Years ago, I drove across the country to San Francisco with a beautiful young woman who knew Robert Duncan. Having long been an admirer of his poetry, I hoped to meet. Unfortunately, he was out of town during the time I was in town.
It is with Miss Keough that Duncan first encounters the work of H.D., the words “Fruit cannot drop/through this thick air…,” heard in “that early summer of my sixteenth or seventeenth year.” “Just beyond the voice of the poem,” he continues, “the hum and buzz of student voices and the whirr of water sprinklers merging comes distantly from the world outside an open window.”
I had a similar experience around the same age with H.D. In my case, the poem was "Pear Tree." I read it in the Holmesburg Library, and that is when I decided I wanted to be a poet.
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