prophecy

Robert Duncan’s “Introduction” was the final piece that he composed for his 1968 collection of poetry Bending the Bow. The effort preoccupied him throughout much of 1967, a year in which Duncan, alongside many other creative practitioners, recognized that his art was undergoing a formal crisis that stemmed from an increasing awareness of US atrocities in Vietnam. Duncan’s effort to reckon with this crisis of practice yielded a startling manifesto that, despite being positioned as the “Introduction” to the collection he had already composed, in fact theorizes an aesthetic orientation that appears only occasionally and nascently in the collection itself. The piece, written in a dense, vertiginous, and original prose, comes in five short sections.