Robert Duncan, the Ambassador from Venus

This definitive biography chronicles the life and times of the poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988), who lived and wrote at the forefront of the literary, aesthetic, social, and political movements of his time. Duncan, associated with the Black Mountain School and the San Francisco Renaissance, was, and remains, a revered international figure--both for his fascinating life and his powerful, incantatory poetry. He became the leading practitioner of nontraditional open-form verse, exemplified in his masterwork The Opening of the Field.Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan's birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Jarnot's vivid descriptions of life on the west coast and in New York City feature luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Weaving together quotations from Duncan's notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, this richly detailed work gives a brilliant account of the extraordinary life and art of one of America's great postwar poets.