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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
Foreword by Robert Creeley xvii
A Note on the Text xxiii
Author's Note xxv
Note: Texts added to this revised and expanded edition are followed by an asterisk M.
THE BOSTON POEMS (19 56 -1 959) 3
Two Astronomers with Notebooks 5
War for Those Who Are Not Soldiers 7
And when I pay death's duty 9
A 4 Part Geometry Lesson 1 o
Poem ("O dark heaven ...") * 12
Herons 13
For years I've heard 14
Poem by the Charles River 15
Letters to Freud i 6
The Hunger of Sound 19
Quitting a job* 26
CUPS 1-12 (1959-i96o) 29
THE PARK (1960) 47
THE FAERIE QUEENE ( 1961) 57
An Appearance 59
Metamorphoses 6o
So 61
From a Fortune-Cooky 62
The Sphinx 63
For Gustave Moreau 64
THE MOTH POEM (I 962- 1 964) 65
A Literalist 67
The Literalist 68
Between 69
The Borrower 70
Awake 71
Supper Guest 72
The Medium 73
O-friend 74
Invisible Pencil, 76
Atlantis ("draws back ...") 77
Atlantis ("the light of it ...") 78
My Dear- 79
Paradise Quotations 8o
it it it it 82
Salut 83
C 85
The Translator: A Tale 86
IMAGE-NATIONS 1-4 (1962-1964) 87
Image-Nation i (the fold 89
Image-Nation 2 (roaming go
Image-Nation 3 (substance 9 1
Image-Nation 4 (old gold 92
LES CHIMERES (1 963-1 964) 9
The Shadow 97
Myrtho, 98
Horns 99
Anteros ioo
Delfica 1 0 0 1
Artemis 102
Christ among the Olives 103
Golden Poem i o8
CHARMS (1964-1968) io9
Psyche, iii
Translation 113
Winter Words 114
The Stories i i 5
Ina Dark i 16
The Prints 1 17
Love 118
The Private I 119
Song 120
1st Tale: Over 121
2nd Tale: Return 122
: At Last 124
Aphrodite of the Leaves 125
The City 126
Sophia Nichols, 127
A Gift 129
Bottom's Dream 130
The Finder 131
Out of the Window, 133
Merlin 134
The Cry of Merlin 135
envoi 137
GREAT COMPANION: PINDAR (1 9 7 1) 139
IMAGE-NATIONS 5-14 AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS (1 965- 19 74) 147
Image-Nation 5 (erasure 149
Image-Nation 6 (epithalamium 156
a good return* 157
Image-Nation 7 (fair 159
Image-Nation 8 (morphe 164
Enfant Terrible,* 166
Image-Nation 9 (half and half 167
Image-Nation i o (marriage clothes 170
Image-Nation i i (the poesis 177
Image-Nation 12 (Actus 179
Image-Nation 13 (the telephone 183
Image-Nation 14 (the face 185
Origin* 187
STREAMS I (1 974- 1 976) 189
Luck Unluck One Luck 191
Sky-stone 193
Suddenly, 195
Gathering 196
The Skill* 197
Harp Trees 199
Tumble-Weed 200
SYNTAX (1979-1981) 201
Preface 203
The Truth Is Laughter i 204
The Truth Is Laughter 2 205
The Truth Is Laughter 3 206
The Truth Is Laughter 4 207
The Truth Is Laughter 5 208
The Truth Is Laughter 6 209
The Truth Is Laughter 7 210
Dreams, January 19 81 21 1
The Truth Is Laughter 8 21 1
Tombstone 212
The Truth Is Laughter 9 212
Image-Nation i5 (the lacquer house 213
Image-Nation 16 (anaclitic variations 215
The Truth Is Laughter I o 216
alerte d'or 217
The Truth Is Laughter I I 217
The Truth Is Laughter 12 218
The Truth Is Laughter 13 218
The Truth Is Laughter 14 219
A Ceremony 219
Dreams, April 1981 220
Diary, April I I , 19 8 I 222
The Truth Is Laughter 15 224
Occasional Thought 224
The Truth Is Laughter 16 224
Image-Nation 17 (opercula 225
graffito 227
The Mystic East 228
lake of souls (reading notes 230
Departure (envoi-commiato 239
further, 240
Some Voices in Syntax 241
PELL MELL (1 98 1 - i 988) 243
Waiting for Hours 245
Skylight 246
Cold Morning Quotations 247
Image-Nation i 8 (an apple 249
6 November '82-Dream of a poem ... 252
Fousang 253
Mooning 257
The Iceberg 259
Sock-hop 260
Useful Triads 262
a cet ultime instant ... 264
The Pause 266
Moments 268
Story 268
`the universe is part of ourselves' 269
Romance 270
No-name 271
The Soul 272
Desire 273
Anecdote 274
The Ruler 276
Skylights Smoking a Ramses Cigarette ... 278
Advice: find someplace where 280
To whom it may concern: 281
Hi! 282
First Love 284
Home for Boys and Girls 285
belief 286
My Window 287
`the sounding air' 288
Image-Nation 19 (the wand 289
The Art of Combinations 293
Ah, 293
honestas 294
Epitaphics 295
Image-Nation 20 (the Eve 296
Silver-winged red devil, a toy from Mexico 297
Image-Nation 2 i (territory 299
Dream ("I went madly to sleep") 300
Pain-fountain 301
Dream ("'standing everest,' ") 302
Utopia 303
'It springs on you' 305
The Truth Is Laughter 17 307
0. 307
Halloween 309
Giant 310
poetry is ordinary busyness iii
