Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bending the Bow: Poetry

Bending the Bow: Poetry

Duncan, Robert

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 0811200337
ISBN13: 9780811200332
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: Jan 17 1968
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.45 Width: 5.21 Depth: 7.92
Language: English
In Structures of Rime, the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself--the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of Passages, which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series--a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson, Zukofsky's A, and Olson's Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan's belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine's Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval's Les Chimères enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam's Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems--My Mother Would Be a Falconress, A Shrine to Ameinias, and Epilogos--among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as Up Rising and The Soldiers are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

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