The Astonishment Tapes: Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends

By Robin Blaser and Miriam Nichols

The edited transcript of revealing autobiographical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser
 
Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, explored his homosexuality, engaged in a lively arts community, and met fellow travelers and poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. The three men became the founding members of the Berkeley core of what is now known as the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry.

In the company of a small group of friends and writers in 1974, Blaser was asked to narrate his personal story and to comment on the Berkeley poetry scene. In twenty autobiographical audiotapes, Blaser talks about his childhood in Idaho, his time in Berkeley, and his participation in the making of a new kind of poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is the expertly edited transcript of these recordings by Miriam Nichols, Blaser’s editor and biographer.

In The Astonishment Tapes Blaser comments extensively on the poetic principles that he, Duncan, and Spicer worked through, as well as the differences and dissonances between the three of them. Nichols has edited the transcripts only minimally, allowing readers to make their own interpretations of Blaser’s intentions.

Sometimes gossipy, sometimes profound, Blaser offers his version on the inside story of one of the most significant moments in mid-twentieth century American poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is of considerable value and interest, not only to readers of Blaser, Duncan, and Spicer, but also to scholars of the early postmodern and twentieth-century American poetry.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388232

Book preview

THE ASTONISHMENT TAPES

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETICS

Series Editors

Charles Bernstein

Hank Lazer

Series Advisory Board

Maria Damon

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Alan Golding

Susan Howe

Nathaniel Mackey

Jerome McGann

Harryette Mullen

Aldon Nielsen

Marjorie Perloff

Joan Retallack

Ron Silliman

Jerry Ward

THE ASTONISHMENT TAPES

Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends

ROBIN BLASER

in company with Warren Tallman, Angela Bowering, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Dwight Gardiner, Martina Kuharic, and Daphne Marlatt

EDITED BY MIRIAM NICHOLS

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion and Scala Sans

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Double Portrait of Robin Blaser, detail, right panel, 2001, © Christos Dikeakos; courtesy of the artist

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are courtesy of the Robin Blaser Estate, housed in the Robin Blaser Fonds, Contemporary Literature Collection, Special Collections and Rare Books, Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University.

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blaser, Robin.

     The astonishment tapes : talks on poetry and autobiography with Robin Blaser and friends / Robin Blaser in company with Warren Tallman, Angela Bowering, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Dwight Gardiner, Martina Kuharic, and Daphne Marlatt ; edited by Miriam Nichols.

         pages cm. — (Modern & contemporary poetics)

     Includes bibliographical references and index.

     ISBN 978-0-8173-5809-9 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8823-2 (e book)

  1. Blaser, Robin. 2. Blaser, Robin—Interviews. 3. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Blaser, Robin—Friends and associates. 5. Poetics. 6. Poetry—History and criticism. I. Nichols, Miriam, editor. II. Title.

     PS3552.L37Z46   2015

  811'.54—dc23

2015007046

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Out of Idaho

2. Berkeley: Astonishments

3. Ernst Kantorowicz: Falling into History

4. Dante and the Metaphysics of Light

5. Moderns and Contemporaries: The Knowledge of the Poet

Appendix A: List of Names

Appendix B: Guide to the Complete Transcript of the Tapes

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Photographs

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to my research assistants at the University of the Fraser Valley, Katrina Janzen and Mark Toews, for their assistance in getting The Astonishment Tapes transcribed. I couldn’t have taken on this task without their help. Special thanks to Mark for digitalizing the tapes as well as assisting with the transcription. Karen Tallman’s kind permission to publish these transcribed recordings of her late father, Warren Tallman, has made the project possible. My thanks as well to the peer reviewers for their comments and useful advice, which were used to improve this book significantly. I am also grateful for the support of the University of the Fraser Valley and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Astonishment Tapes are a series of autobiographical audiotapes that tell the story of a poet and a poetics in the making. Born in Denver, Colorado, to Ina Mae McCready Blaser and Robert Augustus Blaser, Robin Blaser spent his early childhood in small desert railroad stops in Idaho. Both his father and maternal grandmother, Sophia Nichols, worked for the railway. By the time of his adolescence, the family had settled in Twin Falls, Idaho. After brief stints as a student at Northwestern University and the College of Caldwell, Idaho, Blaser began his life as a poet and scholar in earnest when his family sent him to Berkeley in 1944. Blaser studied medieval, Renaissance, and romantic literatures. He took courses from distinguished scholars such as the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz. He also participated in the cultural scene around the university, a scene now called the Berkeley Renaissance. In 1946, he met poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan and began to attend Duncan’s off-campus study group on modernist writers. Without the help of current scholarship, the group worked its way through the textual dazzle of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Federico García Lorca. In a 1999 interview, Blaser describes Duncan’s soirees: "So Duncan lived in this place on Telegraph Avenue called Throckmorton and there he set up a thing and it included an enormous number of people. There would be thirty or so. We read Finnegans Wake there, each of the thirty people having to feed in information so we could get through because this predates even the key to Finnegans Wake and stuff that came out a couple of years later. I mean there was nothing that you could do with it. And also The Cantos, we did The Cantos, we had Mallarmé, we had García Lorca (Interview," EOS 356). As Blaser says on the tapes, such experiences brought the intellectual shock of international modernism; then Spicer and Duncan performed the possibility of a contemporary poetic practice beyond the moderns. In Robert Duncan’s Medieval Scenes (c. 1950), Blaser found for the first time an example of a serial poem, a form of the long poem that both Spicer and Blaser would adapt to their own practices. Blaser thus speaks of his meeting with Spicer and Duncan as fateful. In his essay on Spicer, The Practice of Outside, he comments that Jack sometimes gave his birthdate as 1946, the year they all met (Fire 161).

