For Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book workshop attendees, please use the comment section to ask Michael questions or comment on class topics. Thank you for being part of this work. See also H.D.’s Palimpsest.
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What a thrill it is to pick up the threads of divine intervention with Michael. I know very little about Robert Duncan, but discovered H.D. In my twenties. Further to my check in at the first meet up, here’s an expanded version from 2017.
http://themanygenderedmothers.blogspot.com/2017/06/lorin-medley-on-hd.html
Hello companions – as i return to our reading for this week, a couple of things arise –
first, poor Bakersfield – here’s a wee song to bring solace to that benighted zone, for your amuse-ment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0PNW4DXwJ0&list=RDA0PNW4DXwJ0&start_radio=1
Meanwhile, appreciate the shout out to Hillman, Michael – many points of resonance with Duncan’s work – one of which is Hillman’s work on distinguishing between Soul and Spirit, a relationship that shows up variously in the HD Book. Here’s a bit of an overview for those interested: https://faithinthejourney.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Relationship-Soul-and-Spirit-.pdf
Finally, and rather serendipitously, here’s a reading of a Celtic tale that resonates for me with a central theme of the Eros chapter (“but for the imagination, for the mind seeking communion, to create in its life a serious play, even inert matter is alive with person.” p. 83): Martin Shaw’s version of Deirdre (cf. p 73 – “She found me out, tried me with James Stephen’s “Deirdre”…. : https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65950)
Here’s the link for Martin’s substack – hopefully you can open it https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/the-road-west?
See yu Wednesday – cheers. (Btw, I’ll be coming off another zoom call, so may be a bit fried!)
From Scott: I tried to post this to the comments page, but no go. When I went to the National Gallery in London a year and a half ago, there was a sumptuous exhibit devoted to St Francis – reading p 94 – “…receiving the stigmata, he received too the burn from the oil of Psyche’s lamp….”, I remembered this photo I took on the occasion:
(See above.)
After my morning reading in the Rites of Participation chapter, I stumbled on this article,
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-sex-life-intimacy-shared-attention_n_68d05b31e4b05ba1eeaa2ee7
which seemed to rhyme with what Duncan threads in via Stein about the effect of ritual in composing the environment and how “what is seen depends upon how everyone is doing everything”
I love a happy ending.
An example of H.D.’s prose: https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Palimpsest-by-H.D.pdf
From Cass:
Hi Michael and Paul,
I wanted to email to let y’all know I won’t be able to attend tomorrow’s session, as I’ll be observing Yom Kippur with my partner. I plan to watch the recording, though, and am excited for the next session!
I wanted to offer a question based on this week’s reading, Michael, which you can choose to address if you think it would be useful for the group:
At the end of ch. 6, Duncan discusses the way that the participation of poet and reader in an identification with the mythic (in H.D.’s example, the Hermes-actor is the Hermes-god). I struggle with not feeling my knowledge of mythic or religious systems is complete enough to participate in the constellation of meanings that such allusions evoke. On the other hand, intellectual study of these systems does not necessarily bring one closer to such identification because it becomes overly rational… What are other ways of thinking about or approaching this mythological aspect of poetry in Duncan’s tradition?
Thanks as always! See you next week!
Best,
Cass
Scott Lawrence offers this reflection: https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/1919.docx
Hello, everyone! I watched the recording of the last session and wanted to thank everybody for a robust discussion. Honestly, I am a bit glad I was not in the (Zoom) room because it invited a lot of different approaches to responding to my question, which was very stimulating. The theologian Rubem Alves recounts a story in which a dead man washes up on the shores of a coastal village, and as they dress this stranger’s body for burial, the townspeople begin to speculate about who he was, what he was like… His silence is generative. I very much felt my silence was generative in this case, as well.
I wanted to offer a response to some of what was said, though I can’t respond to all of it, so I apologize if I leave anyone out. The one piece of context I will add to my initial question is this: I am very much committed to the dialectical synthesis of theology (broadly construed) and historical materialism, and it is out of this tension that my question comes. For that reason, I appreciated Jay’s suggestion that one place we can and maybe should meet Duncan is at the level of scholarship, and I also saw myself working out this tension as Jay saw Duncan internally working out the tension of scholar and poet.
I very much appreciated Scott’s point about the change in educational trends since H.D. and Duncan’s times–the reduction of instruction in Latin and Greek classics. This topic could be discussed at length, but I very much liked the suggestion that the part that poets may have to play in our current moment is to be very attuned to the ways that these deeper, primal forces are reemerging with new faces and names in our time, and that poets must try to “work the ground,” as has been a throughline with Duncan. This idea was brought up in different ways by many in the class.
