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This chapter traces the development of Rukeyser and Olson’s thinking about physics over the next two decades, as they gradually jettisoned conceptual schemes based on the system and the field. Their trajectory is contrasted with the shifting interests in science of Robert Duncan. Rukeyser begins with high hopes of editing a major anthology on science and the humanities, but gradually loses confidence in schemas borrowed from physics. After her long poem One Life she largely abandons the use of poetic masks, and writes in The Speed of Darkness that the fundamental unit of the universe is the story not the atom. The chapter then offers close readings of science in Olson’s poems “The Kingfishers,” the unpublished “Maximus Letter #28,” and “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld].” This last poem is read in detail against its sources in Whitehead’s metaphysics, which provided Olson with a readymade conceptual scheme. The final section explores Duncan’s discursive responses to public knowledge of the sciences, and gives close readings of two poems, “Apprehensions” and “The Fire: Passages 13.” “The Fire” is a poem that Olson could not have written, because it expresses and then examines the poet’s rage at scientists like Oppenheimer.

The chapter shows how postwar poets encountered strong negative or idealized images of poetry in the writings of physicists and other scientists. Physicists sometimes referred to an abstraction of poetry in order to negotiate tricky questions about how to communicate the strangeness and “semi-phenomenological” character of the quantum world. Murray Gell-Mann coins the term “quark” partly because the allusion to Joyce enables him to finesse the questionable actuality of these sub-atomic particles. The chapter discusses the surprising prevalence of articles about poetry in general science journals aimed at professional scientists, and looks in detail at one article on contemporary poetry and science. Many poets read and referred to popular writings by Erwin Schröger and Werner Heisenberg. The chapter explains how their books appealed to poets because they referenced poetry, and talked about its possible future roles in relation to physics. Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan both found uses for the ideas of these physicists in their essays and poems. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how late in his career Oppenheimer reversed his earlier endorsement of Paul Dirac’s dismissal of poetry, by arguing that good scientific communication to the public would have the quality of lyric.

This chapter discusses how four poets made use, or may have done so, of specific articles from Scientific American, a magazine that deliberately set out to provide the public with sufficient information about scientific developments to contribute to democracy. Sometimes a poet only later acknowledges it as a source, as in the case of Rae Armantrout’s poem “Natural History,” which critiques sociobiology. The chapter speculates whether Frank O’Hara’s famous poem about the sun was written in response to a specific Scientific American article and concludes that the circumstantial evidence is not strong enough. Jackson Mac Low’s poems in Stanzas for Iris Lezak make use of several articles from Scientific American. The chapter argues that his acrostic proceduralism is an original mode of inquiry by which he exposes hidden strata in scientific texts, and exposes norms of poetic communication. Robert Duncan explicitly cites a diagram in an article on human evolution in the Scientific American in his poem “Osiris and Set,” which is shown to be responsive not only to that passage in the article, but also to the general mood of an issue of the magazine full of advertisements for advanced nuclear weaponry.

Males sharing moments of sexual pleasure were one thing in American culture in the generation before Stonewall, but men who shared domestic space, apart from a few specific settings, were something else again, transgressors more troubling still. Part One introduces several such male couples, characterizing them as genuine cultural outlaws who apparently posed particular threats to their society’s dominant culture. How the outlaws comported and considered themselves, the author maintains, provides fresh insight into queer culture before “gay liberation” as well as into the harsh workings of American culture at large. Among those featured are Lee Fuller and Frank Leach, seemingly mundane middle class men of Monrovia, California; considerably less mundane poet Robert Duncan and painter Jess Collins; and San Francisco Bay Area typesetters Thomas Rolfsen and Chalmer Cochran. The centerpiece of Part One is the coupling of modernist furniture designer Edward Wormley and theater professor Edward Crouse, their involvement beginning during their Midwest boyhoods, thereafter documented by their sometimes-daily correspondence that ended only when late in middle age they realized their lifelong dream of sharing a home. The Wormley-Crouse letters, housed in Cornell’s rich Human Sexuality Collection, is by itself a priceless document, heretofore unused, of twentieth-century queer life.

Robert Duncan saw Blake’s images of ‘fire and blood’ alive in contemporary America. Like many of his generation, he was appalled by the war in Vietnam, believing it to be symptomatic of a deeper spiritual sickness in America. He wanted poetry to provide an alternative form of democratic participation which would recover the meaning of freedom from the toxic lexicon of American foreign policy. Duncan, like Blake, imagined the body, and the body politic, as a site of alterity and ethical responsibility, charged with repression and desire. His reading of Blake sought to preserve the place of the Romantic poet in the modern world but, ironically, helped expose its fragility.

The specificity of the dead was very important to Gunn, and this is why he was a great poet about death. Death, as he knew, is not an impersonal entity that exists in the world, like air or dirt, but a very particular experience that happens to each person in a different way. One does not get used to it. One does not get over it. It is always a shock, even when it is expected. “Lament” may be his greatest poem in this vein, but “Duncan” is surely one of the runner-ups, and they share a number of qualities, including the strictness of their rhyme schemes and their casual use of medical phrases such as “home dialysis.” (His rhyme for that, in “Duncan,” is “his responsiveness.”) . “Duncan”—a poem, it turned out, about his friend and fellow poet Robert Duncan, who had died earlier that year—was marked in a few places with his handwritten emendations.

