From an interview: (Paul Nelson) – And how would you describe the basic cosmology? What are the components of that worldview?
(Robin Blaser) – The main components are, first, that there isn’t one. That was what you felt and this was what the 20th century tried to do to us. It took us away and Marxism didn’t help at all unfortunately with that problem. Marxism is quite a different thing, but that’s when we’re already social and know how to move and then Marxism can speak to you. Otherwise, you’re fucked. You’ve not got a cosmos with which: Where’s God? We’ll you’re sure not going to…even an old Catholic like me isn’t going to turn into THAT. And Spicer, I mean, Spicer’s view of the Catholic Church (laughing heartily) IS ONE KICK IN THE ASS AFTER ANOTHER! HA! and I just loved it. And Duncan, ooooh Duncan. He was an occultist in some part and the occult tradition was a fascinating one. We all came to know of it. But the occult was a counter Christian, counter religious tradition that was also a religious tradition, whatever a religion means, essentially to be tied to a world at large. So all of us were busy working around it, sometimes at quite a loss. Spicer is utterly fascinating for the size of the world in his work. First I think it’s by experimenting with language. Spicer was so marvelous since (because of) the fact that language wasn’t working. It didn’t give him a world. It didn’t give any of the rest of us a world. It just jabbered on & on & on. And lectures could just be insolent jabbering, so you were sitting there and you’d try to get some Shelley in all this jabberwocky. I’m not going to mention any of the professors. They’re dead now. I’m glad I’m not. But it was simply a matter of finding language as the way with which you could walk on a piece of earth…
8 comments:
He is saying that he didn't have any world view, but orbited around a few?
Marxism, Christianity, the Occult.
Those appear to have been his choices, and he never really signed up with any of them?
Is that a fair restatement?
Kirby, I'm not sure any restatement is fair, ever. Discursive slicing and dicing is the academic trade, but it's sometimes okay to withhold that, too.
But what do you think, based on the rest of the interview? Anyway, I've put the critic-beast to bed for the time being--at least until the poet safely crosses the waters of oblivion.
I barely know his work, so should remain silent. I had the feeling there was a certain majesty in this poet but I never got around to him. I was just trying to see if I understood what was here.
He's recently dead, and I have a lot of respect for the recently dead. I had forgotten this that he had just passed. I never knew him, except as a figure in books.
May he rest in peace, and those who loved him find some solace however they can.
If Robin had a religion it was the worhsip/whoreship of beauty. He was a presence never to be forgotten. His stories about his friend Jack Spicer were a treasure to hear in person. May he and Jack be reunited in eternity, their glittering eyes gay.
Kirby:
There is a sentence in Blaser's prose poem "Robin Blaser: Curriculum Vitae" that echoes your restatement, but in terms that suggest his commitments as well as his refusals: "I was always a guest―of family, of religion, and especially of language―nothing more, nothing less."
You are right, I think, to sense a certain majesty, though "majesty" is a peculiarly inapt word since Blaser's great gift as a person was humility, a virtue that over time became compatible with the most ambitious of intellectual appetites. He was, as it were, a student of majesty, developing a far keener understanding of that quality than did his friends Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, though they sought themselves to occupy the throne. But I'm no fan of majesty. In modernism it's the Poundian quality, and we see where that tends. I prefer grace, H.D.'s aim and virtue; Blaser's too.
If I had to restate Blaser's philosophy I would turn to the envoi to his 1983 book Syntax, which opens with two quotes: "Aristotle said, 'all men by nature desire / to know' / Dante added, 'every man by nature is a / friend to every other man' // I believe both worlds / and dream their necessity." Later, alluding to the constellations, and to heaven more generally, I suppose, he writes, "the shapes of happiness shimmer in the air, / composing, for the good is our own composition."
Ben F.
Ben, thanks for these words: grace and virtue seem particularly necessary--now more than ever. And those words make good companions of majesty: they are probably more durable and available as time goes on. Now I'm digging through boxes to locate my copy of Syntax: thanks for the sharing those quotes from it.
Ben, thanks for writing this. It's odd but I see him aboard a Greek ship with all the others recently dead, rowing towards some other shore on a vast dark lake. It's odd because the image is so antiquated: they might just as well be on a Love Boat type vessel, dipping prawns in some mass-produced sauce, but I'd prefer the Greek ship, an Argo, with all the naughts, knotty. Was he still actively producing poetry right up to the end? Did he go over relatively happily?
In Jack Clarke's essay on Olson called "Tramping the Bulrushes," he says this: "Of the few still alive (1991) who methodically 'hold on' whom one might turn to for inspiration, I might cite Robin Blaser because he has even given us a formula: scholarship--cosmos--happiness."
That, for me, catches most essentially Robin's beauty and his legacy for a couple of generations of writers he nurtured.
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