Dorn launched Duncan's May 7 [1969] reading with a generous introduction and Duncan in turn treated the audience to a performance of his Passages poems. Graduate student Don Byrd remembered the event well: "...There were perhaps 300 people at the reading; it went on for nearly three hours. Somewhere in the midst of the apocalyptic passages, he stopped and said, 'Some times people ask me why, if I believe this, I bother to write poetry. I write poetry for the fucking stars.'"
Robert Duncan, quoted in Lisa Jarnot's Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (Univ. of California Press, 2012).
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