stream of reviews
On the Margins of Great Empires. Selected Poems
Andrew Duncan
Published in June 2018 by Shearsman Books
Beneath are some responses to the component parts from which this selected is drawn, from 1978 onwards.
Seeing this sequence as a large, articulated work, put into its sections and with the culminations of a sustained amplitude, I esteem its achievement very highly. It is strong and active with the questions of power which underlie the strength; the instrumentalism of language is put under sustained pressure, both of invention and expression, and the outcome is negotiated closely across a wide range of historical predicament and moral passion. The method is conspicuously unoriginal, but its uses are strikingly productive and grand.
[…] This clash generates in itself an experience for the reader of strength which is profoundly not power. It comes from a precarious equilibrium-point, not willed and in itself formal rather than psychological or dramatic, at which the limits both of rhetorical drive and counter-sceptical intelligence seem to cancel but eventually come into an alignment. The effect, beyond the exhilarating miseries and blooded metal of locally refused panic, is profoundly strengthening and true.
– J.H. Prynne, in a letter about Threads of Iron, 1982
Peter Porter, in a letter to Simon Jenner, c.2003:
We talked on the phone about Eratica a little. .... But this letter is really about one thing, namely Andrew Duncan's Skeleton looking at Chinese Pictures, which I have been reading at intervals now for some time. I think that certainly it is a remarkable book and I also recognize that I must inhabit a shamefully restricted part of the literary world for me not to have encountered his poetry before this[.] …
What I admire most in Duncan's work is his willingness (indeed enthusiasm) for not confining things to any sort of ghetto. He likes as much history and mediaevalism as Pound but he also aspires to a contemporary concern for life in our modern mercantile mess. His chief fault, it seems to me, is a sort of verbal vertigo: too many words spin round and round[.] It's excellent the way he refuses to be cowed by any sort of notion of appropriateness or decorum, so that runic and traditional poetics mix with the city of London and sexual turpitude in modern life.[…] There are many properly 'big' poems - something which doesn't get attempted sufficiently these days, presumably because it gives hostages to fortune.
if I say that I am reminded at times of Peter Redgrove, Lawrence Durrell, and even David Jones, with a touch of a more unbuttoned Geoffrey Hill, I am not implying any kind of influence ... It is certainly a rich book and now that I have marinaded my mind in it, I expect to return to individual poems with greater pleasure and understanding.
One of the problems for late-modern poetry of such rare seriousness and ambition as this has been how to present imaginations of society which are prospective as well as critical. How to do this without the particular values of poetry y becoming subject to fixed, externally located systems of ideas? The prospective condition Duncan maps out is hard-won, and necessarily hard to define. It is, if any fixed condition at all, a new state without commonality, a liberated, sometimes anarchic, sometimes pacific, sometimes even mystical, existential order to which poetry’s process of cortical rage can bring the self by breaking up the false divisions of the private and social day.
–John Cornall, review of Cut Memories and False Commands, City Limits, May 16-23, 1991
I can’t read Rilke’s Duino Elegies, for example, and not feel astonished at how Rilke rarely puts a foot wrong, even in the most complex sections. Andrew Duncan manages to write quite brilliantly through much of the poetry on display here. He manages to say something more in them than the bland and obvious, and he is entirely unfashionable with his elevated, oracular diction when mainstream UK poetry circles seem obsessed with “natural-speak” (an obsession that they may now be outgrowing). That refusal to court populist style deserves a commendation in itself.
