Saturday, December 9, 2006, Burnaby, BC

So, last night at the Western Front, I walked in with Lou Rowan and soon started drinking red wine. George Bowering and Jean Baird showed up early and George told me he had not looked at my essay on him yet. (I had talked to Jean earlier in the day and she relayed the message on to George.) Michael from the Kootenai School of Writing was there, a bunch of other people as well, including Peter and Meredith Quartermain. I told Peter this was the EVENT of the MILLENNIUM (so far) and he told me he was going to steal the line, and I gave him my blessings, but when it did come out with him at the podium, he almost got it right. Oh well.)

 

There were appetizers like cheese (some of which George called underwear cheese which I took to be a reference to a strong degree of stinkiness and thought about making a laundry reference, but passed) and chips and before long, trays of shrimp, oysters and halibut, lots of fried halibut started to appear, some distributed by George as friendly waiter. George introduced me to Stan Persky with the phrase: listen to that accent! which I immediately understood as a Chicago accent, so I piled it on, remembering Stan was originally from Chicago. We had a chat about Chicago and some of his recent work which had some Chicago references, but did not talk much after that.

 

Lissa Wolsak arrived and I went over to say hello. It was good to see here there. I did not think she was going to make it. I introduced her to Lou when he came around. Lou and I had a little chat when we first came in. He split up with Ginger in October and is looking for some kind of meditation exercise to help him get through it. I, of course, suggested Kum Nye and he mentioned he saw that referenced in the Binghamton Blues piece. I should send him an email reminder along with a link to Stephanie’s book. Lissa is a doll. She’s amazingly bright, an excellent writer and a healer with a thriving practice using a field technique. She read one of my essays right about the time when I was just getting some confidence in what I was doing and said it was right on, which really emboldened me. Her timing was divine.

 

I could sense Lissa had some medicine for Lou, so I left them alone and told her to talk with him by saying to her Lou may be a potential client. I mingled and had more wine. (I had bought Lissa a glass.) When I returned, Lou left before too long and I could sense Lissa was eyeing her exit.

 

I think the Quartermains, folks like that, and Language Poetry in general, these folks may be too smart for their own good. There is a heart connection that seems to be missing and I think Robin is just coming into heart issues in a huge way as he contemplates death. I think you’ll see softer and more accessible poems from Robin in the next couple of years. He has SO much heart, there is no way that it cannot get into the poems. One he read written YESTERDAY was quite good and memorable. It was about seizing the moment: Never let the world go by… I would love to have a copy of that poem. One other thing about Peter: He lusted after my hat and inferred he was going to steal it.

 

The reading started and Peter was emcee and talked too much. He admitted it and George was heckling, which I thought was totally appropriate, given Peter’s inability to get out of the way. George read first and, using his left hand to gesticulate, read:

 

Who’s There?

 

the room talks to itself

                                    coloured Persian

and wraps its thinking-

                                    lights around

the man bent over

                             a drinking fountain

who is black

                    and white

who transliterates

                            into one crouching

over his book

                      of loose pages

and another clapping

                                  his hands and pointing

his toe

           playing musical chairs

and chances

                    among deep-seated minds

whose laugh counter-

                                   points the razzle

of crows outside

                           cawing down the chimney

as if to enter between

                                   firecat-andiron’s

serious, childish, jasper eyes

                                               the room talking to itself

 

George finished and then from his seat mentioned that he forgot to introduce the next person, who was not a poet, nor a reader, as he prefaced his reading with, and his name was something like Michael Vardi. The poem he chose for the occasion was:

 

one word of wisdom

 

I’d just given a talk on what I thought were

the irreparables of our time – wow! – and was

standing outside on the grass smoking a cigarette

 

when a young man came up, self-induced plainness shining

all over him – he said, ‘I had trouble following you,’ and

he went on about someone telling him he was just to or-

dinary, and what, he seemed to ask, could he do about that –

 

I said ‘Tell me, have you ever in your whole life felt or-

dinary – even once?’

 

after a long pause, searching every sparkle of his honesty

he said very quietly, ‘no’ –

 

“Well” I said, ‘you’ve turned it inside out, exactly as you

must – since the ordinary is always and only a rumor about

somebody else’-

 

‘And,’ I added, ‘why not tell whomever-it-may-concern to put

the ordinary where the sun don’t shine – everybody’s got a place

like that’ –

 

And the young man introduced Daphne Marlatt. I’d never seen her before but have heard her name often. She was one of the TISH editors and was born in Australia, educated at UBC like George, but unlike him also at Indiana and lives now in Victoria. She read a poem from Pell Mell that I had just seen for the first time Wednesday night:

 

Silver-winged red devil, a toy from Mexico

 

the place is poisoned   history is effective,

not progressive    date: anytime, or

the Cheyanne massacre and freezing, 1879.

date the re-entry and then the return

from the wound of mankind    it is

not the womb of woman, nor is it

the Greek male-womb, the substitute

it is our violence – that inside of

ourselves, which gods inhabit,

though they are real outside the inside,

continuous grass, repeated sand in the

glass of sky-scrapers, golden, sunning,

melted forms, banks on rivers of

our violence    I have thought the intellect

sweet and the bare-forms of poets,

hairy-wrists, graceful, the stench and

the beauty, bright and terrible, crabs

in the hair of their chests or the clean

smooth flesh variable   I

sometimes thought they were priests or

the same thing, revolutionaries, I thought they

were baseball players, lovers

or beauties    they were at a loss

in the language, ever so much

at cross-purposes with the world

of that violence which is our nature,

endlessly before us, where

the inside turns into the outside, dying

and other   now, knowing the

source does not look like ourselves,

virgin and child in the icon

sit in a tub of blue weather,

two rivers pour into okeanos

where fish begin the dangerous

beginning, somewhat

familiar, the peculiar cause

of imagery somewhere    if you

pound the table the wings shiver,

silver, on springs at the shoulders of

the red body

 

Stan Persky was next, the old Chicago hand. He moved up to Van from San Francisco with Robin in 1966, and they were lovers at the time, but broke up in Vancouver. Stan read a poem which goes back to the time he and Robin were first together, in the early 60’s:

 

Sophia Nichols,

 

the wind hits and returns    it is easy to personify

a new place and language,    but the new body stings

 

these men with green eyelids, drawing their worth,

it was rumoured, from Egypt, knew

 

the work is a part of it    a power arrived at the

same thirst

 

                    he borrowed a head for a day

 

but which head    the phrases tremble in the other

mouth    it is true and false    the veil of her face,

 

an old porcelain, not for the hand to comfort    she

moved beyond the sop one gave for affection   ‘My

 

success has been to keep duty and love alive’   she said

her hand waved with the power of disease    Sophia

 

Nichols of the orchards, the deserts, the flooded

ponds and games wherein the moon sought our feet

 

died with a mouth full of tumour    it is true and

false    the moon flowers ( that it is Blake talking )

 

tonight it is the half blossom and the stars too

above this mud are from the other mouth   this city

 

untouched    the streets, Hotel Lyric have a foreignness,

a place outside a window    a sound of bees pulling

 

the lilac    above cement this wonder  ( the other mouth )

that crickets were men once who so loved the muses they

 

forgot to eat    now fed on thistles, the language must

sting    the flesh turn to a dew ( the other mouth ) the

 

loss,    some glistening blood on the leaves of the mirror

plant    Sophia Nichols of the story, the goldenrod,

of the snake that entered the cage and ate the captured

sparrows, the telegraph keys, pale yellow paper,   of

 

the Odyssey and the homing stories of the soul,    the sea

imaginary, light and foaming green on the rocks   dark

 

further out as the eyes of the cat

                                                                if she would be

free from words, she would free me    even in the night

 

there are birds summoned by words

 

Ellen Tallman was next. Her husband Warren, from Tumwater, Washington as George points out often, was the center of the group that helped create the environment in which TISH was spawned. He and Ellen were friends of Duncan, Spicer and that gang, and she mentioned first meeting Robin at a gathering of anarchists in 1946. She mentioned Robert’s word for something being full of light and that word would be GLAMOURS which I first saw in Michael McClure’s work. I asked Michael about that reference and he had forgotten, so it was wonderful to have that bit of information from Ellen. She read a poem about Cortes Island entitled: Mountain, which I cannot find in The Holy Forest, argh!

