The Structure of Rime

The Structure of Rime brings together for the first time all of the prose-poems in this acclaimed series by San Francisco poet Robert Duncan. The book is augmented with three etchings by California artist Frank Lobdell, who knew the author, as well as two photographic portraits of Duncan.

Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was one of the most influential American poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Two of his major works were large serial poems entitled Structure of Rime and Passages. He numbered each sequence, publishing them in magazines as they were written, and then inserting them into his books of poetry, collections covering distinct chronological periods. A collected edition of The Structure of Rime never appeared, probably because Duncan did not want to close off the possibility that he might compose more poems in that series and preferred to keep them in the train of his poetry as a whole.

The Structure of Rime is an extended discussion and demonstration of Duncan’s poetics, his principles of prosody, his belief in the open form, and in content unconstrained. Twenty years after Duncan’s death, the Arion Press is publishing for the first time together the thirty-one poems of the series that appeared during Duncan’s lifetime, plus one published posthumously in the year of his death, and six first published now.

Poet Michael Palmer, a friend of Duncan’s from the early 1970s, has written an introductory essay for this book. Palmer writes that Duncan “challenged the myth of originality that had become deeply ingrained in the poets of his generation, while simultaneously, if paradoxically, asserting a particular originality of his own.” Palmer guides readers into the poems with an open mind to experience what cannot be explained.

The book concludes with Duncan’s “Notes on The Structure of Rime”, two discourses that Duncan wrote, in 1961 and 1973. Readers will find these notes both helpful and challenging. He ranges from the pure pleasure of being read to as a child and the necessity for affectless recitation of poetry to observations about the body politic and poetic.

Arion Press publisher Andrew Hoyem’s connections with Duncan and his poetry span many years, and a series of serendipities made this book possible. Christopher Wagstaff, one of two trustees administering Duncan’s estate, worked with Arion Press in 2007 on the publication of a book by the artist Jess, Duncan’s companion, and subsequently Wagstaff agreed that Arion should publish Duncan’s Structure of Rime series. In preparing for publication, the curator of Duncan’s archives went through the notebooks of the poet and found six “Structure” poems that had not been published and one that had been published in a literary magazine as a memorial soon after Duncan’s death.

The book is accompanied by Frank Lobdell’s abstract etchings with aquatint. Lobdell is one of America's premier postwar abstract painters; he is of the same generation as Duncan and they traveled in the same artistic milieu of the Bay Area, sharing interests in modernism and surrealism. Lobdell maintains that “the purpose of painting is always to go beyond what can be said in words”. Duncan and Lobdell crossed paths at times, and they held each other’s work in high regard. 

Two black and white etchings by Lobdell are inset into windows on the front and back covers of the book. The prints, variations on similar elements, measure 5-5/16 by 4-1/16 inches, and have been printed by Robert Townsend, at R. E. Townsend, Inc., in Georgetown, Massachusetts. In addition, each copy comes with a separate black-and-white etching with aquatint, signed and numbered by the artist, presented in a folder. The extra prints were editioned by David Kelso at his intaglio studio, in Oakland, California. The prints are suitable for framing.