o_190rdoloef55ab3f4r60s1n5fa.pdf

Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends
directions – that add one of the elements that pull the
viewer’s eye within the collage. With the Oakland
Museum’s important Pop Art U.S.A. show in 1963,
Jess was added as an important predecessor but felt
the fit wasn’t right and offered: “I’m afraid I’m too
romantic, and perhaps worse yet, sentimental.” But
more than that, Jess’s work had much greater depth
and cultural layering than Pop Art. He might have
turned a feminine hygiene advertisement “Modess . .
. because” into Goddess Because Is Is Falling Asleep
(1954) but the collage is hardly a one-liner. His work
brings in much more. Similarly, Duncan famously
described his own poetry as a “grand collage” made
up of so many found pieces and allusions. In an
interview Duncan stated that he did not have “any
style” and ventured more broadly that, in fact, “the
American style is polyglot assemblage” because
“Americans have no history.”
Duncan wrote for an exhibition of Jess’s
“Translation” series:
The set of Translations and their Imagist
Texts as they are presented in this show in
this complex game of associations, in which
the paintings are cards, the arcana of an
individual Tarot, a game of initiations, of
evocations, speculations, exorcisms, may be
related to the field of dream and magic in art
which we inherit in the tradition of the
Surrealists. A play at once sinister and
rightful, like Lewis’s Carroll’s play with
words, but here, a play with the properties of
paints and picturing.
Just as Jess’s Abstract Expressionist
teachers tended not to give titles to their paintings
because they didn’t want to limit their meaning, Jess
often gave his “Translations” titles starting with “Fig.”
or “Ex.,” suggesting, as Ingrid Schaffner has
observed, that they were figures or examples of
something outside the painting - in essence, an
invisible text led them. And just as Jess’s art was a
constant playing with meanings, so Duncan called his
own poetry “multiphasic.” In addition to Jess and
Duncan’s shared love of Finnegan’s Wake, Duncan
offered that “[i]n the archeologist’s sense, the OED
had opened up the layers of language, and the OED is
another one of the complicating factors at every step
of writing, because that gives me the layers of very
single English word through its layers of time. . . .”
In fact, he asserted: “After all, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake
is drawing directly on the OED all the time.” One of
his problems with Milton’s Paradise Lost is that
Milton “has an outline” and poetry should not – for
that reason, he points to Williams’s Paterson as
coming to an end and Williams discovering that it
had not ended yet. And Duncan was fond of
McClure’s beast language because it was a way of
“using sound to disturb language.” Duncan and Jess
and many around them were deeply involved in
various esoteric traditions but they were particularly
fond of the Zohar (David Meltzer’s introduction to
kabala came when Duncan burst out of a restroom in
the store where Meltzer worked, indignant that a
library copy of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in
Jewish Mysticism had been left there). Duncan would
talk about the world being made of letters in the
kabalistic tradition – and, in a sense, that is symbolic
for the range of artists around Duncan and Jess.
Duncan, Jess and their friends were all, in a sense,
engaged in a world made of symbols and letters and
symbols and letters made up of the world.
Notes
“An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their
Circle,” exhibition organized by the Crocker Art Museum
and curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff.
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, June 9 – September 1,
2013
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, January 14, March
29, 2014
Katzen Arts Center, American University, April 26 – August
17, 2014
Pasadena Museum of California Art, Sept. 14, 2014 – Jan.
11, 2015
Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, An Opening of
the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle (Pomegranate
Communications, Inc., 2013)
Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus: A
Biography (Univ. of California Press, 2012)
Christopher Wagstaff, ed., A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews
with Robert Duncan, 1960-1985 (North Atlantic Books,
2012)
Michael Duncan, ed., Jess: O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica
(Siglio, 2012)
10