-from The Fire (1967)
Put it that one is to be somewhere in this transforming, accumulating poetry-not simply be led to a conclusion, but be taken by just such a magical carmen perpetuum to all the image-nations of this re markable, revivifying world. How lovely that neither concept nor any other obligating pattern can enclose us, if we can "come into the world," as Charles Olson put it, recognizing that "we do what we know before we know what we do." The authority in any act is rooted here.
What comes then to be in the complexly layered "song" of these poems is an increasingly familiar presence, a person quite literal to any life. There is no fact of a didactic history, however much a particularizing story has been told and told again. Time folds and unfolds ("depli") continuously all that is said, and the person each one presumes to know has momently to be recognized anew:
in the tree tops,
the child, the child of the big shot, invalid's child, labourer's child, child of the fool, child of railroads, child of trees, child that is deiformed, child of fireworks, child of colourlessness, child of damask, Mage's child, the child born with twenty-two folds at least his or her concern is only to unfold herself or himself, curious one or the other's life is, then, complete under that form he or she dies there's no fold left for one or the other to undo
in the land of magic
-from Exody (19901993)
Bringing this extensive and multifaceted "song" now together, remembering all that these poems constitute as a presence, makes in turn a vivid and enduring evidence of the human in the fact of that, itself. Much as a tree might grow in beloved intention, or anything of fragile possibility find continuing if unexpected time, so this poet's life is manifest as a complex of perceptions, of reflections, ironies, humor, things learned, things forgotten, person become substance of its own potential. Robin Blaser makes clear the heroes of his determining order, found particularly in the sections Great Companions but everywhere echoing in quotation and allusion whether Robert Graves or Pindar, or Robert Duncan, or the measuring instance of Robin Blaser's concept of justice, Hannah Arendt. Or his belief in a hierarchic premise for human order such as Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil. These are all lintels, as Blaser says, those supporting beams over any door's opening that so make possible the door. We enter by their provision into The Holy Forest (for us/for our rest) itself.
One soon realized that Robin Blaser was an immensely literate poet but never confiningly bookish or contesting in what he knew. One saw him shifting in circumstance, from the harshly exposed yet determined poet of "Herons" to the confidence and openhanded recognitions and accommodation of a much later work such as the wondrous "Image-Nation 24 ('Oh, pshaw,."' Or yet these amazing lines:
How can a body be made from the word?-language, a shivaree of transparence-jigsaw-glass immensity
-from "Image-Nation 25 (Exody,"
Reading them, a younger poet wrote as a tag now left in this copy of Robin's manuscript: wow, does this make me want to be poured through Blaser's work, like clear water through a glass pitcher.... As through a glass darkly-or brightly, as the case may be. Robin Blaser has become a touchstone for all his company, a bond in mind and heart. What does one ever want a poetry to be other than the sounding that reaches through all the fact of our variousness, brings to a common apprehension and presence whatever we have known, feel, or have felt? It is such a simple yet subtle art, this saying things in time. So there is time, it is time, to read.
Robert Creeley
Waldoboro, Maine
August i1 , 1993
This revised edition of Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest is based on the 1993 collection of the same title, edited by Stan Persky and Michael Ondaatje and published by Coach House Press. New to this edition are some poems that were hiding in back drawers in 1993: these have been interpellated into the text in chronological order and marked by an asterisk in the table of contents. Most of the new additions, however, consist of poems written between 1994 and 2004. The serial books Notes, Wanders, So, and Oh! appear here as part of The Holy Forest for the first time. (Wanders was released as a chapbook by Nomados Press in 2003.) The order of the whole, like that of the first edition of the Forest, is as nearly chronological as possible. In exception, I have placed the long poem "Great Companion: Dante Alighiere" (1997) after Notes (1 994-2000) to signal a distinction between the serial run of the former and the latter as a singular work.
On typographical conventions, I have retained original spellings, which shift from American to Canadian, and Blaser's preference for single quotation marks. Over the years, some poems have been dated and others not. Where Blaser has dated the poems, I have preserved the dates in the manner recorded-most often by year, but sometimes more specifically by day and month as well. In front and back materials, I have followed U.S. conventions of spelling and punctuation.
