[Download] "Promoting "a Community of Thoughtful Men and Women": Anarchism in Robert Duncan's Ground Work Volumes." by English Studies in Canada # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Promoting "a Community of Thoughtful Men and Women": Anarchism in Robert Duncan's Ground Work Volumes.
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 248 KB
Description
FOR PEOPLE FAMILIAR WITH THE WORK OF ROBERT DUNCAN, discussing him as a political poet likely brings about a quick reference to his vitriolic attack on the Vietnam War. This attack is epitomized in his famous (and perhaps infamous) mid-1960s poem "Up Rising, Passages 25," in which Duncan openly equates President Johnson with Hitler and Stalin as members of "the great simulacra of men" (Bending 81), before going on to describe (in grisly detail) the horrors of America's use of napalm on the Vietnamese people. However, Duncan's poems from this era are not my focus; instead, I will argue that the poems of Duncan's last two books, Ground Work: Before the War and Ground Work II: In the Dark (published in 1984 and 1987, respectively), offer a much different and potentially more resonant type of political poetry. Specifically, I would like to suggest that the writing in the Ground Work volumes is effective political poetry because it avoids (for the most part) the oppositional, polarizing attacks found in his Vietnam War--era poetry. Rather, in these later works, Duncan abandons these attacks in favour of a poetry that creates, through both its form and its content, a model of political anarchism, a subtly didactic model that he hopes the reader will follow and consequently enact in her daily life. Before discussing Duncan's personal belief in and use of political anarchism, I would like to provide a brief overview of anarchism. Such a definition is necessary in order to both differentiate anarchism from other political movements, particularly Marxism (especially since the border between certain strains of anarchism and Marxism is rather permeable at times), as well as to set the stakes for why the acknowledgement of Duncan's anarchism, overlooked or undervalued by most of his commentators, is crucial to understanding the fundamentally political nature of the Ground Work volumes.