After receiving a PhD in American Literature from the University of California at Davis, Christopher Wagstaff taught writing and literature for many years, most recently at the University of California at Berkeley. He has curated numerous art exhibitions, showing the drawings and decorated books of Robert Duncan, among other art and literature, at University Art Museum, The Bancroft Library, the Palo Alto Cultural Center, and Mythos Gallery. He is preparing a traveling exhibition devoted to Robert Duncan, his partner Jess Collins, and their artistic circle. Wagstaff has published a series of chapbooks of his interviews with Bay Area artists. He has also edited The Collected Poems of Madeline Gleason 1919-1979 (Talisman House, 1999) and A Sacred Quest- The Life and Writings of Mary Butts (McPherson & Co., 1995). He is co-trustee of the Jess Collins Trust, which administers the estates of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins. Wagstaff lives in Berkeley, California.
*** Winner of the 2013 PEN Oakland Award
“This is a great and spiritually magnanimous volume. Active and
peaceful anarchist, and shaper of the best that was to come after
him, Robert Duncan possessed genius that opened worlds. These
interviews are breathing shapes of consciousness.”
—Michael McClure, author of Of Indigo and Saffron
“It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this book. Like
no other yet published, it exhibits the operations of the mind of a
great American poet at play in the most diverse fields: social and
political criticism; sexuality; philosophy; and of course literary
history, theory, and poetics. This collection is a testament to
Duncan’s full engagement with how to live in a civil (or uncivil)
society.”
—Gerrit Lansing, author of Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth
“This is, simply, an essential text. Duncan was always an amazing
talker and thinker, and these interviews over three decades display
his animated intelligence and spirit in full glory. Invaluable
for poets and those interested in a broad sweep of modern poetry
and poetics, this volume is crackling with Duncan’s wit and honesty
and profound seriousness about the art and its forebears. His
creative energy is inspiring and open and a great gift to the
reader. Added to the mix is editor Christopher Wagstaff’s lucid
contextualization of the interviews. This gathering is a treasury,
as well as a proxy autobiography of a major American poet.”
—David Meltzer, author of When I Was a Poet
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