Duncan’s Open Form and Cagean Intermedia: The Practice of “Theatre” After Black Mountain

Abstract

What is Duncan’s allusion to John Cage’s “open scales” doing at the end of “Passages 17”? Roughly contemporaneous with Jack Spicer’s “Poetry as Magic” workshop, Charles Olson’s west coast delivery of the Special View of History lectures and Duncan’s staging of Medea at Colchis were Cage’s classes on experimental composition at the New School for Social Research. While the Fluxus and Happenings movements that emerged from Cage’s New School course rejected many premises Duncan retained as a “derivative poet” both the west and east coast variants of the post-Black Mountain vanguard were working through problems traceable to the institution’s final phase under Olson’s rectorship in 1952-53. I examine the postwar avant-garde as a cultural formation in which Duncan’s serial open-form compositions and Cagean event-based work constitute branches of a single sensibility whose root can be intimated in the watchword “theatre” that haunts this period’s work.

Keywords

• Poetry
• Open Form
• Intermedia
• Black Mountain
• Theatre
• Antonin Artaud