"Not to creation or destruction but to truth": Robert Duncan, Kenneth Anger, and the conversation between film and poetry.(Critical essay)

Aesthetic values characterized in part by serial form, liberatory depictions of male queerness, and an allegiance to or engagement with hermetic magic practices are generally recognized as part of Robert Duncan's overall poetics. This essay is a modest attempt to situate those poetics within the context of Robert Duncan's decades-long friendship with filmmaker Kenneth Anger. I write this primarily because no published work has as yet investigated the possibility that "New American" or "Underground" Cinema (1) had an effect on Duncan's work, despite the fact of Duncan's well-known interactions with filmmakers including Anger, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, and others.

Indeed, the two published monographs that focus on Duncan's work (Peter O'Leary's Gnostic Contagion and Mark Jacob's Robert Duncan) do not at any point discuss the fact of Anger's and Duncan's mutually influential friendship, much less the effects film had formally on Duncan's output. Clearly, the time has come to think about the relationship between Anger's film and Duncan's poetry--my hope is that this essay will lead to further exploration not just of the affinities that Duncan's work had with Kenneth Anger's practice, but of the aesthetic and social interactions between innovative writers and filmmakers of the postwar era generally. The fact is that so many poets affiliated with the "New American poetry"--John Ashbery, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, Helen Adam, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg come to mind--collaborated extensively with their filmmaker peers, including Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, and Alfred Leslie. I wish to position this essay, then, as an "opening of the field," to use Duncan's well-known phrase, one that will simultaneously reveal new interpretative strategies for Robert Duncan's poetry specifically and inspire scholarship on the as-yet undocumented valences between American film and poetry of the postwar avant-garde.

Robert Duncan's "Modernist Shame"

In sifting through the correspondence between filmmaker Kenneth Anger and poet Robert Duncan, and in reading sections of Duncan's unpublished "Notebooks," we find Duncan referring in various ways to the influence that Anger had on his developing poetics and "spirit." In a notebook entry, Duncan wrote:

 
  The violations of art are ruthless, and Kenneth Anger's film in 
  reaching out to disturb the centers of life has corrupted his actors 
  until thru the decompositions of their individual being enigmatic 
  avatars appear; he has corrupted the motion of the film, ripening it 
  and pushing it on to the inertias of human pleasure ... O felix culpa, 
  Augustine cries--And this cry I heard repeated as I lay awake after 
  this film. These images of pleasure having forced themselves thru 
  Anger's art to address my spirit that recoils at pleasure. For all 
  spirit as it has dedicated itself to joy has sought, as it is weak, 
  escape from pleasure and, as it is strong, defeat of pleasure ... 
    Whatever the war of our existence--in living we are at every moment 
  upon a partisan front--of this world or the other, the artist is 
  dedicated finally not to life or to death, not to creation or 
  destruction but to truth. And this is the final authenticity of 
  Anger's art: it has not shied from the true thing which its process 
  reveald [sic]. (2) 

Here, Duncan grants Anger credit for challenging his resistance to heightened sensuality and pleasure: "These images of pleasure having forced themselves thru Anger's art to address my spirit that recoils at pleasure." Duncan appears to look to Anger in part for permission to go back to what at this point in time seems like a practically corny, Romantic conceit--the pursuit and enactment of "truth." As Keats, Coleridge, and Blake understood before him, Duncan sees inherent in the moving visual image (be it the magic of absinthe-induced hallucination, vision, or the "process" that finds light projected onto the cinema screen) a point of entry into a state of consciousness free from binaries. Interestingly, words including "decompositions" and "corrupted" are used here to describe Anger's actual effect on the actors and the material of the film itself. A filmic process that tends to "disturb the centers of life," to "corrupt," to "violate," all in the name of articulating a nonbinary "truth" suggests that Duncan saw in Kenneth Anger's work a Keatsian ability to flourish in doubt and decay.

Duncan appears ready here to at least consider a derangement of the senses, one that will lead him in no uncertain terms to the promised land of visionary certainty. It is significant that this entry was written in 1954. Marking the shift from Duncan's early modernist-influenced work, including his Stein imitations collected as Writing Writing (first published in 1964, though written in 1953) (3) and The Venice Poem (1948), the 1950s found Duncan becoming more involved personally with filmmakers, including Anger and Stan Brakhage, as he reacted against certain aesthetic practices associated with Modernism in favor of a marked Romanticism. (4) Duncan's readings of Blake seemed to have an especially important influence on his self-positioning as Romantic poet: