The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University. He
is the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Most of the texts in this festschrift began as oral presentations at the
similarly titled 1995 Vancouver conference on the occasion of Robin
Blaser’s 70th birthday. For readers unfamiliar with the poetry scene
(which includes such landmarks as the Berkeley Renaissance, Black
Mountain College, Tish, Talonbooks, Coach House Press, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
Raddle Moon, and the Buffalo Poetics List), opening this book is like
arriving at eight in the morning at a party that’s been going on all
night. People still haven’t run out of things to say about their
involvements with the guest of honor, but they’re long since beyond
the basics. Throughout, the book seems to be harboring secrets. Michael
Ondaatje, for instance, opens his brief contribution by saying, “I’d
rather pass Robin a note privately telling how much I love his work.”
Most of the contributors are not as well known as Ondaatje, yet no
information is provided regarding who they are.

Nevertheless, an attentive reading reveals much about Blaser, his
community of friends, students and colleagues at Simon Fraser
University, and his poetic works such as The Holy Forest and
Image-Nations. Blaser’s ideas and opinions about writing receive
extended, careful treatments. These ideas were and are shared widely by
many fine and influential American and Canadian writers: Daphne Marlatt,
Susan Howe, Michael McClure, Rachel Blau Duplessis, and Steve McCaffery,
to name a few.

Charles Bernstein emphasizes Blaser’s insistence that poetry is a
“mapping of the unchartable yet-always-being-charted aspirations and
desperations, inhabitations and reparations, of the soul in and as
language.” Blaser extended this multiple insight into an attempt to
free people to experience “reading as composition,” and, of course,
writing as thinking. Pauline Butling points out that Blaser’s efforts
at liberation extend in many directions, including the political. She
cites his 1980 introduction to a selection of George Bowering’s poems,
in which Blaser praises Bowering’s “expansive and disjunctive
structures,” which “work to destabilize centres of authority whether
in poem or nation” while also helping to shape both a national and
transnational egalitarian politics and poetics.”

Leaving to the various handbooks of Canadian literature the historical,
systematic overviews of the poetry movement with which Blaser was and is
intimately involved, this festschrift extends to its readers the wisdom
and experience of practitioners of such art.