A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser, Mechanic of Splendor, Miriam Nichols
Palgrave
Macmillan, 2019
He was in his full magician mode in those days. Marvelous magical jewelry and dramatic flop hat. An enormous moonstone ring glowed on his finger and a necklace of wooden beads hung from his neck. He didn’t, as I recall, wear a cape, as Robert Duncan did, but he didn’t need one to make clear his otherness, his connection to dimensions beyond/within the workaday. He radiated a luminous beauty, at once rugged and glowing with sensitivity. Many years later, I took him to brunch at a small café on College Street in Toronto. As we were leaving, a waitress came to us and, addressing him, said, Excuse me, but I have to tell you that you are the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He did that to people. It wasn’t just his gorgeous French features accented by his prematurely white hair. Energy radiated from him. It got you. Enchanted you.
It got me, sitting expectantly in that cement bunker waiting to learn about someone named Charles Olson. I had no idea how lucky I was, or that what unfolded in that room would forever change me and shape my life. It is very unlikely in the spring of 1968 that any other university in the world offered a seminar—or course of any kind—on the work of Charles Olson. And there I was about to embark on a voyage that would define the rest of my life. How I got there is the tale of contingencies: of my friend, Bruce Rosen, bumping into me by chance and taking me to a reading by a poet named Creeley at UC Riverside in 1965; of the chance encounter at the SFU bookstore in 1967 with a book by a guy named Olson which drew my attention because it was edited by Creeley (it blew my mind); with the decision to return to university in the same term Olson’s name happened to appear on the list of courses offerings. Click click click, the balls go on their precise, geometric paths, even as the dice roll around the bowl and land on a 6 and a 1.
Robin had recently arrived in Vancouver from San Francisco to take the teaching position that was left vacant when Jack Spicer died. He seemed like an exiled prince in a distant land. He established himself in staid, grey, horribly Calvinist Vancouver like a burst of sensuous sunshine amidst the ever-present clouds, like the Baroness Münster in Henry James’s The Europeans. He had already attracted a group of smart, talented, creative students around him—Sharon Thesen, Gladys Maria Hindmarch, Brian Fawcett, Tom Grieve, Richard Rathwell, Cliff Andstein, and others. I adored him. He was beautiful. He was brilliant. He was learned. And he embodied a kind of danger, partly sexual, partly intellectual that excited us and prodded us. It was how he taught. He challenged us with ideas we had never dreamed of and with stories of marvels and wonders. When the Olson course ended (it never really ended) I signed on with him for another course, this one on H.D. and Pound, both of whom were news to me. I had no idea how much news they would bring.
Each student in that course was expected to lead a class on one of the writers. I was assigned H.D. As I recall, we skipped her short stuff and dove into the war trilogy. Robin lent me his copies of the Oxford editions—the only texts available and long out of print— which I photocopied and bound in rice paper covers (and eventually gave to Angela Bowering)—so that I could read the entire poem. Robin’s habit as a teacher of poetry was to have students read the work aloud, and I read a passage from Tribute to the Angels that goes:
Now polish the crucible
and in the bowl distil
a word most bitter, marah
a word bitterer still, mar
Wait, Robin said. What do those words—marah, mar—mean? Good question. When I admitted ignorance, I was immediately dispatched to the library—in those pre-Google days, you had to use books to find things out—and told not to come back until I could enlighten the class as to their meaning. Now? I said. Go, he said, and I went. (And I am still going.)
Several large dictionaries later, I returned with the information that marah and mar are the feminine and masculine forms of the Hebrew word for bitter. Thus the erotics of the iconography of the spiritual politics fell together in a stunning moment of archeological discovery, an entrance into so many knowledges, so many implications and explications, so many disciplines and ecstasies of the heartmind. It was also a moment of introduction to what I came to call the Conversation. H.D. led to G.R.S. Mead and The Pistis Sophia which I read as if under a spell. Who knew? A lapsed Methodist, my mind, as we used to say, was totally blown—like Balthazar, in The Flowering of the Rod, falling into the flash of light from Mary Magdalene’s hair and finding the cosmos there—heaven. The scales, as they say, fell from my eyes. What do you see then? It’s the same old stuff, but it has a further dimension to it—a sudden luminous depth beyond anything known. And movement. The war was revealed in imagination as a manifestation of another war, a war elsewhere, as another Beloved was revealed beyond and within in the grace of an outcast woman. I was swept up in it, and so my first ever publication, in Iron, a little literary magazine in Vancouver, was an essay I wrote for Robin on the war trilogy as Gnostic epic.
