Innovations & Organizations

A leading poet of the San Francisco renaissance, Robert Duncan is a member of the international avant-garde. Born in Oakland, California, he has been an editor, a teacher at Black Mountain College and assistant director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College. Highly regarded by fellow nonacademic poets, Duncan's poetry is at once learned and spontaneous. Its form seems at once innate and wrought, complex, and wonderfully musical. He received the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize (1960),a Guggenheim Memorial Award (1963), the Levinson Poetry Prize (1964), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967), and the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1967). After a self-imposed silence of many years, Duncan published a challenging volume in 1984, The Ground Work, a book he designed himself. He continues to be one of the chief advocates for the poem as "wisdom literature" and not just personal expression or artifact.