This is a quick reading recommendation for my students. Ange Mlinko has written a very good review (at The Nation) of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. Reading this book was for me a transformative experience. It changed not only how I look at poetry but how I imagine the arts and experience to intersect. Though it can be at times difficult, the book has a charming and thoughtful personality and leads its readers through the history of English-language poetry as it had developed in the previous 100 years or so. In some ways it makes an excellent introduction to contemporary American poetry—perhaps a far better one than many works intended for academic teaching, such as the heavily digested and stodgy two-volume A History of Modern Poetry by David Perkins (vol 1, vol 2).
I strongly encourage you to read the review to see if you might also want to read a copy of The H.D. Book.
If you do decide you want that book, there are several ways to get it. The cheapest/easiest is the bootleg PDF that’s been circulating for a few years now. Probably the most pleasurable way to read the book is in the new edition out from the University of California Press. And, finally, the most scholarly and probably most interesting way is to track it down in all its original forms in the various journals that printed excerpts of it over the years; should you be willing to make that time investment, let me know, and I’ll share my bibliography with you, to ease your hunting.