There-abouts 312
`0 on the left'-Posse 312
Carmelo Point, 13 June 1984 313
For Barry Clinton, d. 17 June 1984,
of aids 314
pin-wheel-shimmering wind pale 3 15
The Truth Is Laughter i 8 315
Pretty Please 3 16
And Tereus, 3 16
Praise to Them, 317
0 fragmented ago- 317
I would be there 318
I thought when I dreamed 319
writing table 319
dancing with radios 320
hard, gemlike flame 323
conversation 323
heavy reading 324
hymns and fragments 325<
br />
stop 326
`Mr. Dandelion' 327
sapphire-blue moon, once 328
untranslatable reason 329
demi-tasse (an elegy 330
Continuing 332
GREAT COMPANION: ROBERT DUNCAN (1988) 333
STREAMS II (1986-1991) 341
Image-Nation 22 (in memoriam 343
As If By Chance 347
going, going* 350
Interlunar Thoughts co 3
Image-Nation 23 (imago-mundi 3c 1
`home, home on the range' 354
the skin moves over the muscles* 354
Giving the Glitter to / Some Body Else 355
Of the Land of Culture 357
a bird in the house 359
Who's There? 36o
rose 361
Bits of a Book 363
EXODY (19901993) 367
Muses, Dionysus, Eros 369
Even on Sunday 370
tip-toeing through the stink weed,* 375
in the tree tops, 376
Image-Nation 24 ('oh, pshaw,' 377
Mappa Mundi, 389
Image-Nation 2E (Exody, 391
NOTES (1994-2000)* 397
Robin Blaser: Curriculum Vitae 399
Shipped Shape 407
The Truth Is Laughter 19 407
of is the word love without the initial
consonant 408
at this point in time 409
one word of wisdom 410
well, I was walking up 41 1
that cat, 412
my novel 412
Bits of a Book 2 413
merci buckets- 414
The Flame 4i5
Ode for Museums, All of Them! 417
A Story after Blake 419
pentimento 1 421
a fountain at the kitchen door, 422
forest 1 423
Liveforever 424
In Remembrance of Matthew Shepard 425
vocabulary 1 426
the bottom line 427
nomad 429
pentimento 2 430
Image-Nation 26 (being-thus 432
GREAT COMPANION: DANTE ALIGHIERE (1 997)* 43
WANDERS (2001-2002)* 459
The Truth Is Laughter 20 461
The Truth Is Laughter 21 461
Oh! 462
Glass Road, 462
Well, my dears, I knew there were shadows 463
hail yah, 463
`who, who, who, who' 464
half-you flown on a carpet, 464
`there, there, there,' 464
Among universals, 465
Petty, vulgar, provincial, 465
Good morning, 466
So 467
There's a wonder afoot, 467
`like money in the gutter,' David said. 468
did you ever see an angel, 468
forgot, oubli 469
oubli, forgot 470
when Nietzsche said 470
a true story of 471
there were two accent 472
the clock is back, 473
on page 6i 473
`I have lost track of the world,' Mahler said 474
so eerie: `must get rid of Halloween- 474
To: Colorado / Montana 475
imagine a map 476
I return to my meditations-explicationsexperiences 476
who's goose 477
everyday, the carpenter 477
Fingerspitzengefiihl, 478
Ruck and rot pucker in political thought 478
woke this morning 479
will be, 479
what did I forget 480
a dream that repeated during the nighteach 48o
`oh,' I said to myself, 48 1
the Bible is as historical 481
if you look at a table of minerals, 482
the first imagination of god 482
well, this old crow is making 483
I've caught the unease 483
what i-densities 484
dear dusty moth 485
Robert Duncan said, `Don't tell 485
Ethel Merman, 486
SO (2003)* 487
Charles Watts, 489
just out the door 490
begin the beguine 491
there 492
woke this morning 492
a song 493
OH! (2004)* 495
I don't remember this: 497
only the shadow knows 498
comfortably 499
simplified mind Soo
sea and sky 5o,
no body 5o,
whose salted heart Sot
what would you do 503
`Have you got a toybox?' 5o4
divination by pebbles 505
language is love 5o6
Afterword by Charles Bernstein Sol
Index of Titles and First Lines 51 1
For a reader to begin here may well prove displacing if one expects to find either a simple explanation or some securing directions. I have read Robin Blaser's consummate poetry for years, but I cannot predicate its authority on any sense that it has answered the questions which compelled it or come to the conclusion of what it thought to say. What has to be recognized is that these poems are not a defining "progress," or a skilfully accomplished enclosure. Above all else I must emphasize a sense often echoed here, that the "unfolded fold" to be found in his work-the turn, the bend in the road, the "twist" of Charles Olson's preoccupation-is the nexus of its life and the life it has made so movingly eloquent. No one is going anywhere-as if to get "there" were the sole possibility.
