[For] Duncan "the beauty of a poem is a configuration … that leads back into or on towards the beauty of the universe itself." This process in poetry leads to the production of the poem of resonance in which meanings, far from arising gratuitously [as some critics suggest], slowly build in a process of accretion. To understand the building process one must be aware that the idea of configuration is central to Duncan's poetics since for him the idea of a poem evolves organically from a particular locus "in relation to its environment of language and experience." Elements in the poem grow out of their relationship to each other as predicated upon their relationship to an order beyond the limits of temporal perception. This is the poem of resonance, a poem in which each element is charged with meaning reinforcing and extending each other in an ever-widening gestalt. (p. 67)

Unlike "The Structure of Rime," an earlier open series which has as its central focus the growth and education of the poet, "Passages" is not structured according to any perceivable organization. Instead, it receives its impetus from whatever is the poet's concern at the particular moment of composition. "The poem is not a stream of consciousness," Duncan says, "but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it." There is no goal, no desire, no margin to this series, for the individual poems are part of a larger series mirroring in apparent discord the underlying harmony of the universe. As a result, whatever is at hand, whether the poet's memories, ideas, awareness of persons or things, or reading, can enter the field; and as the "poet works with a sense of the parts fitting in relation to parts of a great story that he knows will never be completed," he creates picture after picture of man's nature. Such a composition can never be completed since man is continually changing; each "Passage" then is a fragment of the whole composition. (pp. 67-8)

The form of the individual poems in this series is the collage. Although Duncan had been approaching a theory of the poetic collage with such poems as "Pindar," "Apprehensions," and "The Structure of Rime," it is not until Bending the Bow that he uses the collage to illustrate what had been a growing conviction for him; that is, the poet must be completely free from preconceived ideas, whether structural or thematic, and must allow the internal forces of the composition at hand to determine the final form. The collage allows Duncan the freedom from external restraints and makes possible the infusion of a great many diverse materials; controlling the whole, then, is not the individual bias of the poet, but his compliance with instinctually felt forces. Thus, within the body of the poem there are no contradictions, no extraneous materials, since everything is bound in the total unit. The collage, in effect, is the vehicle for a Heraclitean perspective, one that would recognize the divine Law and sense the harmony of the universe in accordance with that Law….

Duncan's attempt to find what he calls "the most real form in language" often results in a poem-collage that seems little more than a collection of purely personal allusions drawn from whatever he happened to be reading at the time of composition. However, central to his poetics is the idea "that the order man may contrive or impose upon the things about him or upon his own language is trivial beside the divine order or natural order he may discover in them." As such, his poems are apprehensions of a transcendent reality, and the images, allusions, metaphors provide resonances or glimpses of the unity beyond the present…. Whatever enters the poem-collage, then, does so according to a pattern—an order, or theme—beyond temporal limitations. (p. 68)

"The Fire" is only one part of the Grant Collage; taken as a whole the thirty plus sections of "Passages" represents Duncan's attempt to awaken the public to ideas which express the man's commonality. While the "Fire" is essentially a negative vision, it is a critical part of Duncan's search for the nature of man since he cannot ignore what man has become. Like Pound's Cantos Duncan's "Passages" will be written indefinitely since he knows the only constant in man's nature is change….

"The Fire" begins with six lists of unconnected words; they are not joined by grammar or syntax but appear to be isolated units complete in themselves. Reflection upon the words included in these lists, however, does create certain suggestions of a primal landscape in which the things of the earth appear by themselves, mysterious and unexplained. Viewed as a whole the lists circumscribe an area, a field bounded by words and comprised of words; the poet entering that field cannot be expected to understand all the relations between the individual words, since his consciousness has not yet fully expanded; it takes his complete effort just to see their arrangement. It is his task as a poet to render that arrangement as best he can….