Among poetry’s most powerful interlocutors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been journalism. As the pressure of news has become increasingly pervasive, from the world wars to JFK’s assassination, the Irish Troubles, and the September 11 attacks, poets such as W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, Louise Bennett, Louis MacNeice, Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Carolyn Forché, and Jorie Graham have refashioned poetry to absorb news stories, newspaper headlines, and news vocabulary. But poetry has defined itself against the news at the same time that it has ingested it. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” Williams famously wrote, implicitly characterizing poetry as an antigenre to the news: “yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Even as poets have drawn on the news, they have explored the differences between poetry and what Walter Benjamin saw as the commodified, transparent, and instantaneous discourse of journalism, foregrounding poetry’s long temporal horizons and deep memory, its obliquity and metaphoric density.

The conclusion examines how the Californian poets a generation younger than Jeffers responded to his work and how Kenneth Rexroth’s and William Everson’s disagreement over the value of his work effectively obscured Jeffers’s role as a poetic precursor. It also considers the influence of Jeffers’s anti-war poetry on the draft-age poets Everson and Robert Duncan, whose conscientious objection to World War II was in part based on their reading of his work. The conclusion contends that Jeffers’s influence has been erased by the lack of consensus among the middle generation poets who follow him, but their extension of his sacramental poetics in the search for the divine in the universe nonetheless confirms his legacy as a central poet in American literary history.

Robert Duncan's parents were born in Jamaica and migrated to Cuba looking for work like thousands of British West Indians in the early twentieth century. Robert explained that his parents were apolitical and conservative and, like many West Indians of the era, chose to remain outside of Cuban politics. In 1958, Cuban rebels camped out in the nearby hills surrounding the city of Guantánamo. Robert decided to run off and join the revolutionaries at sixteen. His choice caused conflict and debates within his family, but Robert insisted. He was born in Cuba, and he wanted to join the struggle. He could reel off a list of his compañeros who were also descendants of West Indians with ties to the base. Robert had regular contact with the naval base and was accustomed to military culture and discipline. He remained a career army officer, training in Moscow and serving with distinction as a lieutenant colonel in Angola.

This chapter considers how Barthes was read in America, among a far wider range of poets than in Britain. It starts with a brief consideration of Robert Duncan’s essay on the ‘kopoltus’, and then looks at the poets gathered in Ron Silliman’s 1975 anthology ‘The Dwelling-Place’, New York School writers such as Bernadette Mayer, and other ‘Language poets’, closing with a more in-depth consideration of the importance of Barthes to Lyn Hejinian. Links are established between these writers’ poetics, which are varied but all describable as ‘language-centred’.

This chapter details the life and career of Denise Levertov from 1972 to 1975. This period was marked by critical endings for Levertov, an extraordinary time of emotional turmoil and confusion. Three centrifugal forces—the end of the Vietnam War, her break with mentor Robert Duncan, and her divorce from Mitch—could have overwhelmed her. In the end they did not. She survived, and haltingly searched for a new life. Two books of poetry appeared. Footprints (1972) and The Freeing of the Dust (1975) both attested to her longing for freedom and desire to leave the past behind, and a collection of essays, The Poet in the World (1973), established her preeminence in poetics. As she groped toward the future, Levertov carried a talisman with her, a new understanding of her name Denise. Previously she assumed Denise derived from the Greek “Dionysus.” Now to her delight she discovered that in Hebrew its origin was in “Daleth,” meaning “door,” “entrance, exit/way through of/giving and receiving.” Obliquely she began to live into this new self-understanding.

This chapter looks at how the filmmaker Lawrence Jordan realized his trinity of “time/Moment/change” through rhythms of editing and camera movement into a paradoxical image of “timelessness.” It reads his “alchemical autobiography,” Sophie’s Place, as a poem of his aesthetic education as an artist, particularly under the tripart guidance of Cornell, the poet Robert Duncan, and the collage artist Jess, tracing this influence into his “H. D. Trilogy.”

This chapter details the life and career of Denise Levertov from 1976 to 1981. The trauma of the last few years, while not over, seemed to be abating for Levertov. The war had ended; her friendship with Robert Duncan waned dramatically, although there was episodic contact between them; and her divorce ensured a different relationship with Mitch. Gradually her attention shifted, and by early 1978 she clearly felt she had entered some new phase in her life. Her divorce from Mitch allowed her to explore her erotic desires even more than before. Her relationships with younger men gave her sexual pleasure and affirmed a youthfulness that she had felt slipping away as she aged. Divorce also allowed Levertov greater freedom to travel and more solitude; it did not alter her financial situation. She continued to earn money through poetry readings, and from 1976 to 1978 she served as poetry editor of the new progressive magazine, Mother Jones. But her chief means of support came from her employment at Tufts University.