The Opening of the Field: Poetry

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.