Robin Blaser was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1925 and grew up in small town Idaho. In 1944, he moved to Berkeley to attend the University of California where he would meet Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan and join a community of poets and artists whose explorations would come to be called the Berkeley Renaissance. Blaser spent 11 years at Berkeley, leaving in 1955 with an MA and a Master of Library Science (MLS) to accept a position in the Widener Library at Harvard. In Boston, his friends included John Wieners, Steve Jonas, and Ed Marshall; importantly during this period, he also met Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, and Frank OâHara. Donald Allen, editor of the landmark New American Poetry anthology (1960), was a frequent interlocutor. Blaser did well at Harvard, but he came to dislike the place as did his partner, Jim Felts. In 1960, they returned to San Francisco, but the scene around Spicer and Duncan had changed. By 1965, Blaser had split with Felts and fallen out with Duncan. That same year Spicer died of acute alcoholism. A faculty position in the Department of English at the newly established Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Burnaby, British Columbia, offered a fresh start and Blaser moved to Vancouver in 1966. He would remain at SFU for 20 years and spend the rest of his life living and working in Vancouver with his life partner, David Farwell. Blaser died of a brain tumor in 2009.
I first met Robin in 1978 when I was an undergraduate student in English at Simon Fraser. I took his Arts in Context course on modernism, as well as a Directed Studies on music and literature and an audit on MallarmĂ©. When I stopped being a student and started writing about his work, we became friends. Both of us came from small towns and conservative, religious families; both of us fled. These were recognitions between us. Blaser mentored me through academia and many years of personal storm. He had a particular way of doing this. I would arrive at his doorâno point in calling because most of the time he wouldnât answer the phoneâand if he wanted to, he would open it. Very often I came full of trouble and he would begin to talk, not letting me get a word in edgewise. He could do this for hours without a real pause, cruising through the ends of sentences as if periods were orange lights at an intersection. It would all be about the books that had just arrived or an art show or news from the poetry world. After an hour or two, he would ask what I had come to talk about. By that time, I had forgotten, my self-concern utterly lost in the worlds of imagination he unfolded for me. Blaser offered entrance to those worlds. This book is my map of that magical territory he offered to students and friends. ââMap is not territory,ââ he loved to say.1
Pause/Reset
When Robin Blaser arrived in Berkeley in 1944 to attend the University of California, he was a 19-year-old gay boy from a place where gay wasnât welcome. He had no concept of contemporary poetry beyond that of Vachel Lindsay, a poet who literally took his poems to the street, but without seriously challenging the formal or philosophical assumption of Anglo-American traditions.2 At Berkeley, he had his first introduction to the modernsâEzra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D. , James Joyce, Federico GarcĂa Lorca, and Mary Butts among themâthrough Robert Duncanâs off-campus reading circles. What began for Blaser there was a lifelong odyssey through twentieth century poetry, art, and philosophy. In The Astonishment Tapes, he says that he went to Berkeley to express his sexuality and join the world (AT, 60). He was a young man full of ambition and promiseâprize pie as he later referred to his younger self. But the world he had grown up with wasnât there. That world was Catholic (mother ), Mormon (father), Anglo-American, and heteronormative. Blaser had already experienced anxiety in adolescence over same-sex attractions (he did not act on these feelings until Berkeley), but the loss of a religiously-based world order and set of values was a deeper shock. James Joyce was the one who represented a real challenge because he had flattened the hierarchal order of Irish Catholicism in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and that hierarchy came pretty close to Blaserâs adolescent imagination. As a teenager, he had considered the priesthood.