 

Ellen introduced Robin, who had to wipe away tears from his eyes. I love hearing his laugh, which I came to know interviewing him and hearing it over and over when I was transcribing the interview. He began with a poem that had been left out of the last version of The Holy Forest, entitled:

 

Quitting a Job

 

 

1

 

Nothing to it. I counted my money. There wasn’t much.

 

I took a cup of courage out of the Charles River.

Yellow iris perched like canaries on the shore.

 

Climb out of the rocks, I said. With thirty-three years,

you have a few left. Whatever the fortune-teller in Chicago

said, you won’t die strangled.

 

The tea leaves sparkle.

 

O, I expect the joy to last all summer. I’ll hang on to it

with a gull’s beak.

 

The hot Boston summer. The sweating thighs. The slow, building

irritation with the wilted people. Streets. Subways. Window-

ledges.

 

Dusty sparrows dart among the red-legged pigeons, winning bread.

 

Last week I quit my job. It is a geographical necessity, I said,

to find an image for this century. Crowded. Speechless. I need

time.

 

Whatever it is. Here, where it isn’t, the blue-winged flies are

almost beautiful.

 

I think of Lawrence’s angry poems.

 

What have they done to you, men of the masses,

creeping back and forth to work!

 

Ah, the people, the people!

surely they are flesh of my flesh!

 

2

 

The dancer completes a turn. Stands waiting to resume.

Rhythmic. Sexual. Begins again on Cambridge Street.

 

The arms lift away from the body, for balance.

The hands close, breathless, touching the air

as a cat paws at unimagined beasts.

 

Look at it!

The joy will outlast summer.

I quit my job.

I abolished money.

 

The moon shines through the straggly body of a

tree of heaven. (They grow out of gutters, drainpipes

among the falling bricks, between vacant

houses.)

 

The stars are like leaves this summer.

I’ve tasted their sweat.

 

I think of Tu Fu’s rabbit pounding bitter herbs.

The seeding grass. And yes, this blue (O, inward)

mountain.

 

It was pretty cool that he started with this, as I had marked it as one of the early poems which bears repeating, in fact, the first of them, since I began reading the new edition of The Holy Forest. The line: It is a geographical necessity, I said, to find an image for this century, I found rather compelling. And I had noted that this was one poem which was not included in any previous books. That fact is interesting because it seems as if that line suggests one of Blaser’s essential quests, and that being the effort to find an image which will inform the post-modern era, the era after the death of the old gods and before the birth of the new. I asked Robin about this and he said he was just not getting what he needed from Boston. The fact that it is the East Coast and still reacting to the shadow European culture (British culture mainly) was still casting over the former colonies. On the West Coast, the energies of Asia were being assimilated more readily than back east and I am sure this is what Robin was feeling, but that was never spoken last night. I asked him if he found that image, or did it turn out to be several images, such as boat, dancer, tree (forest, orchard) and he agreed that it was several images. I asked Miriam Nichols about it and she said the poem was likely found in a drawer somewhere, but did not address the intellectual nature of Robin’s quest for the essential image of the post-modern era.

 

The next poem was one dedicated to Robert Creeley, about whom Robin said he was always around him, like Duncan and Spicer. The poem is also from Charms, like the poem Stan Persky read, and is entitled:

 

A Gift

 

 

there are in this room, two tables

and in this one, three

 

they are full of invisible motion

shaped out of  their origin

 

oak, redwood, mahogany

out of the window    boy thieves

 

with flashlights in the fig trees

no bodies distinct from their souls

 

no city distinct from a language

from tracings of the new Wells Fargo

 

Building ( 42 stories )

through the fog,  welders’ lights glow

 

the grapevines twist around

the city    in your mouth

 

a concurrence   the poet’s kiss

given,   caught like a love adept

 

on my lips    the attraction

of it  scattered in public

 

where, now and then,   god

knows you    your love

doesn’t count    in this

 

