Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book

I took a class at the CUNY Graduate Center last semester -- with Ammiel Alcalay, and also with Ana Božičević, Tim Peterson, Seth Stewart, Kyle Waugh, Caolan Madden, sometimes Erica Kaufman, and many others -- where we learned about H.D. through Robert Duncan through Diane di Prima, who came to visit our class. It was as mystical as it sounds.

Duncan's H.D. Book wasn't out yet, but we seemed to be working our way toward it. It came out in January from the University of California Press, and now Lisa Jarnot has a review of it up at the Poetry Foundation. Here are some excerpts that put into writing some of the things I've heard about Duncan as a larger-than-life figure, and the book as a sacred text:

Duncan’s confidence as a thinker and talker and writer was generated partly by his adoptive parents’ belief that he had been incarnated from the realm of Atlantis.

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He constellated H.D. as his mother (and Freud as his grandfather by default).

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Jack and Harvey’s insistence that The H.D. Book had some kind of cosmic significance loomed large in my imagination. I was 20, provincial, and ready for adventure. Duncan too gave hints of some secret that was hidden in H.D.’s work—he sensed that she was privy to some mysteries. In a 1960 meeting with her, she told him that she had fallen into a Roman Mithra cult in London during World War II and had “seen too much.” Whatever it was, I wanted to be in on it. Over a period of weeks I quietly xeroxed all of Duncan’s writings on H.D. and handed them to Harvey. When he died in 1991, the project seemed lost. But another member of our circle rescued it. In 1995 it arrived in my mailbox on a floppy disk, with no return address. Some years later it showed up on the Internet under the imprint Frontier Press.

That bit about the floppy disk and the internet is a piece of the story I hadn't heard before -- so wild.

I haven't read The H.D. Book yet; my suspicion is that it's something you should read in pieces over a long stretch. Anybody wanna have a book club? There really are reading groups forming for it around the country. If only I still lived in Milwaukee.