Polymorphous Poetics: Robert Duncan's "H.D. Book"

Stephen Fredman outlines that Robert Duncan's work intersects intellectually and biographically with the thinking of Norman O. Brown. While noting that Brown and Duncan mutually influenced each other, Fredman focuses on Brown's claims for the polymorphous perversity of the totally erogenous body. Indebted to the suggestiveness of his study, Duplessis takes up where Fredman has left off and links Duncan's concurrent literary and theoretical work in the 60s and 70s--The H.D. Book--directly to the polymorphous perverse. Further, given that the writing of this endless book paralleled the composition of Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and even some of Ground Work: Before the War, people can note that Duncan explores "polymorphous" proposals and makes a critique of masculinist modernism in the central poetry in his oeuvre. While the relation of this book to his concurrent poetry is too large a topic to broach systematically, she notes certain implications of these positions for his poetry.