(Re:)Working the Ground

JAMES MAYNARD is Assistant Curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, USA.

"This welcome collection of essays addressing Robert Duncan s late writings offers an informative, thought-provoking range of insight and approach. The essays are blessed with deep archival, philological, and contextualizing reach, resonantly engaging the heft and the restive harmonics of Duncan s work." - Nathaniel Mackey, Reynolds Price Professor of English, Duke University "This brilliant and much-needed collection of essays, along with three important works by Duncan himself, addresses the dynamics and materials of Duncan s making, the complex forces at work in his writing-as-reading and reading-as-writing, the range of his inclusive explorations and across-the-board readings, his investigations of other languages - and worlds besides.These essays exhilarate the connectedness of the late, great poems of Ground Work to the earlier, all the way from The Years as Catches to Bending the Bow." - Peter Quartermain, Professor of English Emeritus, University of British Columbia and author of Disjunctive Poetics from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe "Offers a definitive treatment of a poet for whom reading was a mode of being and writing an entry into cosmic orders. Far from providing a critical consensus on Duncan s notoriously eclectic work, these essays show the generative and rhizomatic trajectories his thought could pursue. Building on extensive archival research, essays in this volume trace Duncan s response to events of his own later years - Vietnam, feminism, gay liberation, as well as his own household, friendships, and mortality. With the long-awaited arrival of a multi-volume edition of Duncan s collected writings (Re:)Working the Ground re-opens the field of inquiry for this vital American poet." - Michael Davidson, Distinguished Professor of American Literature, UC San Diego

• (Re:)Working the Ground: An Introduction; J.Maynard PART I: PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED AND UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS BY ROBERT DUNCAN From : A Prospectus for the Prepublication Issue of Ground Work Before the War: Preface In Passage PART II: ESSAYS Into the Serial Forms of "The Regulators; R.J.Bertholf Duncan Étude III: Intellectual Property or the Poetic Commons; S.Collis Before Caesar's Gate, Robert Duncan Comes to Grief: The Vietnam War and the "Unengendered Child"; S.Fredman Robert Duncan's Craft Exchanges: Doing Ground Work in the Pastoral; J.Hamilton The Needs of Ghosts: On Poems from the Margins of Thom Gunn's "Moly"; D.Johnston Robert Duncan's Radical Humanism; or, On the Crises of Reading and Falling in Love; E.Keenaghan Duncan's Celestial Hierarchy; P.O'Leary Genreading and Underwriting (in) Robert Duncan's Ground Work ; C.Oudart Robert Duncan and Gertrude Stein from Writing Writing to Ground Work II ; B.M.Reed The Story Told of What Cannot Be Told; D.Tedlock "[T]he Poem / as a Shatterd Pitcher of Rock Crystal": "An Essay at War" as Groundwork for Robert Duncan's Later Poetry; K.Winter