Robert Duncan in San Francisco by Michael Rumaker

Author:Michael Rumaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2013-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

SELECTED LETTERS MICHAEL RUMAKER / ROBERT DUNCAN

edited by Ammiel Alcalay and Megan Paslawski

Michael Rumaker was the first in his family to graduate from high school, which made Black Mountain College an unlikely but necessary destination for him. After his family threw him out “for not going to church and for being queer,” Rumaker happened to attend a lecture by the artist Ben Shahn at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Shahn had taught at Black Mountain and was enthusiastic about it and his good friend Charles Olson, who was soon to become its Rector. Mary Reed, a friend of Rumaker’s who taught painting in Philadelphia, was aware of the college: “Oh yes, Black Mountain, I hear it’s a hotbed of communism and homosexuals.” Such credentials convinced Rumaker to matriculate. These initial letters (one from Robert Creeley and an exchange between Rumaker and Robert Duncan), discuss Rumaker’s final examination and graduation, which at Black Mountain required an external examiner instead of tests set by a student’s teachers. The college chose Duncan to examine Rumaker.

Robert Creeley to Michael Rumaker, October 9, 1955

Dear Mike,

[. . .] I’m sorry not to have been here for your graduation—they tell me it was terrific, and I’m very happy it all went off ok. As to Robert D / he suddenly went all ‘academic,’ i.e., wanted to know if you’d read Henry James, and so forth, i.e., must have felt suddenly called upon to act as a ‘scholar’ or some damn thing. It wasn’t at all that he felt any diminishment re that feeling he had for your writing, much more literally; but again, thought I guess he was called upon to deal with it all, i.e., graduation-wise, very much in this other ‘character,’ which is no more his than mine. The outcome is, no one has that kind of time; and as far as we are concerned, it does not affect anything. I.e., it would take too damn long, and is not the point to begin with—so to hell with it. But again, do let me emphasize this was Robert’s sudden flair for academicism (apparently) you bumped into, we bumped into—not any lessening of his more relevant sense (opinion) that you make it, as a writer. Which is all anyone wanted to know, in the first place. Wow. [. . .]

Robert Duncan to Michael Rumaker, March 30, 1956

[The major portion of this letter appears in the text of Robert Duncan in San Francisco]

[. . .] It is a matter of some ten years between me and thee. And in another ten years when you start reading the “new” writers you will see it more sharply. Especially when that ten years is the difference between a depression and a war-boom; between a world that was just beginning to know that there might be war and a world that will now never believe there might be peace.

Michael Rumaker to Robert Duncan, April 4, 1956

Dear Robert Duncan,

[. . .] I’m sorry if graduating me put you in a bad spot. I had great doubts towards the end as to the validity of it all.

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