Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book: The Roots of Modernism with Michael Boughn

Michael Boughn

I was first introduced to H.D.’s work in 1968 by Robin Blaser, who lent me his copies of the three long war poems that became known as Trilogy. They had been out of print for years. I photocopied them and bound them in rice paper covers. I had arrived in Vancouver in 1966, part of the mass movement then forming in opposition to the war against Viet Nam. I was 20 years old and on my own having been ejected from my family for refusing to go to war. I have always thought of Robin’s appearance in my life as moment of angelic intervention. It changed everything, opened a new world, and initiated a life-long devotion to H.D.’s work.

Decades later in Buffalo after a 10 year stint as a working-class hero (ha) even as the industrial working class was disappearing into the maw of globalization, I entered the PhD program at UB. That was 1982. At my first English Department party, Jack Clarke pulled me out of the kitchen onto the front porch and warned me not to do my dissertation on Derrida who, wonderful thinker that he was, had become a kind of hot cult commodity in the English Department. Instead, he told me, go to the Poetry Collection and find some real work to do. (Another intervention). Which I did and which resulted in the descriptive bibliography of H.D. that University of Virginia later published.

It’s funny how events, many seemingly trivial, come together to render a moment of significance in your life. The whole thing buzzing with a sense meaning. You might even say fate. That’s how the H.D. Book came to be mine to edit. A net of unconnected choices scattered across decades led to a surprise phone call from Rachel Berchten, Duncan’s editor at University of California Press, asking me if I’d be interested in editing the H.D. Book for them. It was such a wonderful experience, living so closely with Duncan’s thinking for over a year.

I taught as a sessional lecturer (adjunct for the Yanks) in the English Department at the University of Toronto for 22 years, but I never got to teach H.D. I did write.a book of poems, Hermetic Divigations—After H.D. that takes up a conversation with H.D.’s Hermetic Definition.