45:2 Spring 1999

ROBERT DUNCAN

Introductions from the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University: Helen Adam/Jess Collins and Charles Olson

Nineteen introductions by Robert Duncan, given during his time as assistant director at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, were included in the Spring 1999 issue. The introductions represent a series of readings given in the Bay Area (1956-1959) which included some of Duncan’s most memorable contemporary poets, culled from his circles in San Francisco (Helen Adam, Jack Spicer, William Everson), New York (Denise Levertov, Jean Garrigue), and Black Mountain (Charles Olson). The Duncan who composed these introductions was fresh off the completion of Letters, and as Robert Bertholf wrote in his introduction to the section, just beginning to envision The Opening of the Field, “not as a collection of separate poems but as a coherent book. As Duncan wrote in his introduction to a reading given by Helen Adam and Jess Collins on April 7, 1957, “Look! all the hosts of the imagination have come to the rounds where we may see them.”

[KM, 2006]

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