Many thanks to University of California Press editor Rachel Berchten for shepherding the manuscript through the production process, to Ellen F. Smith for her careful copyediting, and to Peter Quartermain for his work in preparing the manuscript of the new additions. A special thanks as well goes to Robert Creeley and Charles Bernstein for contributing to this collection. Creeley's Foreword is reprinted here from the first edition of The Holy Forest; Bernstein's Afterword was written for the occasion of this new release.
Miriam Nichols
These poems follow a principle of randonee-the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour. Poems called Image-Nations come and go throughout, as I come upon them. Great Companions of the art of poetry, a series which here consists of Pindar, Robert Duncan, and Dante Alighiere, will continue as I go on rereading the others and fold them in. And what of the "mere pals," my friend Peter Quartermain asked, pinching the pretension? They are here from the start, folded in and innermost. They are-men and women-there by friendship and their own attentions, aspects of the `you' who appears in the poems.
Some of these poems appeared in Measure, Locus Solos, Paris Review, Open Space, The Nation, Pacific Nation, Caterpillar, Line, Capilano Review, O-blek, and West Coast Line. Some have appeared as chapbooks or books, published by Open Space, Four Seasons, Ferry Press, Cobblestone, Talonbooks, Fissure, Coach House Press, and Nomados. I am grateful for their attention.
I want to thank my editors of the first edition of this collection (Coach House, 1993), Michael Ondaatje and Stan Persky, for the initial gathering and editing of The Holy Forest, and Miriam Nichols for her work on this revised version. David Farwell has helped in every way-more than I can say.
The whole thing: just trying to be at home. That's the plot.
Robin Blaser
Vancouver
for Cleo Adams
2
for Sylvia Townsend Warner
1957
9/30/56
I
2
3
for Lars Balas
2
1959
I
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
I0
II
12
for H.D.
for Fran Herndon
2
3
4
5
for Stan Persky
for Robert Creeley
for Louis Zukofsky
for Louis Zukofsky
for Louis Zukofsky
for Diagoras of Rhodes, winner in boxing, 464 B. C.
STROPHE
ANTISTROPHE
EPODE
STROPHE
ANTISTROPHE
EPODE
STROPHE
ANTISTROPHE
EPODE
STROPHE
ANTISTROPHE
EPODE
STROPHE
ANTISTROPHE
EPODE
bound for
Inscribed in gold letters in the temple at Lindos
1971
1971
for Dennis Wheeler
0
for Dwight Gardiner
1974
- 74
Fortune Infortune Fort Une
for Susan Knutson
for Ellen Tallman
October 1975
rev. 29 January 2004
for my father, died April 20, 1978, at 76
for David Farwell
I read, walk, listen, dream, and write among companions. These pieces do not belong to me. Syntax, a personification, looking for a predicate and vice versa.
A preface, then,
that is also the after-face of it. Syntax felt odd when I wrote and published it in 19 8 3. The cultural orphanhood that has hunted me since childhood came to the surface. The writing of it was fun, funny, disturbed, and dependent. Thus, the trouves-the found-things(an anthologist called to say he wanted to publish one of my poems from Syntax, `Tombstone'-I said, `Good choice, but it isn't mine, it's a first-people's tombstone, found in North Van- couver'-he published it anyway, to my consternation, under my name, needing, I suppose, an author for his purpose). And thus, the quotations, as in essays, dependent upon them. I will, later in The Holy Forest, call these the brilliance of reading under the library table. Losses and gains of cultural meaning in their scholarship. Their voices are named in the margins and, then, identified with my reading of their books at the end of Syntax. The discovery of Opal Whiteley came through the air on CBC radio. Then, I found her book, The Story of Opal, i 92o-the image of her writing under the bed, secretly; the photograph of her putting back together the shredded pieces of her book; the story about the cow and her mud tracks, dug up and kept in the back part of the cook-table drawer, that I wish I had written-being true, as they say, to myself.
