it”). He asks Levertov at one point in the correspondence, “Is it a disease of our generation that we offer symptoms and diagnoses of what we are in the place of imaginations and creations of what we are?” This sense of imagination can be useful in our own situations as we reconcile opposing tensions in American cultural and economic life. Levertov's sense of protest and opposition remains important, but Duncan's correct to acknowledge that it's hard to make poetry of that, depending, I suppose, on what he or we mean by "poetry." I like some of the recent ephemeral performances and poems used in public situations by PIPA (Poetry Is Public Art) and I like how Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetry Theater assumes a public presence and creates spaces of opposition in unusual and productive ways. The Duncan/Levertov correspondence will be useful I hope in coming to terms with the contradictions and difficulties of poetry and politics, private and public statements---discovering where privacy begins and publicity ends, etc....

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Tom Clark has posted some terrific poems lately at his blog. I particularly like this one about Robert Duncan, and this about
Philip Whalen. I like to start the week by reading Tom's newest entries. The movement of text and image is instructive and generous with its recursive layering of thought and feeling.