The Agency of Certain Women
Reading the TLS review of Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book , edited by Michael Broughn and Victor Coleman, I come across Duncan's explanation for his book: I am searching out, a poetics . . . my initiation of self as poet in the ground of the poet H.D. . . . how I had found my life in poetry through the agency of certain women". I am not yet a reader of Duncan, nor a serious reader of H.D., but Duncan's words here touch on my writing project, my next book Infinite Variety . I have been writing poems that take off from poems by women poets. Influenced by Michael Schmidt's description of a batch of these poems I submitted to PN Review, I have been thinking of the women's poems as points of departure . That description has been niggling my mind as not quite accurate, because I don't leave these poets behind me. They are with me. Duncan's words give me an alternative formulation. In my poems, I am thinking with these women poets. I think I will drop the r...