SOURCE: “Robert Duncan's ‘Momentous Inconclusions,’” in Sagetrieb, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall, 1983, pp. 71-84.

In the following essay, Johnson considers Robert Duncan's poetry in relation to Whitehead's process philosophy.

I'd cut the warp to weave that web 

                              in the air 

                    and here 

let image perish in image, 

                              leave writer and reader 

          up in the air 

               to draw 

                              momentous 

                                        inconclusions, 

ropes of the first water                               returned by a rhetoric 

                    the rain swells. 

The teasing whimsy of these opening lines of Robert Duncan's “Where It Appears, Passages 4”¹ would seem to distance him from Roy Harvey Pearce's “hope for poetry.” A dozen years ago, discussing what Whitman means to contemporary poets and especially Duncan, Pearce defined the mission of the American poet as “simply to tell us the truth in such a way that it will be a new truth, and in its newness will renew us and our capacity to have faith...