Biographical Particulars:
Born in Oakland, California, January 7, 1919. Studied the civilization of the Middle Ages with Ernst Kantorowicz at the university of California, Berkeley. Poems and essays have been printed in The Phoenix, The Experimental Review, View, The Art, Origin, The Black Mountain Review, Botteghe Oscura, and in the recently published local magazine Ark II, Moby I. In 1954 with Norman MacLeod he conducted the Poetry Center Workshop. After a year in Europe, in the spring of this year he taught classes in writing at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Since September, he has been Assistant Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College, a position provided by [a] Rockefeller Grant.
Of his work Robert Duncan writes:
Decisive influences in my work have been from the first the great inventive Masters of our day: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, among Americans, and from three Masters of English poetry: Yeats, Lawrence, and Edith Sitwell. The music of Stravinsky, Satie, Schönberg and Webern, and the sculpture of Brancusi, the painting of Bernard, Mondrian, and Matisse have all had a major role in the development of my concept of form. I am an Orthodox “Modernist” and formalist. I write for an ideal reader who is more learned in the Art, in the lore of spirit and language, than I shall ever be. No, not for a Grand Master, but for that perhaps even more rare Grand Reader whose subtle mind, demanding as it is, will yet recognize my devotion to subtlety of mind. And thus, extend Grace. Then, in a way, I write for all who have a like devotion.