As Blaser read and developed and changed as a thinker and poet at Berkeley, and as his range of reference and circle of literary acquaintances grew, he began to join a generation of young poets who also had to find their way in a world that had come unglued after two world wars. âThe center cannot hold,â Yeats had said (Yeats 1962, 99). White male privilege was about to come under review, especially after African Americans and Indigenous peoples had fought for the Allies and women had collected paychecks in factories. Those factories, ramped up for wartime production, soon began to push out consumer goods that changed the way people lived and they would set up the conditions for environmental problems to come: more cars, more plastics, more big oil. Television became widely available and prepared the way for an intensified culture industry that included pushback against the various liberating genies that had escaped the bottle during the war. High-profile international art movements like Dada had already mocked the pretensions to respectability of a middle class that had acquiesced to catastrophe; surrealism had tapped the repressed, psychological and social, and it would turn up in Berkeley through exploratory arts journals like Circle. Looking back on the postwar period, Blaser would say that the postmodern was a search for a new relation among things and a corrective to the authoritarian elements in modernism. Pound, of course, was quickly taken as the poster child for the latter: he had advocated for Mussolini during the war and was on trial for treason. Eliot had turned toward the esoteric Anglican tradition in his great wartime poem, Four Quartets . Both were major poets and both presented problems as models.
Blaser shared this set of cultural conditions with his generation. However different they were, the New Americans, as they came to be called after Allenâs famous anthology, responded to the same problematic: how to imagine âothersâ in a less fearful and arrogant way; how to reposition humanity as part of nature instead of its master; how to create meaning and value in a world without religious foundations, which is to say without the means to compel belief. In retrospect, the issues of the later twentieth century were already on the horizon when Blaser arrived in Berkeley: civil rights, decolonization, sex and gender parity, and the ecological footprint. What seemed to be required even in 1945 when these issues had not been widely articulated was a pause/reset on the culture. Of those poets closest to Blaser, Robert Duncan would go on to develop his grand collageânot the tale of the tribe as Pound had called his epic poem, The Cantos , but the story of the species, opened up to include, at least virtually, all cultural narratives, high and low. Jack Spicer would develop the serial poem, a way of working that took the book, rather than the individual poem, as a unit and positioned the poet as a character in his own narrative, thus limiting his or her authority. The poet, no more than the reader, would know what was coming next. Spicer later claimed a poetry by dictation, where the poet became a transmitter of messages received from the âoutsideâ as he called it, rather than a master of his fieldâenergy transferred to the reader from where the poet got it with minimal interference of the ego, to paraphrase Charles Olson in âProjective Verseâ (Olson 1997, 240). A major influence for Blaser, Olson worked through the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead to articulate an embodied âhuman universe,â fully embedded in planetary life.3 Common to these poets was the thought that instrumental reason had to be stitched back into a complex fabric of affective relationships. It is worth noting in this context that Bern Porter, a risk-taking publisher of avant garde writing in 1940s Berkeley (Bern Porter Books), and Jess Collins, the visual artist who wound up as Duncanâs life partner, switched from science to the arts after working on the Manhattan Project (the making of the first nuclear bomb).
Blaser maintained all his life that poetry was a distinctive discourse among others and that it proposed a mode of knowing as valid as the scientific or philosophical. To follow his thinking, poetry does not fall under the rubrics of subjective/objective or true/false: it is relational thought that has more to do with meaning than knowing, although the poet cannot afford ignorance. The real, as Blaser liked to call it, is what comes out of the interaction between the poet and the world: âTo hold an image within the line by sound and heat is to have caught something that passed out there,â he says in âThe Fireâ (Fire, 3). The poem is the record of that meetingâthe poetâs view-from-here. The point is not to convince the reader to accept the poetâs perspective but to articulate a common ground where meetings might take place. Or as Olson says, citing Keats, âa manâs life ⊠is an allegoryâ (Olson 1970, 17). This is the corrective to modernism: the view-from-here is not definitive and certainly never complete, but it can be rigorous and sincere, and may, perhaps, become exemplary. Blaser had a lifelong fascination with Dante that dated from his Idaho boyhood and memories of the Gustave DorĂ© illustrated Inferno in the family home, all the way through to his âDante Alighiere: Great Companionâ piece of 1997. Dante had created a world image out of Catholicism; Blaser took as his task the making of an analogous image for the twentieth century, but he did not have the Christian tradition on which to build it. He had, instead, the loosened syntax of Finnegans Wake , The Waste Land , and the Cantos . Without the passionate assurance of a cosmic order, Blaser, like the moderns before him, as well...