Into the Serial Forms of “The Regulators”

Abstract

Writing a tribute for H.D. in 1960/1961 changed Robert Duncan’s poetics. In The H.D. Book, he produced not only an enthusiastic account of H.D.’s writing but also a commentary on high modernism and his own spiritual autobiography. He accumulated a huge amount of information about poetry and its attunements to philosophy, history, occultism, and literary movements; and he was forced to devise a structure to contain this information. In part 1 of his tribute, he trained himself to write formal essays, whereas in part 2 he preferred a series of perceptions, presentations of historical materials, and literary discussions and separated them by asterisks. He returned to his Medieval Scenes writing methods of “re-visioning” the poems by writing them over from the first lines, and in The H.D. Book, this process allowed repetitions and considerations of materials previously discussed. In part 2, the process produced another version of a serial poem in which the parts are not absolutely bound together as a logical narrative combined by the conventional unities. Paragraph development as well as rhetorical and thematic transitions for coherence, even fragments of composition, took the place of formal composition. Duncan called this his “notes form.”1 With this freedom to accumulate insights and supporting information, he captured the methods of the collage in words that he and Jess had tried out in Boob 1–3 (1952–54). So when the “Passages” poems began in Bending the Bow (1968), Duncan used both the serial form and the collage of unfolding parts to present information and references that supported his prophetic stance.