Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book
It’s too long, because I don’t think he ever reached the point of imagining someone reading it from beginning to end. Every couple of years a different chapter comes out in a different journal; of course he’s going to repeat himself. What’s repeated is mostly filler anyway (Sense of History in the Cantos, all that.)
The abundant good stuff comes when he speaks as a gossip rather than an oracle. Anecdotes on the previous generation, sympathetic summings-up of their personality flaws, those flaws taken as more generative of poetry than the vague imperative of Form. Curious glimpses of earlier sympathetic (to me) kooks: Proclus, Ficino. Sharp pictures from his own life, child of fin-de-siecle hippies, Berkeley undergrad in the thirties, skipping ROTC to read Chamber Music with girls on the lawn.
