Up Rising (Passages 25)

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

Now Johnson would go up to join the great simulacra of men,

Hitler and Stalin, to work his fame

with planes roaring out from Guam over Asia,

all America become a sea of toiling men

stirrd at his will, which would be a bloated thing,

drawing from the underbelly of the nation

such blood and dreams as swell the idiot psyche

out of its courses into an elemental thing

until his name stinks with burning meat and heapt honors

And men wake to see that they are used like things

spent in a great potlatch, this Texas barbecue

of Asia, Africa, and all the Americas,

And the professional military behind him, thinking

to use him as they thought to use Hitler

without losing control of their business of war,

But the mania, the ravening eagle of America

as Lawrence saw him “bird of men that are masters,

lifting the rabbit-blood of the myriads up into . . .”

into something terrible, gone beyond bounds, or

As Blake saw America in figures of fire and blood raging,

. . . in what image? the ominous roar in the air,

the omnipotent wings, the all-American boy in the cockpit

loosing his flow of napalm, below in the jungles

“any life at all or sign of life” his target, drawing now

not with crayons in his secret room

the burning of homes and the torture of mothers and fathers and

children,

their hair a-flame, screaming in agony, but

in the line of duty, for the might and enduring fame

of Johnson, for the victory of American will over its victims,

releasing his store of destruction over the enemy,

in terror and hatred of all communal things, of communion,

of communism.

has raised from the private rooms of small-town bosses and business-

men,

from the council chambers of the gangs that run the great cities,

swollen with the votes of millions,

from the fearful hearts of good people in the suburbs turning the

savory meat over the charcoal burners and heaping their barbecue

plates with more than they can eat,

from the closed meeting-rooms of regents of universities and sessions

of profiteers

—back of the scene: the atomic stockpile; the vials of synthesized

diseases eager biologists have developt over half a century dreaming

of the bodies of mothers and fathers and children and hated rivals

swollen with new plagues, measles grown enormous, influenzas

perfected; and the gasses of despair, confusion of the senses, mania

inducing terror of the universe, coma, existential wounds, that

chemists we have met at cocktail parties, passt daily and with a

happy “Good Day” on the way to classes or work, have workt to

make war too terrible for men to wage—

raised in this secret entity of America’s hatred of Europe, of Africa, of

Asia,

the deep hatred for the old world that had driven generations of

America out of itself,

and for the alien world, the new world about him, that might have

been Paradise

but was before his eyes already cleard back in a holocaust of burning

Indians, trees and grasslands,

reduced to his real estate, his projects of exploitation and profitable

wastes,

this specter that in the beginning Adams and Jefferson feard and knew

would corrupt the very body of the nation

and all our sense of our common humanity,

this black bile of old evils risen anew,

takes over the vanity of Johnson;

and the very glint of Satan’s eyes from the pit of the hell of

America’s unacknowledged, unrepented crimes that I saw in

Goldwater’s eyes

now shines from the eyes of the President

in the swollen head of the nation.

Robert Duncan, "Up Rising (Passages 25)" from Bending the Bow. Copyright © by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Bending the Bow (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1968)

Biography

Described by Kenneth Rexroth as “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan was an important part of both the Black Mountain school of poetry, led by Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, whose other members included poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. A distinctive voice in American poetry, Duncan’s idiosyncratic poetics drew on myth, occultism, . . .

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Poems by Robert Duncan

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT War & Conflict, Social Commentaries

POET’S REGION U.S., Western

SCHOOL / PERIOD Black Mountain

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Up Rising (Passages 25)

Up Rising (Passages 25)

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