– Rob A. Mackenzie, 2006, on State of Independence
“For the last 30 years, Andrew Duncan has patiently traced alternative wavelengths, to and from the unevocable, irreconcilable and the impossible.”—Kevin Nolan, 2005
'Andrew Duncan writes a poetry of possibility. To read The Imaginary in Geometry is to stumble into the richness of things, to be thrown, startled, into exhilarating new vistas. It is a pleasure to glimpse Marrakesh from the beach at Aberystwyth. Try this book. Explore it.' –David Herd on The Imaginary in Geometry, 2005
Andrew Duncan’s Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures (Waterloo Press, 2000) and [another poet] both seem to find accord with the ancients yet come at the nuances and intellectual gradations of their own moments. Duncan’s book feeds variously from the Prometheus myth, from ancient Chinese, from Dark Age English and cultures from the Inner Asian Steppes[.] […] The blurb for Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures speaks of the book’s adventures into ‘alien cultures’ as ‘rehearsals of the historic imagination’ where ’beauty, integrity and complexity’ and a ‘shift into ornament and detail’ work to the ultimate end of relieving ‘daily oppression’. The words ‘rehearsal’ and 'imagination’ are crucial, warning us against the idea of poems as obelisks or definitive statements. ‘Anglo Saxon Gems: a 9th Century niello brooch of the Five Senses’ demonstrates these ideas to bewitching effect. The experience of reading this poem is something like looking through the lens of a magical artefact. I have felt something of the same effect reading the more phantasmagorical poems of Peter Redgrove. The kind of ‘relief’ it offers is something akin to the relief a rich dream might give to a mind too long oppressed by the dead habits of conscious thought. It is no naive irrationalism, though: there is always a robust dialectic across the two hemispheres of the brain. Duncan is dreamer and scholar, poetry and world-weary critic of life.
–from a review in Staple, Spring 2005
Tim Allen in Eratica, 2000 (general survey):
Andrew Duncan the poet is not so different to the critic. The same restlessness vies with the same surety, though both are projections. The same blistering intelligence vies wth the same sonic sensibility though in the poems -these curl inward while in the critical writing they curl outward. The same focussed recklessness vies with the same considered political twist, but in the poems this makes for an amazing bubble-view of Duncan's flat rhizoid world. Only frighteningly good poetry could provide such a bubble view. Duncan's acknowledgement of Deleuze and Guattari's input and insight is not something he shouts about but the mesh of his poems, their superb narration of an insider's pragmatic project is certainly a matter of SNAP. In the theatre of theory Duncan is the one concentrating on the music as it bounces off the walls.
By insider I mean the opposite of romantic outsider. I remember when I first encountered Duncan's poetry properly (as opposed to isolated magazine appearances) in 10 British Poets (Spectacular Diseases) and I was struck by the way the writing was looking out at me. I was witnessing a poetry that made no bones of the fact that it never needed me as a witness. It was real - something like a 'real history'. While the work of the majority of contributors to that anthology was changed by my observational presence, akin to a time traveller's presence that changed the course of the material by the very fact of being there, Duncan's poetry was a lot more aimed, reading it was like being pierced by hundreds of arrows.
[His poems’] form rarely varies from free verse where the line breaks are either predictable syntactic moments or come early to denote emphasis. There is a directness, an unfussy attention to writing what is on his mind that has no time for linguistic tricks. The play, the reflexivity, comes in the thoughts themselves and he has honed his 'straight' method to transfer their information with the least possible interference of aesthetic concern - no embroidery, no white noise, but no minimalism either, high access language. No overt formal self-consciousness or exploratory (experimental) journeys into possible ways of saying the same thing either. No tangents.
But how? how to hold on? The world has already turned and the centrifugal force stretches our thoughts until what we read yesterday comes around today strained into helium squeak. It's in Duncan's poetry where this 'holding' really comes to life, where, as Prynne said, it holds 'its place in the altogether fraught intersections of history and personality'. The instrument of holding is the poem, the organisation of language to maximise, as Andrew would probably say, the flow of information. This information is everything (which means this information is everything). It is not a recording of information but, as I said above, a channelling. Beauty is an aspect of this, beauty as mental pleasure. Channelling is pleasurable, sensational. Duncan's poems make information 'sexy'. They attract. His latest work, collected in Pauper Estate (shearsman, 200) is full of these attractions, these tracks made by the desiring machine (why not? To talk about such things without using metaphors would entail philosophy) that is the 'fraught intersection' between the plateaux of history and his personality. Duncan actually says of his old poems that they now have to exist without a personality, which is his way of saying that they have nothing to do with him anymore but yet they undeniably exist. How long I wonder before a poem loses its (his) personality. Is this a general truth or a particular? This is amusing as I actually find more that connects the early and late work than what connects either of them to the in-between work (such as Alien Skies (Equipage, 1993). And, ironically, the connection is 'personality'. There are elements of the personal that come to the surface in both books to a surprising degree. The emotion is pressing and real and if there is a difference between the early and late Duncan's poetry then it seems to be only a matter of relative intervention and control, more marked in the material of Pauper Estate - and the control is very much to do with 'attraction'. Instead of spiralling down cul de sacs of the self the 'control' veers him away to other horizons - the desiring machine is now being steered. There is an abundance of such works in Pauper Estate, 21 titles (including one called 'Virtual machines') that demonstrate a mastery of his material that outshines his previous best. If we needed an example of what could possibly be produced by a human post-structuralist poetics, then this is it. These poems could very well be Duncan at the height of his powers, though I suspect there is more to come.
