“A Made Up Thing” Full of Depth: The Queer Belonging of Robert Duncan and New Narrative

This essay argues that Robert Duncan’s conception of his poet self as “a made up thing and at the same time a depth in which my being is” from The Years as Catches links his poetics to his sexuality and that Duncan, at the center of the San Francisco Bay Area “poetry wars,” becomes a source of grand permission in “queer belonging” for New Narrative writers, specifically Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. New Narrative writers turned from the mainstream’s devastating and violent image of gays and lesbians and the Language writers’ desire to jettison the subject from their own writing to Duncan and Jess [Collins] for the power and pleasures of the made up, fragmented, collaged – a material based relational art, a set of practices, performing queer belonging that looks back in order to move forward, that articulates “the history of our times” and the possibility of a future.Cet article tisse des liens entre la conception qu’avait Robert Duncan de lui-même en tant que poète, c’est-à-dite à la fois « une chose inventée et une profondeur où se loge mon être », comme il l’écrivait dans The Years as Catches, d’une part, et de l’autre les apports théoriques des études en New Narrative, tout particulièrement les écrits de Robert Glück et Bruce Boone. Les auteurs rattachés au mouvement New Narrative se sont à la fois démarqués des représentations néfastes communément associée à l’identité gay et lesbienne, mais aussi de l’emprise des Language Poets et de leur « idéalisme de luxe, pour lequel le sujet parlant est appelé à [...]. disparaître », pour se tourner vers les figures de Duncan et de Jess, en ce qu’ils incarnent la force et le plaisir de l’invention, du fragment, du collage, comme art relationnel fondé sur une pratique concrète, une communauté queer au regard tourné vers l’avant pour mieux envisager l’avenir et proposer « une histoire de notre temps »

From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice

Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. Literary Criticism. FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS: NEW NARRATIVE AS CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE offers the first comprehensive anthology of essays regarding New Narrative writing and community practices by a younger generation of practitioners and scholars. As editors Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw write in their introduction, We are not interested in offering an \u27authoritative\u27 canon of New Narrative work, nor are we interested in consolidating an official version of New Narrative\u27s history. Rather, we want to use this as an opportunity to foreground New Narrative as a movement that is still coming into focus, a more or less unstable object that doesn\u27t want to be \u27fixed,\u27 codified, or hardened into a limited & limiting list of names and works. One of our motivating questions is Why New Narrative now? Or, What are the stakes of New Narrative for our contemporary moment? In other words, while we remain committed to a set of past works that have been identified as \u27New Narrative,\u27 we are equally committed to maintaining New Narrative as a dynamic and ongoing project, one with consequences for our present writing. Roomy in the collective vision that they manifest, the twenty-four contributions to FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS address the AIDS crisis, the politics of race, the structural impacts of neo-liberalism on urban space, and the movement across queer, straight and transgender subject positions. Other topics of investigation include the category of queer art, the importance of feeling, the fiction of personality, the necessity of risk, the function of pedagogy, the strategy of appropriation, as well as scandal and gossip as these topics have been important to New Narrative and its expanded sphere of influence.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1363/thumbnail.jp

Robert Duncan’s Legacies: a Centennial Celebration

2019 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Californian poet Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988), whose work and influence have drawn ever-growing scholarly attention. All of the papers gathered together in this issue began as presentations at “Passages”: The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference in Paris held in June 2019 at Sorbonne Université. Organized by Hélène Aji, Stephen Collis, Xavier Kalck, James Maynard, and Clément Oudart, and co-sponsored by Simon Fraser University, the University at Buffalo Libraries Poetry Collection, Université Paris Nanterre and Sorbonne Université, the three-day conference included three keynote addresses, three plenary panels, ten workshops, a roundtable discussion, and two poetry readings, featuring over 50 presenters and a high number of attendees from around the world. We are pleased to present here eighteen of those presentations, comprising thirteen formal essays along with five more personal testimonies that serve as the coda to each section, and to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on the history of Duncan studies before considering more specifically his modernist, formal, poetic, social, and queer legacies at the century