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1 " You have carried a branch of tomorrow into the room-its frangrance awakened me. "
― Robert Duncan
2 " Among my friends love is a great sorrow. It has become a daily burden, a feast,a gluttony for fools, a heart's famine.We visit one another asking, telling one another.We do not burn hotly, we question the fire.We do not fall forward with our aliveeager faces looking thru into the fire.We stare back into our own faces.We have become our own realities.We seek to exhaust our lovelessness. "
3 " PRELIMINARY EXERCISE:What does a turbine veil? a bird avail what chord?I heard a bird whir no word, felta turbine shadow turning from the floods of timeelectric currents the darkness stirrd,and trees in blaze of light arosecasting shadows of speech, seductive, musical, abroad.It was a single tree. It was a word of many trees that filld the vale.It was a store of the unspoken in the birdthat whirrd the air, that every occasion of the word overawed. "
4 " Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadowas if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place,that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall thereinthat is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.Wherefrom fall all architectures I amI say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.She it is Queen Under The Hillwhose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded.It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sunin an hour before the sun’s going downwhose secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told.Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos,that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is. "
― Robert Duncan , The Opening of the Field: Poetry
5 " In “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” Pound had found the inspiration of a moving syntax (as contrasted with the categorical syntax of Joyce, where parts of speech are things). “A true noun, an isolated thing,” we read in the Fenollosa essay, “does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them. "
― Robert Duncan , The H.D. Book