During his formative years at Berkeley, Blaser came to value a life in poetry and art more than an academic career. As a result, he left the university without finishing his dissertation, which was supposed to cover the poetic drama from Wordsworth’s The Borderers to Hardy’s The Dynasts. And I took all of my exams, Blaser remembers, language exams and stuff and so on and so forth, and then just dipped out (Interview, EOS 354). He was granted an MA and then completed an MLS (Master of Library Science). In 1955, he accepted a position as a librarian in the Widener Library at Harvard. Blaser dates his beginnings as a poet from his time in Boston, because this is when he began to distinguish his own work from Spicer’s and Duncan’s (Fire 9). The Boston Poems lay the groundwork for The Holy Forest, Blaser’s lifelong serial poem. The most impressive of these early pieces is The Hunger of Sound, a poem which gives shape to Blaser’s poetic territory through tree imagery, the titular image of the Forest. Blaser’s poe/tree—the pun is bad but useful in this context—grows out of the roots and branches of language; the genealogical tree of family, friends, and literary companions; and the murmuring of a nonhuman nature that has been named and ordered by human language (as in the place-name Orchard, Idaho) but is not reducible to it. This important image also serves to position Blaser’s project among the leaves of past masters. For the adolescent Blaser, Walt Whitman was an important source, but as The Hunger of Sound predicts, his most enduring and significant master would be Dante Alighieri.

Once established in Boston, Blaser missed his West Coast friends, as his unpublished letters to Duncan and Spicer attest. Luckily Blaser’s romantic partner at that time, James Felts, a biochemist, received and accepted a job offer in San Francisco. In 1958, Blaser resigned his position at the Widener and took a European tour before rejoining Felts in San Francisco and finding work in the library at San Francisco State College. During the early 1960s, Blaser wrote the first serials of The Holy Forest: Cups, The Park, The Faerie Queene, The Moth Poem, and Les Chimères, as well as the first four Image-Nation poems, a series meant to be interspersed throughout The Holy Forest. However, his personal life during this period was turbulent. The old Berkeley community had splintered into factions. Spicer’s growing alcoholism was affecting his relationships; Spicer and Duncan had a falling-out, and Blaser often found himself uncomfortably in the middle. In 1962, he began an affair with Stan Persky, a young writer in Spicer’s circle, and broke up with Felts. This strained his relationship with Duncan, and in 1964 the two quarreled over Blaser’s translations of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères. The quarrel was fraught with personal tensions, but the sticking point, as Blaser explains on the tapes, was a disagreement over poetics and the nature of language. The quarrel played out in public in a special issue of Audit/Poetry 4:3 (1967) that records Duncan’s objections to Blaser’s translation and includes Duncan’s own version of the Nerval poems. From Blaser’s point of view, this was a public reproach and a betrayal by a longtime friend and mentor. The result was the loss of a vital and sustaining companionship in poetry. When Spicer died in the alcoholics’ ward of the San Francisco Hospital in 1965, Blaser was ready for a change. The next year, he accepted the offer of a professorship from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver), then the newest university in British Columbia.