Of course it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Some of us tried to carry partially digested thinking into other classrooms where it was met with shock, surprise, sometimes even anger. Christened Blaser’s Red Guard (a badge I wear with pride) by the more conservative faculty, we delighted in provocations and confrontations. But under all the excitement and occasional silliness, a serious intellectual engagement and commitment formed, one that continues forming even up to this moment of writing about him. His reading lists were essential.
Miriam Nichols knew and loved Blaser in the same key. She studied with him. She travelled with him and his companion, David Farwell, to tour the Idaho of his early years. She has spent much of her adult life working in his archive to bring to light his astonishing work. She wrote brilliantly of that work in Radical Affections. And she painstakingly and immaculately went through dozens of tape recordings to transcribe and edit The Astonishment Tapes. She also edited his collected poems (The Holy Forest) and collected prose (The Fire). No one knows Blaser better than she. You sometimes encounter a biographer who for one reason or another loses respect for their subject and even develops a certain animus toward them. The trick is to remain critical while writing with love. It’s a trick that Miriam Nichols has mastered brilliantly. She gives us a full portrait of Blaser, including the blemishes and occasional failures, but there is never any doubt that she likes and respects her subject.
Her work, like that of Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham in their biography of Jack Spicer, walks a difficult line that holds together the life and the writing so that they illuminate each other without any reduction of complexity to some theory of psyche or sociology. It is a marvelous portrait that opens Blaser’s life and work and in so doing opens our eyes. This opening mirrors Blaser’s own engagement with the Open, an engagement, as Nichols emphasizes, at the heart of his being/thinking/writing. This comes out repeatedly in her narrative, but is especially important in understanding Blaser’s troubled relationship with the Canadian literary scene of the 70s and 80s and his omission/exclusion from official collections of Canadian literature.
Having immigrated to Canada in 1966 and become a Canadian citizen in 1974, Blaser considered himself Canadian (he always traveled on a Canadian passport), but not in an exclusive or nationalist sense. In fact one of the things he loved about Canada was its fabled lack of identity, the absence of the Unity (Identity) encoded in the USAmerican motto, E pluribus unum. The Canadian condition, a condition that arises from both the intractable presence of Quebec in the Canadian foundation, and the increasing presence of immigrants as an influence opening the culture beyond a narrow Calvinist provincialism, prohibits that unification in an identity. The so-called absence of a Canadian identity, while a source of endless anxiety for nationalist pundits, was cause for celebration in Blaser’s thinking, a mode of postmodern nationality.
Part of the problem was that the Canadian nationalist discourse in the 70s and 80s, while accepting of immigrants from around the world, was less sanguine about USAmericans. You could get by if you hid your roots, but if you didn’t watch out. The national (and nationalist) Canadian literary scene militantly defined itself as other than the US at a time when the US was engaged in an aggressive war against the small nation of Viet Nam. Immigrants from Sri Lanka or Nigeria were welcomed into the Canlit family. Blaser never made it. As Nichols relates, he attempted to write his way in by editing and writing about Canadian poets Louis Dudek and George Bowering, but he could never overcome the provincial Canadian academics’ dismissive attitude toward the poetry and poetics identified with Black Mountain College, Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, all of which was seen as somehow connected to USAmerican Imperialism. Throw in Blaser’s commitment to the transnational mind and his prescient attention to the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Avitol Ronell, and a slew of other speculative European and USAmerican thinkers, and Blaser’s work becomes positively radioactive in certain quarters
He was far too Catholic—and catholic—for a literary tradition grounded in plaid flannel Calvinism, British colonial literature, and a provincial exclusivist nationalism. He breached boundaries to the dismay of the border guards. Though he had rejected the Catholic church and its teachings, he kept alive an intense devotion to and concern for the sacred and its place and form in a postmodern world, a shared concern that animated his relationship with Charles Olson. Contrary to the claim of a noted critic that Blaser’s work is “wholly secular,” it is actually wholly sacred in its orientation toward and commitment to the articulation of the profound otherness of the depths of the world, depths that are lost to the secularism of modernity with its scientific positivisms and denial of the Invisible. His catholicism (small c) resonated with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of stammering, rhizomatic conjunction: “and and and”. A cosmos of staggering, stuttering plenitude.
Nichols’ biography is a welcome addition to the studies of postmodern poetry. It cements Blaser’s position as an important thinker and poet in a worldwide conversation about how to keep moving forward, how to stay open to the Creative in the midst of the epochal turmoil and challenges that face us. Any student of late twentieth century writing/thinking will find it immensely useful in its even handed treatment of the forces and counter forces at work in the English language North American literary field in the last half of the twentieth century, as well as its intimate portraits (there’s some great gossip) of Blaser and his companions in the struggle to keep poetry true to its ancient calling.