Reading these poems, one finds a life that is inexorably human, the adamant given of our common fact. Yet Descartes's curiously meagre proposition, "I think, therefore I am," can nonetheless empower the imagination, and "Only the imagination is real," as William Carlos Williams insisted to anyone who would listen. All else lives by the fate of its active being, its seemingly unreflective fact. But our human life yields a double, its acts and the thinking coincident. Who knows which more proves our determining world?
I first knew Robin Blaser as one of an almost mythic band, a triad composed of himself and his fellow poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. In his valuable essay "The Practice of Outside," which serves as his defining proposition for the value of Jack Spicer's own poetry, he speaks with great clarity and power of that poesis he shared with Spicer, recognizing how malevolent the stable "discourse" had become:
Where the poesis reopens the real and follows its contents, the presuming discourse imposes form and closes it, leaving us at the mercy of our own limit.... It may be argued that the push of contemporary poetics towards locus, ground, and particularity is a remaking of where we are.... From Pound's hierophanies and Williams's ground to Olson's cosmology and Spicer's narrative of the unknown, a remaking of the real is at stake. One needs only to notice how much of it is a common experience and also something regained, rather than an invention.
-from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser (197 0
Blaser's company was not just persons of the "San Francisco school" but survivors from a legendary Berkeley, where learning for oneself and discovering the appropriate teacher (Ernst Kantoro- vich is such an instance) had still a singular value. Robin was the quiet one, as my mother might say, certainly the modest one, and it was he, one guessed, who kept the bridge between Duncan and Spicer secure, though it was always precarious. I think of those brothers in the old stories, of the magic that protected them, of the complex trials they had to undergo, especially the youngest, least recognized, most at risk-who again I proposed to myself as Robin.
I am taking the occasion of Jack's book to speak of the battle for the real of poetry in which all contemporary poetry in America is engaged. It began with Pound and continues. For me, it moves West and becomes a fateful meeting of three men-Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and myself in 1946.
-from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
No doubt I compound it all with my own story, but a
poem of his from The New American Poetry (1960), our first meeting place, made actual where we were and had to be:
Herons
A wryly attractive biographical note in the same collection continues aptly: "Born in 1925. Tied to universities from 1943-1959: Northwestern, College of Idaho, Berkeley, California as a student; Harvard as a librarian from 19 55- 19 59. Now free and hoping to remain that way. But it's doubtful. Money!"
There were to be subsequent employments of similar nature, but with his moving from San Francisco to Vancouver in the midsixties and his transforming presence at Simon Fraser University (1966- 1986), Robin Blaser became a source for poetry's authority beyond any simplifying place or time. It is not at all that his work is transcendent or beyond the obvious limits of common life. Quite the contrary. In this still shifting edge of that West which is his first place of origin, he enters upon his own power without distraction or compromise, and comes to the substantiating community of his own need and recognition. In this respect only Robert Duncan finds a place of similar order, while their peers, such as Spicer and Olson, too often are battered by increasing isolation and overt rejection. So the last words said by Jack Spicer to his old friend echo with poignant emphasis: "My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on." These words have no simple reason, such as Blaser's initial Catholicism or Spicer's determined Calvinism, to explain them. What is realized is what has always been, that our words are literally our world, that their permission, what they lead us to, is all we have.
Jack Spicer's own genius was his clear sight, a sometimes ruth lessly grounded specificity. It was he, for example, who recognized that Blaser would follow his emotions with a shifting rhythm, led by feeling to pattern. Together they proposed a "serial poetry" far more the fact of what might now happen rather than any presumed method for gaining generalized continuity, however defined. Therefore one can come to this actuating place of Blaser's powers without need for static containment or to think to summarize its information finally. The point seems clear enough in the titles of several of the books, for example: ImageNation (in its continuing parts), Streams, Syntax, Pell Mell. What he has written about his poetics proves a basic advice:
It seems to me that the whole marvellous thing of open form is a traditional and an American problem.... The whole thing came in a geography where the traditional forms would no longer hold our purposes. I was very moved when, some years ago, I was reading a scholarly book by Jo Miles in which she is making an argument for the sublime poem ... and she begins to talk about the narrative of the spirit. I think the key word here is narrative-the story of persons, events, activities, images, which tell the tale of the spirit.
I'm interested in a particular kind of narrative-what Jack Spicer and I agreed to call in our own work the serial poem-this is a narrative which refuses to adopt an imposed story line, and completes itself only in the sequence of poems, if, in fact, a reader insists upon a definition of completion which is separate from the activity of the poems themselves. The poems tend to act as a sequence of energies which run out when so much of a tale is told. I like to describe this in Ovidian terms, as a carmen perpetuum, a continuous song in which the fragmented subject matter is only apparently disconnected. Ovid's words are: