Ron's argument that Robert Duncan created the "reading list" for us today, that his reading list is ours, is probably valid from where he sits. I know that my reading list was formed from Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, and also that this list doesn't correspond exactly to Duncan's list. I took my cue from Ashbery's introduction to the Collected Poems of F O'H. Gertrude Stein plus the more canonical modernists, French surrealism, Roussel, Flann O'Brien, Lorca, Beckett, Joseph Cornell, John Cage, Auden. That's as good a starting point as any. Duncan's West Coast canon is not entirely different, but there is a difference in emphasis. The New York poets are more oriented toward France. They are less interested in theosophy and in neo-Romantic constructions of the poetic self.

What has always bothered me about Duncan--who is a great poet in all respects--is the insistence on his own authority as a poet, his setting himself up in relation to a tradition of "poesy." All that Victorian medievalism in his diction seems to have that purpose. As though he could only be a "poet" if he were heir to some notion of poetic authority. The H.D. book recently parsed expertly by Silliman in the intimidating presence of Ken Irby, (who was personally much closer to Duncan than Silliman was, who was even a proofreader of the HD book itself) is about this process of poetic authorization vis-a-vis a poetic predecessor. Now when I say some of this bothers me, this does not mean I don't find it endlessly fascinating, only that I find myself asking why it is necessary to claim this sort of poetic authority in the first place. I prefer other models of "becoming" a poet.