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After playing a prominent role in the San Francisco Renaissance, Robert Duncan took part in the experiment of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where a new form of poetic writing was emerging. Laying out the tenets of process writing, Olson’s seminal essay entitled “Projective Verse” left an enduring imprint on Duncan’s poetics of “open form.” Stemming from his need to reconstrue—rather than rebuild—poetic forms, Duncan metaphorizes the locus of writing through the architectural/poetic figure of the “passage.” Duncan’s “Passages,” like Walter Benjamin’s “arcades,” are non-places, where exchanges and transfers occur. Moving from the architectural metaphor to the notion of “architexture,” this paper emphasizes the implications of serial writing in Duncan’s poetry. Articulating, though imperceptibly, language and the Word, philosophy and mysticism, Duncan weaves his palimpsestic text, turning each word, each letter into a cryptogram.