Robert Duncan’s Legacies: a Centennial Celebration

2019 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Californian poet Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988), whose work and influence have drawn ever-growing scholarly attention. All of the papers gathered together in this issue began as presentations at “Passages”: The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference in Paris held in June 2019 at Sorbonne Université. Organized by Hélène Aji, Stephen Collis, Xavier Kalck, James Maynard, and Clément Oudart, and co-sponsored by Simon Fraser University, the University at Buffalo Libraries Poetry Collection, Université Paris Nanterre and Sorbonne Université, the three-day conference included three keynote addresses, three plenary panels, ten workshops, a roundtable discussion, and two poetry readings, featuring over 50 presenters and a high number of attendees from around the world. We are pleased to present here eighteen of those presentations, comprising thirteen formal essays along with five more personal testimonies that serve as the coda to each section, and to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on the history of Duncan studies before considering more specifically his modernist, formal, poetic, social, and queer legacies at the century.