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. In this article, I focus in particular on the first section, titled THE WAR, which Duncan recited at readings as a prose-poetic work that seeks to exemplify on the spot the practice it theorizes (Quartermain, “Notes,” 797–798). For Duncan, it is the term “collage” that enables him to think of problems of artistic form as problems existing “on the same level” as larger social forms amidst historical crisis and to renovate a dynamic relation wherein the old power of high, idealizing forms of Poetry might be made to cathect pressing political contexts with new force. To those familiar with Duncan, a “sister arts” study that raises the importance of collage will not seem surprising, given Duncan’s close personal relationships with collage and assemblage artists such as Jess (his husband), Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and George Herms. Yet, my claims in this article might run counter to expectations raised by this context. Often, such collage practice has been understood as a means of undercutting the authority of its component materials, which are made to no longer speak in the might and right of their traditional site of origin, so that they might constitute a new significance in ironic relation to the other components with which they are collaged. Collage juxtapositions may perform the work of a subcultural, synthetic self-styling, and/or they may work to elicit a cultural criticism, but, in either case, a disillusioning image of what has been received as culturally authentic seems characteristic. The collagist, for example, may like a religious image that they choose to bring into their composition—but in a way that secularizes that image by treating it as “material.” The culturally constructed problematic of such a figure, rather than the expressive raising up of its underpinning religious impulse, seems more what is at stake. Critics thus tend to recruit such practices to a paradigm of the “post-,” such as postmodernism. But Duncan, due to his extreme identification with a vaunted sense of Poetry as his vocation, does not land in this postmodernist version of collage. Duncan’s collage logic proves surprising because it does not deflate the high thing that is brought in but rather sustains its “high-expressive” character.