Editors: erica kaufman, Meira Levinson, Bradley Lubin, Megan Paslawski, Kyle Waugh, Rachael Wilson, & Ammiel Alcalay
64 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
In the late 1970s, Robert Creeley then holder of the Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York, Buffalo, established the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures. The first person invited to deliver a series of three lectures, accompanied by a reading of their work, was poet Robert Duncan who, along with Creeley and Olson, formed a crucial nexus of poetics, thought, and pedagogy at Black Mountain College in the 1950s. Duncan’s bravura performance is captured in a literal transcript, scored in the margin at each two-minute mark so readers can follow the audio source, available on Penn Sound. This unique presentation, along with extensive notes and a collective introduction by Lost & Found editors, presents Duncan as close to live and in action as possible, complementing Lisa Jarnot’s biography, Christopher Wagstaff ’s Collected Interviews, Michael Rumaker’s memoir of Duncan, and the Collected Works under thegeneral editorship of Peter Quartermain.
Author Biography:
ROBERT DUNCAN (1919-1988) was a major 20th century poet whose influence was deep and pervasive. The The web of associations—familial and cultural—that he was born into and chose to pursue, cannot be recounted simply. His landmark 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society,” and life-long relationship to painter Jess Collins, presented a new model for living, while his interpretation of modernism through women writers and association with major figures like Olson, Creeley, Spicer, and di Prima, remain topics yet to be fully explored.
Selected Archive:
- PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
- The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo Libraries Special Collection, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, NY
