An African Elegy (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Robert Duncan is one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic and romantic poets. His dedication to poetry as an act of magic and self-creation has enlarged the scope of what is possible for other poets to do. Born to Edward Howard and Marguerite Wesley Duncan on January 7, 1919, in Oakland, California, Duncan was given up for adoption shortly after birth and raised as Robert Edward Symmes. He resumed using his original surname in 1942. At three years old, Duncan suffered an eye injury in a fall, making him cross-eyed. Duncan has written about his altered way of physically perceiving the world in his poems, and critics have made connections between his writing and his injury, especially in regards to the blurring of identities and distinctions in his poetry. Duncan’s adopted parents were “orthodox theosophists,” and his upbringing was steeped in hermetic lore and the occult. Theosophy, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement founded on the ideas of Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, incorporated principles from both Eastern and Western religions and held reincarnation as one of its central doctrines. Theosophists saw correspondences in language and nature and believed that the physical world itself was a system of symbols pointing to a deeper reality. Duncan’s parents read fairy tales and myths to him and provided him with a storehouse of poetic material, which he would draw from throughout his life.

At the University of California at Berkeley, Duncan began publishing his poems in the school’s literary journal, The Occident, and meeting regularly with a circle of literary friends which included Pauline Kael, Virginia Admiral, and Lili Fabilli. After two years at Berkeley, Duncan moved to New York City, where he became involved with a group of writers gathered around Anaïs Nin that included Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Nicolas Calas. This was a rich time in Duncan’s life during which he developed friendships with poets Russel Sanders and Jack Johnson and a number of abstract expressionist painters who were to influence his own thinking about the possibilities for poetry. In 1942, Duncan met Kenneth Rexroth, one of the central figures in mid-twentieth-century American poetry and a shaper of the San Francisco Renaissance in which Duncan was a major player. Duncan, who saw himself as a spiritual quester and wanderer, married Marjorie McKee in 1943, but the couple divorced shortly after when McKee had an abortion. In 1944, Duncan wrote and published the ground-breaking essay, “The Homosexual in Society,” in which he both “outed” himself as a gay man and criticized the homosexual culture’s attitude of superiority. In 1951, Duncan began what was to be a lifelong partnership with artist Jess Collins.

In the mid 1940s, Duncan returned to San Francisco and became a vital part of the burgeoning literary scene there, later known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Writers involved in this renaissance included Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia, and Robin Blaser, among others. Never a follower of any one literary school or trend, Duncan was active in a number of groups, including the Maidens, a San Francisco circle of writers who gathered for readings and discussions, and the Black Mountain group, which included Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and John Cage. Duncan taught at the experimental Black Mountain College for a few terms in 1956 with some of the latter poets and, after Olson died, became the leading spokesman for open form, or Projectivist, poetry. Duncan published his poetry with a number of presses, many of them small. His best-known books include The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968).

Never one to promote his own writing or to participate in the kind of reputation mongering in which so many writers engage, Duncan has nevertheless gained a steady, if modest, stream of new readers through the years. His poetry, learned and sometimes obscure, is at once intensely personal and passionately public. He strove to give meaning to his own life by seeing it as a part of all life. Poetry, for Duncan, did more than merely reflect society; it helped determine what it would be.

Robert Duncan died of a heart attack on February 3, 1988, in San Francisco, California.

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