Duncan

Thom Gunn

Robert Duncan attended UC Berkeley in 1936-1938 and 1948-1950. I think of all the past spirits ghosts, freaks, artists, writers, queer poets, revolutionaries, and intellectuals when I take photographs on campus. The ground remembers, the trees whisper, the creek reflects, laughs, and cries. Together we worship in endless time.

Poet Thom Gunn taught at UC Berkeley from 1958-1966. Following a brief hiatus, he returned to teach one term per year until his retirement in 1999. After he died I filmed many of his papers and diaries we hold in the library. This a poem he wrote for Robert Duncan:

Duncan

1

When in his twenties a poetry's full strength

Burst into voice as an unstopping flood,

He let the divine prompting (come at length)

Rushingly bear him any way it would

And went on writing while the Ferry turned

From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,

And back again, and back again. He learned

You add to, you don't cancel what you do.

Between the notebook-margins his pen travelled,

His own lines carrying him in a new mode

To ports in which past purposes unravelled.

So that, as on the Ferry Line he rode,

Whatever his first plans that night had been,

The energy that rose from their confusion

Became the changing passage lived within

While the pen wrote, and looked beyond conclusion.

2

Forty years later, and both kidneys gone;

Every eight hours, home dialysis;

The habit of his restlessness stayed on

Exhausting him with his responsiveness.

After the circulations of one day

In which he taught a three-hour seminar

Then gave a reading clear across the Bay,

And while returning from it to the car

With plunging hovering tread tired and unsteady

Down Wheeler steps, he faltered and he fell

—Fell he said later, as if I stood ready,

"Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn."

                                                      Well well,

The image comic, as I might have known,

And generous, but it turned things round to myth:

He fell across the white steps there alone,

Though it was me indeed that he was with.

I hadn't caught him, hadn't seen in time,

And picked him up where he had softly dropped,

A pillow full of feathers. Was it a rime

He later sought, in which he might adopt

The role of H.D., broken-hipped and old,

Who, as she moved off from the reading-stand,

Had stumbled on the platform but was held

And steadied by another poet's hand?

He was now a posthumous poet, I have said

(For since his illness he had not composed),

In sight of a conclusion, whose great dread

Was closure,

                  his life soon to be enclosed

Like the sparrow's flight above the feasting friends,

Briefly revealed where its breast caught their light,

Beneath the long roof, between open ends,

Themselves the margins of unchanging night.