Poetry
The Opening of the Field
Robert Duncan · 1960
Synopsis
The collection opens on a meadow where the poet says he is often permitted to return: a scene invented by the mind, a fabricated place that is his own, where the Queen under the Hill reigns, whose troops are a stirring of words within words. A series, The Structure of Rime, begins here and will continue in the following books. A long poem starts from a line of Pindar and passes through a painting by Goya, Whitman's love for Lincoln and the American presidents of the century.
Context
The poems, written from 1956 to early 1959, appeared in 1960 from Grove Press, where Donald Allen published the anthology of the new American poetry the same year. A major publisher had refused Jess's drawing, a sketch with the photograph of children playing in a ring, which Duncan wanted at the head of the book; the motif of the ring returns in the first poem. The series begun here continues until the two volumes of 1984 and 1987.
Who it is for
A collection of about a hundred pages, with numerous references. Translated into French by Martin Richet in 2012.
Prizes and reception
The first of the three major collections of the sixties; it contains the poem most often cited among his work.
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