The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser - Softcover

Blaser, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520245113 ISBN 13: 9780520245112

Verlag: University of California Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Spanning four decades of meditation on the avant-garde in poetry, art, and philosophy, the essays collected in The Fire reveal Robin Blaser's strikingly fresh perspective on "New American" poets, deconstructive philosophies, current events, and the state of humanities now. The essays, gathered in one volume for the first time, include commentaries on Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Mary Butts, George Bowering, Louis Dudek, Christos Dikeakos, and J. S. Bach.

Blaser emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s having studied under legendary medieval scholar Ernst Kantorowicz and having been a major participant in the burgeoning literary scene. His response to the cultural and political events of his time has been to construct a poetic voice that offers a singular perspective on a shareable world—and to pose that voice alongside others as a source of countermemory and potential agency. Conceived as conversations, these essays brilliantly reflect that ethos as they re-read the cultural events of the past fifty years.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Blaser is Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Among his many books are The Holy Forest (UC Press), Pell Mell, and Syntax. Miriam Nichols is College Professor at University College of the Fraser Valley and editor of Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser.

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"In his exquisite articulations of the flowers of associational thinking, Robin Blaser has turned knowledge into nowledge, the 'wild logos' of the cosmic companionship of the real."—Charles Bernstein, author of Republics of Reality: 1975-1995

"This is a landmark publication in American poetics."—Peter Gizzi, author of Some Values of Landscape and Weather

" Blaser is a fine poet and a superb representative of a tradition that is still undervalued. His work is very important."—Charles Altieri

Aus dem Klappentext

"In his exquisite articulations of the flowers of associational thinking, Robin Blaser has turned knowledge into nowledge, the 'wild logos' of the cosmic companionship of the real."Charles Bernstein, author ofRepublics of Reality: 1975-1995

"This is a landmark publication in American poetics."Peter Gizzi, author of Some Values of Landscape and Weather

" Blaser is a fine poet and a superb representative of a tradition that is still undervalued. His work is very important."Charles Altieri

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The Fire

Collected Essays of Robin BlaserBy Robin Blaser

University of California Press

Copyright © 2006 Robin Blaser
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520245112

Chapter One

The Fire

especially for Ebbe Borregaard

I am here writing about my poetry in relation to poetry. The writing had an occasion: for a few in San Francisco, where I read it last March 8th [1967]. I want to talk about the personalism and the so-called obscurity of my poems in relation to the sight, sound, and intellect that compose them. "The test of poetry," in Zukofsky's words, "is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection."

One difficulty I want to describe is that I'm haunted by a sense of the invisibility of everything that comes into me (aware that nothing is more invisible than emotion-by emotion, I mean the heat of one's sense of the war, or a place, or a body, or of the extensions of these, the earth, the existence of gods, and so forth-the I-have-seen-what-I-have-seen, recorded by Pound in "Canto II"). I believe there is a reality, which, given the leisure to live for it, is neither conceptual and systemized in the ordinary sense of these words-nor imageless. There are many times when, forced by exhaustion, I take the lazy way of the conceptual and imageless, but it is a kind of desire which leads me to write of that other, outside world. Because the personal stake in companionship becomes so great in the way I live, I am sometimes lost when a reader finds me uninteresting or too obscure, his interest too soon exhausted to come to any meeting. I am literal about that other reality. It is, I think, the purest storytelling to try to catch that light-and the difficulty of it, the loss of it, is personal. If I see the light, even fragmentarily, and lose it, that too is subject matter, and leads to a kind of heartless poem, for it is not the elegiac loss which interests me, but the difficulty, the activity, of holding on to it. Burning up myself, I would leave fire behind me.

To hold an image within the line by sound and heat is to have caught something that passed out there. The psychological accuracy of this perception is not enough; the sculptural imagistic quality is not enough; and the very aesthetic quality of taking the one image, or even three images as a whole, the beauty of the idea that you can write a single poem, is a lie. The processional aspect of the world has to be caught in the language also. The body hears the world, and the power of the earth over the body, the city over the body, is in terms of rhythms, meters, phrasing, picked up-the body's own rhythms compose those or it would shake to pieces.-The music of the spheres is quite real, but the sound of the earth must meet it. I suppose I want to say that the real business of poetry is cosmology, and I'm claiming my own stake in this. And this is the activity of telling the story-the necessity is chemical-it is not invented, but it is original, personal, singular, and even domestic. If one man gives up his life for the world, the energy of it is not symbolical: it is the story of one man tied to the heaven and hell he recognizes. No symbols.