No city distinct from language, he says, and this is one of his lifelong concerns, how we can maximize use of language to go beyond what we have got. He addressed this a few times in the interview we did in October and he understands that the poet must be the one who keeps the use of language sacred in a society mired in ads and doublespeak. The poet ought to try cornering reality from different angles (different languages) so he/she can get their mind around it (reality) more easily and certainly with more depth. We see the depth lacking in our society and Robin made a mention of the difficulty in communicating experience. Part of that may be that the range of experience of most people in North America is shrinking. If it is something that happened on TV, or was accessible from a personal computer, or video game, then a North American may have experienced it, but REAL experience is slipping away to all but the few who have opened their consciousness to it, such as the poets and other artists.

 

Next was a later poem (1996) which he said was a parabola, which is a term in physics for a certain kind of curve. The poem is entitled:

 

Pentimento 1

 

 

it’s a parabola!    that’s it, when you get to my age,

words and books are – oh! – up-so-down, of varied mind:

the lane beside my home beaten by cars turning into

electric garages, out of house/into house – garbage cans

and compost bins – a wilderness of clematis climbs

the telephone wires which birds mark and squirrels

trapeze above cats stalking – scavengers, who are shadows

of this culture’s wounds go by the bye, looking

for beer cans to cash in – metaphoric traffic of two

materialities of what we are in language, its fingering

grasp and streetwise mica wander in the slick

that language left when it flew through the air, unisexual

and transmundane – and cared less that desire composes

nature – uncovered facts of whose body-in-pieces –

 

            heartland        of moonburn

                                                         subsists at midnight

            a shallow time,

                                     where horizontals and verticals

            misshape, mistake, and go

            after themselves –

                                      adventurers

            of FAR

 

Again Robin is onto the subject of language and the culture shaped by its use. The wounds of this culture no doubt being the treatment of the environment, which paves open space and turns critters of all kinds into scavengers. These scavengers, twisted, but yet still nature, in traffic with the creatures who live life trying to convince themselves they are happy with STUFF and the trappings of suburban life. Yes, Blaser lives in the city, but the neighborhood he describes and the consciousness he decries are most suburban. It’s car culture. McClure called the driving the car personality enshrined and this is what Robin’s reacting to in the poem.

 

David Farwell, his long-time partner, helped him keep his reading list in order and stick with it. He also passed around a camera and George was among the people taking shots with it.

 

The last poems are either new, or I did not take good enough notes, but are either titled or started with the lines:

 

The Tired Century (with an epigraph by Rene Char,)

Lady Bug, Lady Bug

B.B. Gun

8:25PM, November 6, 2006

15, November, 2006

14, August, 2005

8, December, 2006 – a poem which he read twice, which had an AMAZING sense of heart and started with Never let the world go by… and finally a poem which includes at least two of those aforementioned images which may or may not be ones for the era after the post-modern, dancers and boats:

 

Image-Nation 19 (the wand

 

 

I have told many things and want

to tell more in a small time   to count far off,

ontologically from a crystal, a plant,

an animal, or the order of the world’

simply

           and ‘we drift together toward

the noise and the black depths

of the universe’   celebrate the

sudden hang-up of our visibility,

celebrate the sudden beauty that

is not ourselves   careless   unwrapped

(ducis)    the solar origin drifts

in the same boat

                          what did

dance in this dancer    was

the first difference among poppies and

white horses of advertisements,

the snow-storm and the grapes

from Africa   and the smile, exactly

and repetitions, but joyous, wintering

in Sais, writing memorable letters out

of the shattered various crystals, rocks, grottoes,

leaves, insects, animals large and

small    ‘plenitude and enchantment,

wings, eggshells, clouds and snows’

