Robert Duncan - by Lisa Jarnot (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This is a book of wonders, beautifully written and brilliantly researched. Lisa Jarnot offers a work of devotion to the truth and spirit of Robert Duncan's life and art, the result of twenty years of study and reflection. A great story as well as a rigorous exploration of the poet's art of the imagination, it will pull readers back into Duncan's poetry at the same time that it recounts his rich, adventurous, and always creative life."--Robert Adamson, author of "The Goldfinches of Baghdad."
"Lisa Jarnot's biography of Robert Duncan represents an essential contribution to our understanding of this complex, inspirited man, his life and art, and the many circles in which he moved through the years. It is one of those rare works that melds scholarly diligence with poetic comprehension."--Michael Palmer, author of "Thread."
"Robert Duncan was a poet of enormous means and complexity, one of the last to pursue a truly cosmological poetics. In that pursuit he was a poet (even a "great" poet), who created - like Whitman before him - his own life with all its openings & pitfalls as beyond all else a life-of-poetry. Lisa Jarnot's biography now gives us a first, richly detailed depiction of that life, a powerful and necessary complement to Duncan's poetry itself. A product of the century behind us, it offers up a lasting legacy for the century to come."--Jerome Rothenberg, author of "Technicians of the Sacred."

Book Synopsis

This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919-1988), one of America's great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan's birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan's notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.

From the Back Cover

"This is a book of wonders, beautifully written and brilliantly researched. Lisa Jarnot offers a work of devotion to the truth and spirit of Robert Duncan's life and art, the result of twenty years of study and reflection. A great story as well as a rigorous exploration of the poet's art of the imagination, it will pull readers back into Duncan's poetry at the same time that it recounts his rich, adventurous, and always creative life."--Robert Adamson, author of The Goldfinches of Baghdad.

"Lisa Jarnot's biography of Robert Duncan represents an essential contribution to our understanding of this complex, inspirited man, his life and art, and the many circles in which he moved through the years. It is one of those rare works that melds scholarly diligence with poetic comprehension."--Michael Palmer, author of Thread.

"Robert Duncan was a poet of enormous means and complexity, one of the last to pursue a truly cosmological poetics. In that pursuit he was a poet (even a great poet), who created - like Whitman before him - his own life with all its openings & pitfalls as beyond all else a life-of-poetry. Lisa Jarnot's biography now gives us a first, richly detailed depiction of that life, a powerful and necessary complement to Duncan's poetry itself. A product of the century behind us, it offers up a lasting legacy for the century to come."--Jerome Rothenberg, author of Technicians of the Sacred.

Review Quotes

"Jarnot is a sensitive reader of literary history and an admiring but not uncritical biographer. She is also not above serving up the scuttlebutt that we've come, as readers, to expect as our literary-biographical due."--Robert Baird "London Review of Books" (10/24/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"Jarnot has done her homework, and she gives readers an exhaustive, meticulously detailed account of Duncan's life. . . . Highly recommended."-- "Choice" (2/1/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"A chronicle that should be utterly absorbing for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry."--Ray Olson "Booklist" (8/1/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"A comprehensive, well-researched, and beautifully written biography. . . . Jarnot brings Duncan to life as a gay man and a brilliant poet engaged with the cultural and political issues of his time."-- "Publishers Weekly" (1/23/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"An edifying study of a poet who did much to inspire the next generation of poets, and it is an entertaining life story. This book should be looked to as a template for other biographies of twentieth-century poets."--Daniel Coffey "Foreword" (9/1/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"For many younger readers, the members of the post-World War II 'San Francisco Renaissance, ' like their cohorts among the Black Mountain poets, are little more than names. . . . Posterity winnows ruthlessly, and, rightly or not, the American poets of the 1950s, '60s and '70s who seem to be passing into the canon are largely East Coast folk. . . . This makes Lisa Jarnot's biography of Duncan all the more valuable."--Michael Dirda "Washington Post Book World" (2/28/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"In organizing a mass of previously unavailable archive material, Jarnot's study will serve as an indispensable reference text--if not the first port of call--for anyone hoping to make headway through the metaphysical tangle of Duncan's oeuvre. . . . Readers of Jarnot's biography will find Duncan's life realized, at last, in all its fictive certainty."--Stephen Ross "Times Literary Supplement (TLS)" (9/7/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"Jarnot's biography offers an eloquent testament to an American poet trying to be responsible to the human spirit. . . . It will compel us all to reread Duncan's poetry--breathtaking as it is."--Seth Lerer "San Francisco Chronicle" (8/27/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"Lisa Jarnot's biography of Duncan should only stoke further interest in his work. She avoids the usual two pitfalls--worship and apostasy--by cleaving to a style so clean and free of editorializing or psychologizing that it reads like reportage. . . . The result is a book of just the facts: what, where, when and who. And yet Jarnot, a poet herself, is sensitive to the symbols and cycles that defined Duncan's imaginative life."--Ange Mlinko "The Nation" (10/8/2012 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Lisa Jarnot is a poet and independent scholar. She has taught at Brooklyn College and the Naropa Institute and is the author of four books of poetry, including Ring of Fire and Night Scenes.