I remember when I was existentially locked in a work situation that I loathed to the point of a breakdown I could inspect the interstices of the minute people/system interactions in an almost trance-like manner; the components of my colleagues' reality building produced something similar to solid blocks of negotiated experience and I used to daydream of a poetry that could capture that - I was aware that it was the only art-form that could possibly do it. I couldn't do it myself because it was too painful but when I first read Duncan I recognised it immediately. So maybe Keery is saying the right thing but with the wrong words, after all. I began this article by asking where Duncan came from because there is no doubt that he is a black sheep.
* Reading Andrew Duncan's Savage Survivals amid Modern Suavity is probably best approached later in the day, but I find the experience has much in common with some of those dreams. So what's it like then? Well, it may be Andrew Duncan's best book so far. There's an air of celebration about its language: nothing of the po-faced, dense or exclusive. Many of the surfaces glisten with wit, as do some of the underlying notions, such as the transposition of an ancient Chinese tale into contemporary Scotland, with the help of "some martial arts magazines". Duncan makes the most of this opportunity to take a wry look at aspects of Pound's Cantos, whilst at the same time adopting the mode for his own purposes. There is a certain amount of scientific terminology, which also helps to lever the poetry out of expected settings. Meteorites, for example, do not have the exciting but slightly cozy pantomime costumes of 'shooting stars': instead they encase chondrule insets – and the reader is invited to consider aspects of planet-formation theory instead of just bobbing up and down on a li-lo at the back of her/his mind. There is even a hint of the author risking a foray into the countryside and wobbling on a hummock. Throughout the book, however, attention to the political and the ethical runs like a high-tensile mat - threads of iron - 'the black dot of ethical focus'. And all of this becomes verbal music of a very high level indeed: varied, inviting, deliquescent, delinquent, grinding to a halt, singing. You want to speak the lines out loud so as to have them right in your mouth.
Genesis comes right at the end. The title is 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' but there are no adverts for religious fundamentalists, wide-screen TVs or chilled tarts. Duncan refers to a legend in which the twelve days of Christmas were seen as a period of chaotic shapelessness. Forms dissolve and the whole universe must be recomposed by beings with the gift of music. Yes, it's quite an ambitious book. But then Duncan is an ambitious poet with a positively Shelleyan commitment to the art.
I'm sure that will ring true to many poets. It [the design process] is also why Duncan's poetry does not lead to a sense of surfeit: the linguistic surface is as varied as the subject matter and the music renews itself in constant transformations.
–Peter Hughes on “Intercapillary Space” website, 2006
“Switching and Main Exchange is concerned with technologies of communication and the contemporary obsession with retrieval of data [.] […] The power of Duncan’s poetry is in its accumulative ability to produce an overshadowing sense of displacement, despair and loss. […] he sets up a series of oppositions, initially stark but gradually collapsing into each other to imply their mutual relation. […] Both collections make strong demands of the reader, creating new thought through linguistic difficulty, expansion and experiment.”
– review by Elizabeth Eger of “Switching and Main Exchange” and “Pauper Estate” in PN Review, #150, 2003.
“There’s more energy (linguistic, political, sexual), and a subjectivity more calmly aware just how is implicated, compromised[.] […] It’s this flexibility that realises the real ambition that Duncan has- the poems range over the planet, through history, across cultures, always with a sense of rootedness in a historical/ cultural consciousness: not a touristic poem among them.”