My friend Stan Persky was reading to me one night when a passage turned up that is so much to my purpose, slightly re-worded, that I won't give the author credit: it is in that meeting entirely mine: "What we describe as imagination is no free play of the soul, but a real meeting with real elements that are outside of us, and what matters is not the surrender to the images of fantasy that appear, but to redeem those elements themselves. What we suppose we effect merely in our souls, in reality we effect on the destiny of the world."-Here, I wish to say that it is not language which is the source: it is the record of the meeting, and the magical structure of sight, sound, and intellect is indeed a personal responsibility. Language is given to us and in the most insidious way it controls sight, sound, and intellect, but it is also the medium which can be shaped.-Metaphor as a focus is an immediate escape from the ordinary focus, which rots for some reason I can't explain, and keeps me always from using the word we, though there is a kind of we that I hope to earn the right to use. But the poem offers a field of energy and activity-to be met by whatever companion can be found. If you imagine, as I do, that, at any waking moment, you are a corpuscle in the left wrist of god, then any reality is precisely to be found in the flow of corpuscles in that vast body.

In the constant interruption that it is to go to work every day, to talk in generalities of things that can only be known in specifics, this time guiding others through American writing, I'm struck by this thing called cosmology: Poe wanders off into a long prose piece, Eureka, which he calls a poem, and it is, drawing on all the contemporary science he can digest to record a cosmology; Emerson drops poetry and heads into poetically structured essays, wherein he can describe a cosmology; Thoreau drops poetry to write two strangely structured books, where, as in Walden, the detailed attention given to the seasons is cosmological; Melville goes about it backwards-in Moby-Dick, myths had to be reset so that they could say what they should say about origins, where he is, then later the poetry clanks along unable to hold on to what he wants; Whitman comes in with a new line, as open as he could make it; Henry Adams moves from the well-formed novel to the work on the great Virgin of the 13th century to tell in detail the story of a unified world; Pound puts it in the Cantos when he says the first thing was to break the iambic pentameter. It seems to me that the whole marvelous thing of open form is a traditional and an American problem-"hung up" on form because it was so difficult to open it. 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, which oddly has something to do with the public 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:

to tell of bodies transformed into new shapes you gods, whose power worked all transformations, help the poet's breathing, lead my continuous song from the beginning to the present world In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora: di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis, primaque ab origine mundi ad meo perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!

The sequence of energies may involve all kinds of things-anger may open a window, a sound from another world may completely reshape the present moment, the destruction of a friendship may destroy a whole realm of language or the ability to use it-each piece is in effect an extended metaphor (another word is probably needed), because in the serial poem the effort is to hold both the correspondence and the focus that an image is, and the process of those things coming together-so that the light from a white linen tablecloth reflects on the face of one's companion, becomes light, fire, and the white moth which happens to be in the room is also light in the dark around the table, and is thus both the light and the element of light that destroys it. I ask you to remember that every metaphor involves at least four elements-which are a story, and the bringing them together is an activity, a glowing energy if stopped over, if entered. If the joy one feels in the sunny morning comes out as: the boat on the fire of the sea moves slowly to burn out-the story is of a boat on the sea-the fire is the sun on the water and the movement is of the boat, of the flow of the sun, and of the passing of the sun toward night. The joy of the movement is held a moment, then unfolds the story of the four elements, the boat and where it is, and the sun and what it is doing.

I wish now to extend these remarks by referring to some sources, which, in this case, were brought to me by Stan Persky, who has turned anthropologist, and who offers the pleasures of a real discourse. The gift is a passage in Edith Cobb. She says, "I became acutely aware that what a child wanted to do most of all was to make a world in which to find a place to discover a self. This ordering reverses the general position that self-exploration produces a knowledge of the world" (540). Furthermore, while observing the "passionate world-making behavior of the child," she noted that "accompanied by a population of toys, fauna and flora, and artifacts that do duty as 'figures of speech,'" she became "keenly aware of those processes which the genius in particular in later life seeks to recall" (540, my emphasis). Edith Cobb in her interest in biological psychology moves to describe what she names a "cosmic sense," which in a separate essay, Margaret Mead describes as "a human instinctual need for a perceptual relation to the universe." This is the scientific basis for the proprioceptive process which Charles Olson speaks of. In this context, I am arguing not for my pretensions as a poet, but for what the poetry reflects, if it is entered. That the poet does the job of entering this world and continues through his life to record that entrance is a fact, not pretense-that it is personal, original, and singular is also a fact. And here I want to quote the ethnologist Frank Speck on the Naskapi Indians (Labrador). He says that among them the form of the earth is like a hill and floats upon the water. He calls this a general concept, which is not true; it is a well-known image among them, and his informant, Charley Metowe'cic, said that the earth's form comes to be known only from the testimony of a man about to die. "In the vision that comes at this time the mind can view the universe and sees all around the earth as it rises above the water. And he feels it rocking" (58). This is a statement which draws my attention because it is my own belief that any vision of the world is not complete until a man dies. I mean here that imagination is more a power to take in and hold than it is a power of making up, though it must in its activity take responsibility for the uncreated.