[At] the end of the poem we find that the lists have been arranged vertically and in reverse order. In other words, the structure of the two fields of words suggests a reversal, a rearranging of the primal elements of the world; that is also the theme of the poem—the reversal in the human perspective from an essentially mythic sensibility to an essentially demonic one. (p. 69)

[It] is possible to sense in these lines a keen awareness of the physical things of the earth. That awareness is probably akin to the manner in which primitives apprehended their world. By naming the things around them, they were able to build a language. The only words which may be considered abstractions, "First," "old," "new," "now,", are all words suggestive of creation and generation in the constant flux of time. One is not struck with a feeling of certainty when reading these lines, for without the connectives, without the punctuation marks, we are, in effect, in a one-to-one confrontation with the physical, creative earth, and we do not have an a priori system with which to view it. (pp. 69-70)

Following such an opening evocation of cosmic genesis, Duncan begins to work toward a theme. To do this he describes in detail two quite different paintings created approximately at the same time. One is Piero di Cosimo's "A Forest Fire," 1490–1500, and the other is Hieronymus Bosch's "Christ Bearing the Cross," 1500. "A Forest Fire" represents for Duncan a vision of the world which includes the language of the old beliefs. This painting captures for him the evanescent spirit of an ancient time before man was able to control fire, when man was no better nor worse than the animals with whom he shared the earth….

Piero's painting imparts to Duncan a feeling of the union between "the impetus of the phantasy and the feeling of the heart"; his "aerial spirit" has been moved, causing the resonances to penetrate into the deep recesses of his mind. (p. 70)

A direct contrast to [this painting's] higher harmony is immediately introduced in the poem with the description of Bosch's painting of a quietly subdued Christ bearing His cross amidst a crowd of hideously deformed people. The poem quickly moves from a description of this "opposing music" with the "faces of the deluded" to "the daily news: the earthquakes, eruptions,/flaming automobiles, enraged lovers…." There is no incongruity here; Duncan has accurately telescoped the centuries of human history which have succeeded Bosch's painting showing that our contemporary society has received its perspective from the "opposing music" rather than from the harmony illustrated by Piero's painting…. "The Fire" marks the opening of Duncan's active participation in a range of poetry that will include social and political perspectives. He has not arrived at this point by chance, nor has he given vent to these feelings to capture the attention of an audience eager for antiestablishment sentiments. These themes emerge from within the body of the tradition of the poetry he seeks to find; politics are part of the broad field of the poet's life, and social considerations emerge from his concern with the nature of man.

The ramifications of the opposing music as envisioned in Bosch's painting lead Duncan to recognize the face of Satan in the leading political and scientific figures of his age…. (pp. 70-1)

"The Fire" ends with the lists of the six word groups repeated, but they are now in vertical arrangement in inverse order. The implication is that the primal countryside suggested by the opening lines has been reduced, destroyed, inverted, by the legions of satanic individuals. The unity between man and animal, between man and all nature, that was mirrored in Piero di Cosimo's painting has been replaced by a reversal of priorities, an intrusion of personal power, so that the pagan landscape now has room for armaments factories, for atomic bomb research, for the further separation of man from his true nature.

Binding all the elements of this collage-poem together into a harmonious configuration is the image of fire. From cosmic genesis to the present-day razing of the fields, the fire image effectively subsumes all the seemingly disparate parts of the poem in a totality of resonances that echo an encapsulated chronology of the development of man.

There exists a definite locus, perspective, and theme in the collage poems of Robert Duncan. The elements which enter the field correspond to the overall design, a plan which transcends temporal and spatial relations and which is apprehended in the process of the poem itself. The poem of resonance demands an active reading—a participation by the reader with the elements themselves—so that a shared correspondence between poet and reader can exist. If we are jarred by gaps, by unconnected fragments, or by disharmonious allusions, we must remember the design of the poem is a building process. One cannot comprehend the grandeur of a cathedral by focusing on the stone blocks; it is the totality that impresses. (pp. 71-2)