– review of “Anxiety Before Entering a Room” by Keith Jebb, Poetry Review, Spring 2002,
The thematic structure of Duncan’s writing is energised by fleeting or ‘concrete’ dialectical currents. They come in gusts. You can’t easily quote from a poem. It’s not that you can’t show how effective the writing is, but that you can’t do justice to the architectural grandeur of the ‘whole’ process. He has no fear of embracing the multifarious ‘tradition’.”
– Andrew Jordan on poems in shearsman #35, from 10th Muse, 1999
(AD) So this (On the Margins) replaces the 2001 volume which is out of print. A lot of the poems post-date 2001.
The title comes from a book by Mircea Eliade, adapted. It is, directly, a line from “When history becomes myth”, a poem which uses themes from “L’éternel retour”. The reference is to folk cultures untouched by metropolitan literary systems.
Eliade says so many peoples were doomed to suffering and disappearance “because they live in the neighbourhood of empires perpetually striving to expand”. This phrase became “on the margins of great empires”.
There is a sentence in that 1982 Prynne letter “the displaced feeling corresponds to the Randgebiete and Randsprachen of an internalised but hostile imperium”. The German words are in the title of a book by Wolfram Eberhard, which approached the history of Chinese society through an idea of highly different regional components which contributed different things to the rising farming/ urban/ State complex. I was studying Chinese briefly, for about six months, in 1976, I spent time in the Oriental Studies library at Cambridge, and they had Eberhard’s book. The words mean marginal regions and marginal languages, and the phrase on the margins of great empires refers also to that Letter. I changed subject to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and these really were Randsprachen.
The margins I am thinking of are not doomed to disappearance, I don’t think, just quiet under the huge din of megalopolitan cultures.
In the margins of the great empires
provincial cultures turning slowly on themselves,
a self-locking aggregate crossing the rim
of recurring. The abiding, the filling. Tales
in the prison where Campanella was held.
Occluded
at the place where nothing is altered, the bottom
of a great lake.
Let us enter the greater forgetting
far from the decay of forms
mere laggards in the march of high ideas.
Disposed in the likeness of goodness
descend in the likeness of companionship.
Andrew Duncan
Published in June 2018 by Shearsman Books
Beneath are some responses to the component parts from which this selected is drawn, from 1978 onwards.
Seeing this sequence as a large, articulated work, put into its sections and with the culminations of a sustained amplitude, I esteem its achievement very highly. It is strong and active with the questions of power which underlie the strength; the instrumentalism of language is put under sustained pressure, both of invention and expression, and the outcome is negotiated closely across a wide range of historical predicament and moral passion. The method is conspicuously unoriginal, but its uses are strikingly productive and grand.
[…] This clash generates in itself an experience for the reader of strength which is profoundly not power. It comes from a precarious equilibrium-point, not willed and in itself formal rather than psychological or dramatic, at which the limits both of rhetorical drive and counter-sceptical intelligence seem to cancel but eventually come into an alignment. The effect, beyond the exhilarating miseries and blooded metal of locally refused panic, is profoundly strengthening and true.
– J.H. Prynne, in a letter about Threads of Iron, 1982
Peter Porter, in a letter to Simon Jenner, c.2003:
We talked on the phone about Eratica a little. .... But this letter is really about one thing, namely Andrew Duncan's Skeleton looking at Chinese Pictures, which I have been reading at intervals now for some time. I think that certainly it is a remarkable book and I also recognize that I must inhabit a shamefully restricted part of the literary world for me not to have encountered his poetry before this[.] …
What I admire most in Duncan's work is his willingness (indeed enthusiasm) for not confining things to any sort of ghetto. He likes as much history and mediaevalism as Pound but he also aspires to a contemporary concern for life in our modern mercantile mess. His chief fault, it seems to me, is a sort of verbal vertigo: too many words spin round and round[.] It's excellent the way he refuses to be cowed by any sort of notion of appropriateness or decorum, so that runic and traditional poetics mix with the city of London and sexual turpitude in modern life.[…] There are many properly 'big' poems - something which doesn't get attempted sufficiently these days, presumably because it gives hostages to fortune.
if I say that I am reminded at times of Peter Redgrove, Lawrence Durrell, and even David Jones, with a touch of a more unbuttoned Geoffrey Hill, I am not implying any kind of influence ... It is certainly a rich book and now that I have marinaded my mind in it, I expect to return to individual poems with greater pleasure and understanding.
