The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (Mit Press)

In this exquisitely written study of poet Robert Duncan and artist Jess—living as an openly gay, married couple, seven decades before gay marriage—Tara McDowell busts apart the sometimes stuffy genre of the art historical monograph and offers a fascinating analysis of the networks of collaboration and friendship that sustained postwar American art and literature at a period of massive social upheaval. There might seem to be nothing very exciting (or 'queer,' if that means against norms) about two white, gay men living together in San Francisco, but in the 1950s--the most conservative and homophobic decade of American history--Duncan and Jess’s “household” experiment was absolutely radical, making the domestic into an expansive and multivalent space. McDowell moves between biography, cultural history and close readings that prize open Duncan’s poetry and Jess’s works, exploring the couple’s aesthetic strategies of salvage and testimony, and their great unfinished projects (on H.D. in Duncan’s case and on Narcissus in Jess’s). What results is not only a crucial contribution to the queer history of American art and letters, but also a new look at the history of appropriation (beyond Pop and the Pictures generation) and the legacies of artistic and literary modernism. This poignant book is an ode to postwar American art and writing and what it means to forge a life in relation to another person through a creative reappropriation of cultural norms that would seem to negate your very existence.

Finally! a foundation for actually experiencing the wonder filled world that Jess and Robert Duncan created together: This book, both contemporary and historical, laces together all of the strands of activity flowing through that Household and in doing so offers at long last a View into an alternative life of creating and living and living that creation. This book is a treasure on so many levels.... we are in debt to Ms McDowell for this "act upon the Particulars"......