(after Nansen
(from Fowler
(North Vancouver
(out of Jacquetta Hawkes
(phrases from Geoffrey Hartman and Keats
(phrases from Valery and Geoffrey Hartman
(from Joe Panipakuttuk, originally written in Eskimo syllabics
(from Joe Panipakuttuk
(men's room, Leo's Fish House, Gastown
(Historic Newfoundland
I
II
III
IV
(Rene Girard
(William Blake
(Rene Girard
(Rene Girard
(men's room, Vancouver Airport
(Bernard-Henri Levy
(Geoffrey Hartman
(Shelley
(Thomas Merton's translation
(Henry Corbin
(Opal Whiteley
(Hermann Broch
Bernard-Henri Levy, La Barbarie d visage humain (Grasset & Faquelle, 1977). English translation by George Holoch, Barbarism with a Human Face (Harper & Row, 1979).
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. Rev. & exp. edition (Oxford, 1970).
The Gospel According to Thomas, Coptic text and translation by A. Guillaumont et al. (Harper, 19 59).
Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to all the Great Ones of the Earth, whom this may concerne: Being the last WARNING PIECE at the dreadful day Of JUDGEMENT ([ 649). Excerpted in Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Rene Girard, La Violence et le sacre (Grasset, 1972). English translation by Patrick Gregory, Violence and the Sacred (Johns Hopkins, 1977).
William Blake, 'ALL RELIGIONS ARE ONE,' (1788). In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Doubleday, 197o).
Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (Yale, 1 980). Other books by Hartman which haunt some of the poems by phrase and intention are The Fate of Reading (Chicago, 1975) and Beyond Formalism (Yale, 1970). His Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Johns Hopkins, 198 I) came into my hands after Syntax was complete. (I was fascinated to find Hartman drawn to Cavafy's poem `Waiting for the Barbarians' in his opening essay.) This brilliant book is again a companion for the poet reading poetry to find the layers of the real-especially the last chapter, `Words and Wounds': `... the "dread voice" exists as the poem or not at all.'
Percy Bysshe Shelley, `The Triumph of Life' (18 2 2), 1 1. 1-40, in Poetical Works, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford, 1970).
Thomas Merton, The Behavior of Titans (New Directions, 1961), includes a study of Herakleitos.
Henry Corbin, L'Homme de lumiere dons le soufisme iranien. English translation by Nancy Pearson, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (Shambhala, 1978), wonderfully returning my sequence to our northern lights with which I began.
Along with `Departure (envoi-commiato,' remember Dante's `Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute,' finely translated by Patrick S. Diehl in Dante's Rime (Princeton, 1979).
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil (Routledge, 1946), wondrous and among prose-poems, perhaps, the greatest.
Opal Whiteley, The Story of Opal (Atlantic Monthly, 1 92o)-later I found Jane Boulton's loving adaptation, composed `during long snowy months on a sheep ranch in Alberta, Canada': Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart (Tioga, 1984).
And a further voice:
(Coleridge
for David Farwell & Rob Dunham
)Hartman
)Nietzsche
)Hartman
) Derrida
) Broch
)in
for Michael Ondaatje
for bp nichol
after James Henry Breasted
To whom it may concern:
there are no bones in your jello, so I'll make no bones about the skeletal structure the lost form is wary, even perky, all in a gesture my sleep was perfect, dear lost friend, and our dignity danced there strictly costumed I wore black, you wore white, together we were all and nothing I am writing to remind you of causal effects and summaries, in other words, of the last time and parties, events to remember I have dismembered the black, and you, white perfection, what have you done with your patchwork, crazy, quilted, the perfect skijacket down and hills of rocky dance-cards I am sincere, you are sincere the plunder of memory and places, empty and filled, gardened or wild, in what pool swimming the surfaces 0, you were what I wanted, now disappeared and stained with the flow, such substance, such resin, such super-markets, you have disappeared like watercress in the sandwich, so, I recommend you, definitely, infinitely, somewhere, sometime, exactness of daffodils
signed
riff & ruff
)Serres
) Paz
for Luis Posse
for Catherine Taylor
for Allen Ginsberg's 6oth birthday
Cornelius Castoriadis'
my soul!
reading Richard Sieburth
for Daphne Marlatt
18 April 1988
Robert Graves saw-not the male-womb made scary in Euripides and even scarier in Malaparte's Kaputt with wooden dollsthe Goddess in multiples-of lovely women and aquiline facessaw her All Living-coursing into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, sheass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag-made male-minded by her, had to see her white and black-met her once in his novel The New Crete as the Hog goddess, sometimes named Sally-you may write with kindling, he says, or, loving accuracy, return to the mare's nest
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