 

so to have forgotten, from the inimitable

solar mix, ‘unwilling to become a

higher key’   on Bach’s bedside table,

Leibniz’s De Arte Combinatoria,

at the last minute – numbers

and numbers, multitudes as

the wind is, fish, I had

forgotten miracles and money

in the mouth of, walked by, in

my lanterned garden where the

nightingale sometimes jugged to our

joyance, various, pitch and

glass of magic grammar

and presentiments – the fabled

universe, solvent and fortunes,

the assiduous sweetness among

other stones

 

there we have headed for frying pans,

hospitable, and alone, or the same,

voiceless in the common name,

scattered colours, earlier shapeless,

a candy-wrapper with a phone number

on it suffices to call the largeness, and

the smallness – what of that & on the

clothes-line, stiffened handicraft

of meaning, amenable comfort – and

Persian cats, where the rugs

flowered    take ‘real’ life

and store it in the cupboards,

the shoe-strings and decorations

of natural trees – whisper and

whistle of missing leaves – it’s

winter  –  or summer     or some

other time in the great ritual

of plenitude and enchainment

 

the infinite who belongs to this race

of many things, the gentle death,

ignorance, and innocence last

summer, the youth of it, the

violence with roses and ivy,

sensible words, laughing rose

petal or someone   the inner

muscle has worn out – amidst broad

leaves and harbours, linked to

the observer,    submerged

or proximous, exactly like that

which he loves, startling noise,

clarity and shadow, the heights

of ourselves equal to our shadows,

night and day, the miracle of

many things, the ‘proliferation

of geneses’

 

1. Where is the point of view? Anywhere

at the source of light. Application,

relation, measurements are made

 possible by aligning landmarks. Attention. One

can line up the sun and the top

of the tomb, or the apex of the

pyramid and the tip of its shadow.

This means that the site may

not be fixed at one location.

 

2. Where is the object? It too must

be transportable. In fact, it is,

either by the shadow that it casts

or the model that it imitates.

 

3. Where is the source of light?

It varies, as the gnomen.

It transports the object in the

form of a shadow. It is the

object; this is what we will

call the miracle.                                                                                      )Serres

 

 

most beautiful    stars, balls

tinsel, bubbles, red water, the wand

 

I love the line which states: the heights of ourselves equal to our shadows. Of course this is literally true when one walks in sunshine, or moonlight, but the metaphorical shadow must be recognized and integrated if the querent seeks to fulfill potential. 

 

There is no more distinguished Blaser scholar than Miriam Nichols, who edited the two books launched last night, The Holy Forest of course and Blaser’s collected essays The Fire. In her indispensable essay which serves as the introduction for Even on Sunday, an essential collection of essays, readings and archival materials on Robin Blaser which she also edited, she states Blaser’s poetry asks us to not:

 

abandon the work of exegesis because it is without end, but to let ourselves to be pulled into it – tricked as Spicer would say – and also tricked into the work of constructing a world.

 

Through that investigation we not only begin, she says: to create our own world, but to expand our field of attention.

 

So the Serres Blaser quotes extensively in Image-Nation 19 (the wand  is Michel Serres, the French philosopher who is, according to Wikipedia: “…interested in developing a science which does not rely on a metalanguage in which one account of science is privileged and accurate. To do this he relies on the concept of translation between accounts rather than settling on one as authoritative. For this reason Serres has relied on the figure of Hermes (in his earlier works) and angels (in more recent studies as messengers who translate back and forth between domains.”

 

Again the concept of language(s) and its/their role in shaping us. Again the cross of cultures. Again on the frontier shaped by a tremendous aversion to war, the carnage of which affected Serres from his early boyhood.

 

Yes, our field of attention has expanded. No one in the new century has offered a more complete lifework than what was launched last night at the Western Front in Vancouver. Mythic evenings such as this one are few and are getting more rare. It takes a consciousness like Blaser to create a field of energy that allows us to become huger than we were as we stepped across the venue’s threshold.

 

I watched Robin after the reading as he patiently signed copies of his books for well-wishers, waiting for a time when I could ask him the questions to which I referred above. George came up to him and kissed him on the lips, and left. Once he was gone Robin said: Prick-tease.

 

Paul Nelson

Burnaby, BC

6:03P – 12.9.06