Michael Palmer
Ground Work:
on Robert Duncan
In that regard, let me briefly draw attention to what seems to me one of the finest achievements in Volume I, a masterpiece of elegy, circularity and negative lyricism, “A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing As the Poet Paul Celan Sings.” The “I” singing is at once Duncan/ Celan, if not some First Person beyond them both. A wrecked world has brought him to wreckage, to nothing; from his wreckage, the world “returns / to restore me...” The nothing the poet comes to, the grief of necessary knowledge, is also what causes him to be in the fullest sense. The movement is cyclical and unending, without closure or resolution, and the poem mirrors this in its irresolvability, its dwelling (much like one of Duncan’s most frequently cited poems, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”) in paradox. I hasten to add that the “likeness” Duncan discovers is by no means a presumptive identification with Celan’s actual life-experience, its origins in the horrors of Shoah. The likeness or sympathy is realized in the ground of poetry itself and its recognitions or acknowledgements.
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