When Blaser arrived in Vancouver with Stan Persky in 1966, Simon Fraser University was beginning to acquire a reputation for radicalism. The city also offered a community of eager young writers. Under the tutelage of American immigrants Ellen and Warren Tallman, both of whom had become instructors at the University of British Columbia (UBC), local writers George Bowering, Frank Davey, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, and David Dawson were creating a distinctive line of Canadian postmodernism through their poetry newsletter, Tish. Brash and cheeky, the newsletter caused a stir in Canadian poetry circles with its manifesto-like tone and challenge to established poets. By the time Blaser arrived, the Tallmans had facilitated visits from Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov and organized several large poetry conferences as well, including the now-famous Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963. When Blaser relocated to Vancouver, he quickly became a mentor for local writers and students. He would remain at Simon Fraser for the next twenty years, teaching in the Department of English and the Centre for the Arts before taking early retirement in 1986. The relationship with Persky, however, ended several years after they immigrated to Vancouver. In 1976, after several unhappy love affairs, Blaser met his life partner, David Farwell. The two settled in the Kitsilano neighborhood into an elegant duplex, which they owned jointly with Ellen Tallman, Ellen having separated from Warren and come out as a lesbian. Until his death, Blaser remained in this home with Farwell.

When Blaser left San Francisco, he had a spot in Donald Allen’s decade-defining New American Poetry anthology (1960) as well as a reputation among his peers. However, The Holy Forest existed then as a modest collection of small press chapbooks that had yet to attract much critical attention. In Vancouver, the warm welcome of New Americans at UBC in the early 1960s turned out to be an isolated phenomenon: across the country, a growing push for a national identity and the establishment of Canadian Studies in universities was chilling the academic reception of Americans. In terms of garnering critical recognition, Blaser’s timing could not have been worse. Add to this an oeuvre scattered in small press publications and a distinct lack of talent for self-promotion and it is easy to understand the relative obscurity Blaser endured for decades. In 1993, however, Stan Persky and Michael Ondaatje collected Blaser’s serials in The Holy Forest for Coach House Press. The publication occasioned a conference called The Recovery of the Public World at Vancouver’s Emily Carr College of Art and Design that attracted strong international participation. Papers from the conference were collected in a volume titled The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Edward Byrne and Charles Watts (Talonbooks, 1999). In 2006, the University of California Press published an updated edition of Blaser’s oeuvre in two volumes: The Holy Forest: Collected Poems and The Fire: Collected Essays. In his last years, Blaser received a measure of the recognition that had eluded him. In 2005, he was made a member of the Order of Canada; in 2006 he won the Griffin Trust Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Poetry; and in 2008, the prestigious Griffin Award for The Holy Forest. In 2009, Simon Fraser University awarded him an honorary doctorate. By the fall of 2008, however, Blaser had fallen ill with a brain tumor. He died on 7 May 2009, eleven days short of his 84th birthday.

The Astonishment Tapes

In the spring of 1974, Blaser was invited to give a series of talks on his life, education, and poetics as well as his Berkeley literary companions. Beginning on April 10, Warren Tallman hosted and taped the talks in the company of a small group of Vancouver writers: Martina Kuharic, Angela Bowering, Dwight Gardiner, and Daphne Marlatt. George Bowering and Frank Davey attended a session, but they were not regulars. On the first of the evenings, Blaser named the series Astonishments and defined the term as his response to modernism and Spicer’s innovative poetry. Later he offers a more formal definition from Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope: Astonishment is the very source or origin of the world itself, ever at work and ever hidden away within the darkness of the lived instant (306). Blaser links the term to a modernist genealogy that includes the Marquis de Sade, Gérard de Nerval, Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Charles Olson, and Jack Spicer. In the darkness of the lived instant, Blaser also locates the serial poem. Astonishment is thus not only a descriptor of the way modernism makes the familiar strange and the media of art opaque, but also the source of a poetic form that assumes temporality, contingency, and unknowability as operative principles.

Engaging modernism at Berkeley meant a dawning recognition of the slow, outward-rippling repercussions of Friedrich Nietzsche’s announcement that God is dead along with the old humanism. For Blaser, the collapse of the metaphysical tradition deprives us of a means of relating to the nonhuman universe. Where many intellectuals of the postwar period turned to the life or social sciences, Blaser saw an unanswered need for a relationship with the cosmos, which he glosses in Heideggerian terms as the intertwining of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. In this, he claims companionship with Spicer, who performs, in the absence of God, a confrontation with the unknown and a fall of the world out of meaning. Olson is the other major companion in this recognition because, in Blaser’s view, he worked to secularize and refresh the human universe without losing its nonhuman component and essential otherness. In Spicer and Olson, Blaser finds complementary responses to the same condition though the two poets take different paths. Spicer’s method parallels that of the great Christian mystics who descended into the darkness of disbelief and unknowing. For Spicer this meant a dérèglement of language and the senses that ended in alcoholism and death. Olson, on the other hand, turned toward visionary cosmicity.

