Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was one of the major writers in the San Francisco Renaissance movement and is considered one of the most accomplished and influential of the postwar American poets. A foremost figure among the New American and Black Mountain poets, Duncan, following the death of Charles Olson, became the leading practitioner of a nontraditional open form poetry. He is the author of The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow, among other works. James Maynard is Associate Curator of the Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, and has written extensively on the work of Robert Duncan. His other editorial projects include a new edition of Duncan's Ground Work: Before the War/In the Dark and (Re:)Working the Ground: Essays on the Late Writings of Robert Duncan.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: 1940s 1. An Embryo for God: Tropic of Capricorn 2. The Homosexual in Society 3. What to Do Now 4. Reviewing View, an Attack 5. Poetics of Music: Stravinsky 6. The Poet and Poetry--A Symposium Part II: 1950s 7. Pages from a Notebook 8. From a Notebook 9. Notes on Poetics regarding Olson's Maximus Part III: 1960s 10. Properties and Our REAL Estate 11. Ideas of the Meaning of Form 12. After For Love 13. Preface: Helen Adam, Ballads 14. Poetry before Language 15. The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound 16. The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante's Divine Comedy 17. Introduction: William Everson, Single Source 18. Towards an Open Universe 19. The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography 20. A Critical Difference of View 21. Man's Fulfillment in Order and Strife 22. Jack Spicer, Poet: 1925--1965 Part IV: 1970s 23. Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman 24. Notes on Grossinger's Solar Journal: Oecological Sections 25. Iconographical Extensions 26. Of George Herms, His Hermes, and His Hermetic Art 27. From Notes on the Structure of Rime 28. Preface to a Reading of Passages 1--22 29. Kopoltus 30. Introduction: Allen Upward, The Divine Mystery 31. An Art of Wondering 32. A Reading of Thirty Things 33. As Testimony: Reading Zukofsky These Forty Years 34. Wallace Berman: The Fashioning Spirit 35. In Introduction: John Taggart, Dodeka Part V: 1980s 36. Preface: Jack Spicer, One Night Stand & Other Poems 37. The Adventure of Whitman's Line 38. The Self in Postmodern Poetry 39. Statement on Jacobus for Borregaard's Museum 40. Afterword: Beverly Dahlen, The Egyptian Poems 41. The Delirium of Meaning Appendix: List of Uncollected Essays and Other Prose Notes Works Cited in the Essays Acknowledgments of Permissions Index

"Includes some of Duncan's greatest essays ... a great help to all readers." CHOICE