‘Tearing down the walls’ of Paradise in the 1960s: Robert Duncan's Edenic Space in Touch

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of Eden within Robert Duncan's 1960s Cold War poetry. Past criticism has explored Duncan's queer employment of gender when confronting the body politics of America's containment culture in the ‘60s, and by further introducing the primary yet overlooked politics of Duncan's Edenic poetry, structures of sexual difference and Adamic language can tease out the poet's reclamation and demonstration of a resistant space in poetic form. For Duncan, the symbolic relationalities constitutive of Eden and the Law are confronted through a deconstruction of the Other's body, and it is within touch that the poet breaches the symbolic borders of a prohibited Eden. While male-homosexual touch often opens the Paradisal gates for the poet, the poem's conjoined interplay with Eve, woman and sexual difference becomes equally definitive of the conflicted Edenic site. Touch's disruption of self and Other, phallic language and feminine materiality, enables the poet to politically occupy Eden as a physical space upon the page. By revisiting poems such as ‘Adam's Way’ (1964), ‘Narrative Bridges for Adam's Way’ (1968), ‘Night Scenes’ (1964) and ‘The Torso’ (1968), Duncan's Eden is seen opening up within the very structures of his poetic form.