One of the problems for late-modern poetry of such rare seriousness and ambition as this has been how to present imaginations of society which are prospective as well as critical. How to do this without the particular values of poetry y becoming subject to fixed, externally located systems of ideas? The prospective condition Duncan maps out is hard-won, and necessarily hard to define. It is, if any fixed condition at all, a new state without commonality, a liberated, sometimes anarchic, sometimes pacific, sometimes even mystical, existential order to which poetry’s process of cortical rage can bring the self by breaking up the false divisions of the private and social day.
–John Cornall, review of Cut Memories and False Commands, City Limits, May 16-23, 1991
I can’t read Rilke’s Duino Elegies, for example, and not feel astonished at how Rilke rarely puts a foot wrong, even in the most complex sections. Andrew Duncan manages to write quite brilliantly through much of the poetry on display here. He manages to say something more in them than the bland and obvious, and he is entirely unfashionable with his elevated, oracular diction when mainstream UK poetry circles seem obsessed with “natural-speak” (an obsession that they may now be outgrowing). That refusal to court populist style deserves a commendation in itself.
– Rob A. Mackenzie, 2006, on State of Independence
“For the last 30 years, Andrew Duncan has patiently traced alternative wavelengths, to and from the unevocable, irreconcilable and the impossible.”—Kevin Nolan, 2005
'Andrew Duncan writes a poetry of possibility. To read The Imaginary in Geometry is to stumble into the richness of things, to be thrown, startled, into exhilarating new vistas. It is a pleasure to glimpse Marrakesh from the beach at Aberystwyth. Try this book. Explore it.' –David Herd on The Imaginary in Geometry, 2005
Andrew Duncan’s Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures (Waterloo Press, 2000) and [another poet] both seem to find accord with the ancients yet come at the nuances and intellectual gradations of their own moments. Duncan’s book feeds variously from the Prometheus myth, from ancient Chinese, from Dark Age English and cultures from the Inner Asian Steppes[.] […] The blurb for Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures speaks of the book’s adventures into ‘alien cultures’ as ‘rehearsals of the historic imagination’ where ’beauty, integrity and complexity’ and a ‘shift into ornament and detail’ work to the ultimate end of relieving ‘daily oppression’. The words ‘rehearsal’ and 'imagination’ are crucial, warning us against the idea of poems as obelisks or definitive statements. ‘Anglo Saxon Gems: a 9th Century niello brooch of the Five Senses’ demonstrates these ideas to bewitching effect. The experience of reading this poem is something like looking through the lens of a magical artefact. I have felt something of the same effect reading the more phantasmagorical poems of Peter Redgrove. The kind of ‘relief’ it offers is something akin to the relief a rich dream might give to a mind too long oppressed by the dead habits of conscious thought. It is no naive irrationalism, though: there is always a robust dialectic across the two hemispheres of the brain. Duncan is dreamer and scholar, poetry and world-weary critic of life.
–from a review in Staple, Spring 2005
Tim Allen in Eratica, 2000 (general survey):
Andrew Duncan the poet is not so different to the critic. The same restlessness vies with the same surety, though both are projections. The same blistering intelligence vies wth the same sonic sensibility though in the poems -these curl inward while in the critical writing they curl outward. The same focussed recklessness vies with the same considered political twist, but in the poems this makes for an amazing bubble-view of Duncan's flat rhizoid world. Only frighteningly good poetry could provide such a bubble view. Duncan's acknowledgement of Deleuze and Guattari's input and insight is not something he shouts about but the mesh of his poems, their superb narration of an insider's pragmatic project is certainly a matter of SNAP. In the theatre of theory Duncan is the one concentrating on the music as it bounces off the walls.