I want now to describe some very personal matters-as indications of the singularity-the personalness of language and form. I want here to create the image of a field which is true history, and autobiography, as well as land, place, and presence. I come to poetry with a definite sense of foreignness. Spicer once said that I was the only person he had ever met who could speak quotation marks, and these always appeared around the slang words I used. Now that given thing, language, comes to me through a combination of settled Americans on the one hand and from immigrants on the other. On the paternal side, a grandfather, born in the south of France, and a grandmother born in Wales, who was deeply ashamed of any non-English elements. That grandfather, Augustus Frederick Blaser, arrived in New York in the 1880s and came west to Sage, Wyoming, as a laborer for the railroad, and he was to work his way up to the exalted position of roadmaster and bishop of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. On the maternal side, a great-grandmother, whom I knew, from Springfield, Mass., who came west with the Mormons, and who had been secretary to Brigham Young. My own Roman Catholic thing comes from that great-grandmother's hatred of Mormons, so that my mother and I were in turn sent to the Catholics-with whom we were both to learn "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Latin. In the midst of this interplay of talk about revelation of God here on the American continent, somewhere on the Great Plains was my sense of it, and of the ritual mystery of the Catholic Church, performed for kneeling and rising men and women, we lived in houses that were always by the railroad tracks, sometimes between two railbeds-the houses were remodeled railway cars, sometimes dining cars-with window after window where the tables had been. These were painted yellow and placed upon cement foundations. There was always a vast desert of sagebrush, and in one's place a small garden, watered from a well-of poplar trees, goldenrod, and-the garden was one's own population. Shoshone and Blackfoot passed at a distance walking beside their wagons or dragloads. The people who lived and worked in this land were largely foreign-Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, and so on. Their hold on the land, the houses, the work, and the language was like that of migratory birds. Cities were dreams- I have never forgotten the early morning hum of the city waking up in the first city I had ever seen-Boise, Idaho. Towns I lived in had populations of 8 persons, 14, seldom 20-Kimima, Wapai, Orchard. Cities were imaginary- like oceans. The name of a man would be a town. Blaser, Idaho, has, according to the current Rand McNally Commercial Atlas, no population. In this setting, that force to be English and American, settled, not migratory, forced that paternal grandfather to whisper any French words he wished to remember. And so far as I know, in this, I was his only companion. If we were alone listening to the radio, we would play at translating the words of popular songs:

Tu es la creme de mon cafe Tu es le pois de ma soupe

Outwardly, to others, he was not foreign; the long southern a's and trilled r's of his French were secrets between us. He sported a goatee, and told me with increasing detail the strange tale that he was the lost Dauphin of France. This story and this language are fragmentarily preserved by me. None of his children knew it; my father denies his father was foreign born. When that grandfather was dying, riddled with cancer, I was called home from college to speak with him because the only words he knew were a childish French. And no member of the family knew enough to keep him company. That English and American thing had such force that the other English which most people spoke, more like Woody Guthrie's, was also forbidden sound and thought:

I been doin' some hard travelin' I thought you knowed

There was a step-grandfather besides, who was German, with one eye, and could not hide his accent. Because of his talk of the Kaiser, though the war was long over, they painted the house yellow, which was funny because the house was already yellow. But this was a bright yellow and when they threw a bucket of it over a window, the beautiful color was there, though it killed the verbenas in the window box. But the deer would have come to eat them anyway. Around this, like a circle with two circumferences, the house was surrounded by talk of Joseph Smith's golden tablets, and the hatred of that talk. The laughter that a prophet could be named Smith still rings in my head.

I think every poet has a favorite imagery which helps him to explain the preoccupations of his work. I have repeatedly chosen the Orphic, and in so doing, I will remind you of certain elements of Orpheus's story. Unfortunately, the usual reference to him covers his power in song over animals and rocks, and this has become thoroughly sentimentalized-the magic that it represents cheapened by the view that one wants power over rather than entrance to. There is fairly good evidence that Orpheus was a man, another Greek hero, of early date, pre-Homeric, and that his life is closely attached to the realm of Dionysus, who precedes Apollo at Delphi and later shares the oracle with him. Orpheus's death is recorded in the story, his journey to hell, which he was able to complete only once, though at least four entrances to hell were well known in ancient Greece. One part of his story has to do with the power of death over love and the power of death over the dead. The other part has to do with his death at the hands of the Bacchantes, when he is torn to pieces. His head floats down a river or over a stretch of Ocean and continues to speak in prophecies, but this is stopped by jealous Apollo, when he becomes really dead. Clearly, the Orphic Dionysus is being edited. In some peculiar sense, Orpheus is really repeating the life of Dionysus, the god who is both joyous and terrible, who is bringer of wine, who can be defeated, thrown into the sea by a mortal, locked in a chest, torn to pieces by giants, and who dies. That he holds within himself all the contradictions, the change and process of the world as it is known, and the terror that goes with that process, as Orpheus contradicts his power, has the power to charm with his music, but cannot charm the Bacchantes, has the power to bring Eurydice back from the dead, at least metaphorically, but cannot look at her. It is precisely in the image of the scattered body and mind of Orpheus that I place whatever I know about the poetic process-that scattering is a living reflection of the world.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Fireby Robin Blaser Copyright © 2006 by Robin Blaser. Excerpted by permission.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520245113
• ISBN 13: 9780520245112
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 522
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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