Later, Michael discussed (and several others contributed as well) how, when poems that are “thinking mythologically,” these poems exceed our understanding and thus become “stuck in our craw,” so to speak. And we have to keep returning to them with what we have learned both from books and from living, always participating in a new constellation with the text. I am very interested in this concept, which, for me, is a specific type of reading that is downplayed in our information age, where language is supposed to transparently yield its meaning, as in the example of news writing. Thinking alongside Scott’s comments, this approaches a topic I have been very concerned with: In what ways can we work to promulgate a form of reading that does not seek immediacy and transparency but sees reading as an open-ended and participatory process? (I will note here that my primary interest in Gnosticism as a broad-based phenomenon is precisely its penchance for reopening and rereading scripture.)
Lastly, Boyd raised the potent question that he has been returning to in our study of Duncan: What might a poem be? In the discussion around his question, a few things were mentioned: particularly, the dynamism of poetry in which symbols interact and yield speculative possibilities within us, which we cannot necessarily name. This alchemy of language, that is able to transmute new emotional stances or dispositions within us, and which we can choose to pursue (or not), becomes a means of transforming the world or ground. That we can carry something forth from the poetic experience, that we become the discover ourselves as vessels bearing something new into the world. To paraphrase Julia, for every inch one gains in poetic practice, one can and must gain two inches of an uprightness that can be carried into materiality.
Thank you, again, for the rich discussion. A question that was born out of my difficulty in straddling the spiritual and the material became a chance for very fruitful discussion, and I am glad. I apologize, also, to those who I didn’t mention by name, but I think a little bit of everyone has entered into these words.
I look forward to our next session. Good luck with the big chunk of reading we have for next week!
Cass,
Great response!
A couple of thoughts that may be of use.
1. You write: “the part that poets may have to play in our current moment is to be very attuned to the ways that these deeper, primal forces are reemerging with new faces and names in our time, and that poets must try to “work the ground,” as has been a throughline with Duncan…” (“Every age has its own fascism.” Primo Levi.)
The primal forces are always moving in & out and the practice of documentary poetics is one role the poet can play now. Scott Lawrence’s poem written after the last class is a good example. A basic understanding of archetypes and mythology helps. An understanding of one’s own personal myth is essential. This is the main reason I have workshop participants develop a Personal Universe Deck like McClure suggested. How to not fall in to the traps of being swept up by these forces which is so prevalent now on all sides of the political/cultural spectrum. Do your own thinking as it is clear you are and the people in the workshop do.
2. As for “language is supposed to transparently yield its meaning, as in the example of news writing…” This is another left-brain trap and a place where where A.I. will fail. What Pound, H.D., Duncan et al. practice is a combination (synthesis) of melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia and similar qualities. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci got in touch with me after seeing video of Andrew Schelling’s course on The Cantos and sent me his pdf: THE BEHEADING OF IGNEZ: Katabasis, Ezra Pound and Three Maltese Artists. See: https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Beheading-of-Ignez.pdf
A section that merits your attention is:
This is a large key to why this stance toward poem making is from a deeper place than those who Duncan cited who limited the use of imagery to reveal “the author’s personal conceits” is how Duncan put it on page 47. I hope this is useful and I am grateful you are in this workshop.
Hello Cass and all-
Cass brings up a good point when he writes
“I struggle with not feeling my knowledge of mythic or religious systems is complete enough to participate in the constellation of meanings that such allusions evoke. On the other hand, intellectual study of these systems does not necessarily bring one closer to such identification because it becomes overly rational… What are other ways of thinking about or approaching this mythological aspect of poetry in Duncan’s tradition?”
In my limited experience, a conceptual/intellectual understanding of various religious systems is a great place to start. Then you choose the system that speaks to you and you go deep. In fact, you probably already have a preferred religious or philosophical system that you’re currently working with. In which case, you might want to get under or beneath a strictly left brain intellectual approach and enter the intuitive world of the unconscious (personal and collective), the paranormal, the mantric, the visionary…the dreamtime.
If anything, we have more tools today than there were in Duncan’s time. The world is smaller, the visionary drugs are more varied and of higher quality and there are teachers from ancient wisdom traditions that are open to initiating people into spiritual practices (as long as you’re in good mental health and have a sincere interest).
And then there’s the path of poetry as a mystery cult, which revolves around hero worship, as Pound mentions in “The Spirit of Romance,” and Duncan mentions a few times in “The HD Book.” Choose your hero(s) and merge your mind as one with them through reading their works and the relevant biographies. It helps to memorize the work(s) of theirs that you love the most.