By insider I mean the opposite of romantic outsider. I remember when I first encountered Duncan's poetry properly (as opposed to isolated magazine appearances) in 10 British Poets (Spectacular Diseases) and I was struck by the way the writing was looking out at me. I was witnessing a poetry that made no bones of the fact that it never needed me as a witness. It was real - something like a 'real history'. While the work of the majority of contributors to that anthology was changed by my observational presence, akin to a time traveller's presence that changed the course of the material by the very fact of being there, Duncan's poetry was a lot more aimed, reading it was like being pierced by hundreds of arrows.
[His poems’] form rarely varies from free verse where the line breaks are either predictable syntactic moments or come early to denote emphasis. There is a directness, an unfussy attention to writing what is on his mind that has no time for linguistic tricks. The play, the reflexivity, comes in the thoughts themselves and he has honed his 'straight' method to transfer their information with the least possible interference of aesthetic concern - no embroidery, no white noise, but no minimalism either, high access language. No overt formal self-consciousness or exploratory (experimental) journeys into possible ways of saying the same thing either. No tangents.
But how? how to hold on? The world has already turned and the centrifugal force stretches our thoughts until what we read yesterday comes around today strained into helium squeak. It's in Duncan's poetry where this 'holding' really comes to life, where, as Prynne said, it holds 'its place in the altogether fraught intersections of history and personality'. The instrument of holding is the poem, the organisation of language to maximise, as Andrew would probably say, the flow of information. This information is everything (which means this information is everything). It is not a recording of information but, as I said above, a channelling. Beauty is an aspect of this, beauty as mental pleasure. Channelling is pleasurable, sensational. Duncan's poems make information 'sexy'. They attract. His latest work, collected in Pauper Estate (shearsman, 200) is full of these attractions, these tracks made by the desiring machine (why not? To talk about such things without using metaphors would entail philosophy) that is the 'fraught intersection' between the plateaux of history and his personality. Duncan actually says of his old poems that they now have to exist without a personality, which is his way of saying that they have nothing to do with him anymore but yet they undeniably exist. How long I wonder before a poem loses its (his) personality. Is this a general truth or a particular? This is amusing as I actually find more that connects the early and late work than what connects either of them to the in-between work (such as Alien Skies (Equipage, 1993). And, ironically, the connection is 'personality'. There are elements of the personal that come to the surface in both books to a surprising degree. The emotion is pressing and real and if there is a difference between the early and late Duncan's poetry then it seems to be only a matter of relative intervention and control, more marked in the material of Pauper Estate - and the control is very much to do with 'attraction'. Instead of spiralling down cul de sacs of the self the 'control' veers him away to other horizons - the desiring machine is now being steered. There is an abundance of such works in Pauper Estate, 21 titles (including one called 'Virtual machines') that demonstrate a mastery of his material that outshines his previous best. If we needed an example of what could possibly be produced by a human post-structuralist poetics, then this is it. These poems could very well be Duncan at the height of his powers, though I suspect there is more to come.
I remember when I was existentially locked in a work situation that I loathed to the point of a breakdown I could inspect the interstices of the minute people/system interactions in an almost trance-like manner; the components of my colleagues' reality building produced something similar to solid blocks of negotiated experience and I used to daydream of a poetry that could capture that - I was aware that it was the only art-form that could possibly do it. I couldn't do it myself because it was too painful but when I first read Duncan I recognised it immediately. So maybe Keery is saying the right thing but with the wrong words, after all. I began this article by asking where Duncan came from because there is no doubt that he is a black sheep.
* Reading Andrew Duncan's Savage Survivals amid Modern Suavity is probably best approached later in the day, but I find the experience has much in common with some of those dreams. So what's it like then? Well, it may be Andrew Duncan's best book so far. There's an air of celebration about its language: nothing of the po-faced, dense or exclusive. Many of the surfaces glisten with wit, as do some of the underlying notions, such as the transposition of an ancient Chinese tale into contemporary Scotland, with the help of "some martial arts magazines". Duncan makes the most of this opportunity to take a wry look at aspects of Pound's Cantos, whilst at the same time adopting the mode for his own purposes. There is a certain amount of scientific terminology, which also helps to lever the poetry out of expected settings. Meteorites, for example, do not have the exciting but slightly cozy pantomime costumes of 'shooting stars': instead they encase chondrule insets – and the reader is invited to consider aspects of planet-formation theory instead of just bobbing up and down on a li-lo at the back of her/his mind. There is even a hint of the author risking a foray into the countryside and wobbling on a hummock. Throughout the book, however, attention to the political and the ethical runs like a high-tensile mat - threads of iron - 'the black dot of ethical focus'. And all of this becomes verbal music of a very high level indeed: varied, inviting, deliquescent, delinquent, grinding to a halt, singing. You want to speak the lines out loud so as to have them right in your mouth.