Take what you know about spiritual practice(s) of the body, speech and mind and apply them to poetry and vice versa (apply what you know about poetry to your spiritual practice).
Duncan was born in 1919 and found a way to bring life and meaning to Eros, Orpheus Hermes etc. I was born in 1962, and feel a much stronger connection to abstract visionary states, experiences, feeling tones and colors than I do to particular deities from Ancient Greece, or, say, Tibet. I’ve never seen Eros, Orpheus or Hermes in person or in a dream…nor do I want to. But, like all of us, I do know what Eros feels and sounds like, and I have a personal relationship with the principle at work.
Sorry to both state the obvious and preach to the converted.
This is fantastic. Thank you Mateo.
I am sorry to have been absent from the discussions, but I plan to be more of a participant in future weeks. My general comment at this early moment is that the intra-personal moments being described sound very familiar. The languages I have been steeped in crosses many boundaries, theology, philosophy, comparative religions, cross cultural myth and symbol, depth (Jungian) psychology, these are all fields I have explored in some depth. The suffering of the seeker is of course not unique to poets, but common to all who would “go down to the sea”, the hero’s journey of Western mythology. and the ordeal of the Spirit Quest of indigenous peoples. I am not saying they are experienced in the same way, but that the journey to self and the journey to discovery of one’s true grounding are common to humanity across cultures and times. (I am sorry to go on. I am not offering anything new.) I just want to say, these waters are familiar to spiritual experiences and dreams, anguish and ecstasies that I, like many, have personally experienced first hand. I thank you for the careful and loving companionship along this path. One never arrives. The miracles are all in the shared journey.
Ezra Pound in 1918:
“Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths…”
Pound, H.D. and Duncan are obviously three who share this notion, yet most poetry we see these days by what Rodrigo Toscano calls “normie” poets does just that 98% of the time. What are methods to get beyond chopping up mediocre prose into line breaks and calling it poetry? I have ideas of my own on this.
I am posting this link here as it resonates with some of our themes from yesterday – e.g., the notion of “book”, the marginalization of particular voices and of whole sets of practice, And it speaks directly to the politics of publishing, specifically the publishing of poetry. In its critique, It implies, or suggests, lines of resistance.
https://defector.com/good-riddance-to-the-best-american-poetry
Ryukan-
Collage is my preferred way of busting out of “declarative” thinking and writing.
Foregrounding the music (phonemes) over sense is key.
I also always go back to Hans Hoffmann’s theories of push-pull in abstract painting.
I never resonated with Olson’s big theories regarding the breath and the line. Give me Kerouac’s playful ear any day.
I have no problem with loose pentameter (9-11 syllables) stacked in quatrains. “Open Field” is a way of Being.
I thought I should share this recording of a talk Robert Creeley gave at the Naropa Institute back in the summer of 1986. (I was actually there in the room. Seeds were planted in me…but they didn’t ripen until now thanks to Michael Boughn and Paul Nelson.)
The section on Duncan starts at about minute 26.)
This talk is pure religion, a transmission. Take a Ketamine tab and have a little seance with the living soul of Robert Creeley as he merges his heart and mind with Robert Duncan.
https://cdm16621.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/606/rec/27
From Michael Boughn:
I hope this reaches the whole group. If not, Paul will hopefully forward it.
I recently had a thought regarding Cass’s question way back when: “I struggle with not feeling my knowledge of mythic or religious systems is complete enough to participate in the constellation of meanings that such allusions evoke.”
When mythic figures enter the poem, say Zagreus in Pound’s Canto XVII, or the
various angels or other Greek Mythological figures in HD’s work, they are Images, or as Pound says, complexes of feeling, and should be read as such. How do they resonate through the poem in you heartmind. That’s what you need to know, not scholarly systems of categorized information about them.
James Hillman (again) is really good on this question of Images and how to relate to them. His thinking is gathered together in a volume of the uniform edition of his works called From Types and Images. His core message is “stick with the image.” Don’t try to translate it into symbols or systems. Stick with the specific, particular image and it will give you all you need to know. Any thing else is interference. Zagreus is not operating as part of a system of information you can learn by studying mythology. You don’t even need to know that Zagreus is a cult name of Dionysus. Who you also don’t need to know about. To read the poem all you need to know is in the image. Open your soul to it. Let it in-form you.
Later . . .
____________
Michael Boughn
http://www.razzamatootie.ca