Genesis comes right at the end. The title is 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' but there are no adverts for religious fundamentalists, wide-screen TVs or chilled tarts. Duncan refers to a legend in which the twelve days of Christmas were seen as a period of chaotic shapelessness. Forms dissolve and the whole universe must be recomposed by beings with the gift of music. Yes, it's quite an ambitious book. But then Duncan is an ambitious poet with a positively Shelleyan commitment to the art.
I'm sure that will ring true to many poets. It [the design process] is also why Duncan's poetry does not lead to a sense of surfeit: the linguistic surface is as varied as the subject matter and the music renews itself in constant transformations.
–Peter Hughes on “Intercapillary Space” website, 2006
“Switching and Main Exchange is concerned with technologies of communication and the contemporary obsession with retrieval of data [.] […] The power of Duncan’s poetry is in its accumulative ability to produce an overshadowing sense of displacement, despair and loss. […] he sets up a series of oppositions, initially stark but gradually collapsing into each other to imply their mutual relation. […] Both collections make strong demands of the reader, creating new thought through linguistic difficulty, expansion and experiment.”
– review by Elizabeth Eger of “Switching and Main Exchange” and “Pauper Estate” in PN Review, #150, 2003.
“There’s more energy (linguistic, political, sexual), and a subjectivity more calmly aware just how is implicated, compromised[.] […] It’s this flexibility that realises the real ambition that Duncan has- the poems range over the planet, through history, across cultures, always with a sense of rootedness in a historical/ cultural consciousness: not a touristic poem among them.”
– review of “Anxiety Before Entering a Room” by Keith Jebb, Poetry Review, Spring 2002,
The thematic structure of Duncan’s writing is energised by fleeting or ‘concrete’ dialectical currents. They come in gusts. You can’t easily quote from a poem. It’s not that you can’t show how effective the writing is, but that you can’t do justice to the architectural grandeur of the ‘whole’ process. He has no fear of embracing the multifarious ‘tradition’.”
– Andrew Jordan on poems in shearsman #35, from 10th Muse, 1999
(AD) So this (On the Margins) replaces the 2001 volume which is out of print. A lot of the poems post-date 2001.
The title comes from a book by Mircea Eliade, adapted. It is, directly, a line from “When history becomes myth”, a poem which uses themes from “L’éternel retour”. The reference is to folk cultures untouched by metropolitan literary systems.
Eliade says so many peoples were doomed to suffering and disappearance “because they live in the neighbourhood of empires perpetually striving to expand”. This phrase became “on the margins of great empires”.
There is a sentence in that 1982 Prynne letter “the displaced feeling corresponds to the Randgebiete and Randsprachen of an internalised but hostile imperium”. The German words are in the title of a book by Wolfram Eberhard, which approached the history of Chinese society through an idea of highly different regional components which contributed different things to the rising farming/ urban/ State complex. I was studying Chinese briefly, for about six months, in 1976, I spent time in the Oriental Studies library at Cambridge, and they had Eberhard’s book. The words mean marginal regions and marginal languages, and the phrase on the margins of great empires refers also to that Letter. I changed subject to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and these really were Randsprachen.
The margins I am thinking of are not doomed to disappearance, I don’t think, just quiet under the huge din of megalopolitan cultures.
In the margins of the great empires
provincial cultures turning slowly on themselves,
a self-locking aggregate crossing the rim
of recurring. The abiding, the filling. Tales
in the prison where Campanella was held.
Occluded
at the place where nothing is altered, the bottom
of a great lake.
Let us enter the greater forgetting
far from the decay of forms
mere laggards in the march of high ideas.
Disposed in the likeness of goodness
descend in the likeness of companionship.
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