Two major intellectual positions of the postwar period conflict with Blaser’s narrative of modernism. On one hand, old anthropocentrisms lingered as unacknowledged faith in reason and language as a means to an unmediated real—essentially a faith in knowledge as objective. Blaser points to Olson’s argument with Plato as indicative of this struggle. Olson identifies in Plato (and Blaser is careful not to limit Plato to Olson’s version of him) a separation of knowledge from the living context of the creature. This translates into a closure of thought—what Spicer called the fix—on whatever certainties about reality the mind supposedly holds. On the other hand, the social sciences restricted with equal firmness their focus to humanity—identifying knowledge as subjective—thereby leaving nonhuman nature out of the discourse. Secular intellectuals, anxious to be rid of the embarrassment of religion, turned to psychology, sociology, political economy, or anthropology. Anything else was dismissable as mysticism or old school religion. For Blaser, this is not adequate, not only because it renders us tone-deaf to the murmurings of the natural world and the wheeling of the stars, but also because it leaves us with no language for perceptual experience, very little agency, and no world to respond to other than the sphere of our own species. As he says it: We have no sense that the intellect and the language and the poetics are all of those movements into the other than what is ourselves, and our crime politically is that we go right on allowing a political system in which vast numbers of people cannot have the love of the other and as a consequence there is no love. There’s only your great big fucking maw devouring the world in the cry-baby routine (Session 8). Myths, Blaser says, were narratives of human relationships with the cosmos. Without an intimate connection to the earth and sky, humanity turns to its needs and wants, which in the end consume the world.

The alternative to religion and scientism on one hand and to the social sciences on the other—positivisms, Blaser calls them—comes from Blaser’s devotion to Dante, inspired by Ernst Kantorowicz’s courses on the thirteenth century at Berkeley. From Dante, Blaser derives his poetic project: the pursuit of a world image adequate to the determinations of its temporal moment but dynamic and inclusive of human creative potential as well. In The Stadium of the Mirror, an essay completed just before the tapes, Blaser explains that Form is alive, not a completion of the heart or of the mind (Fire 27). The Holy Forest, like The Divine Comedy, is a mental journey. Dante’s Comedy begins with the poet lost in a dark wood that mirrors his spiritual uncertainty. In the great narrative poem that follows, Dante creates an imago mundi in which to find himself and unite with his beloved Beatrice. Blaser saw an analogy between Dante’s situation and his own. The Holy Forest begins with a strong sense of cultural loss in the wake of modernist challenges to traditional forms of knowledge and religious faith. Blaser’s awakening at Berkeley to religious skepticism, Cartesian subjectivity, and philosophical idealism demanded new narratives and new poetic forms that avoided the substitution of State for religious authority, an error that led such an accomplished modernist poet as Ezra Pound toward fascism. The Holy Forest moves from the dark wood of Blaser’s beginnings as a poet toward the forest of the holy mountain that appears at the end of the Purgatorio (Canto XXVIII, 365). For Blaser, purgatory resembles the actual earth, and souls are placed here, he says on the tapes, to relearn the nature of love. The serial poem—a long poem in which no single lyric is definitive, no vision total, and no trope final—enacts the purgatorial act of ongoing self-transcendence. In Blaser’s cosmos, however, the poet does not complete his journey in paradise because that would imply a completed cosmos. Rather, what Blaser describes as an interrogation of death takes place.

Distinction between the triad of body, intellect, and soul is another significant concept that comes from Dante, as Blaser explicates only on the tapes. Dante, he says, places the body and intellect within the range of consciousness and will and views the intellect as a mediator between the body and soul. In Blaser’s secular adaptation of the triad, the inner and outer landscapes of human life should be integrated through the good of the intellect (Inferno, Canto III, 47), a universal human good. In other words, creative plasticity is a species birthright, and humanity as a whole—not just the Christian populace—is responsible for the hells or heavens it builds on earth. The soul, in Blaser’s practice, morphs into heart, or love of the world. This comes through on the tapes in the image of the conventual Sacred Heart. Blaser remembers the image from childhood, stamped on the schoolbooks of his mother, who attended the Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden, Utah, as a young woman; later the image returns to him through Dante’s vision of the flaming heart in the Vita Nuova. As Blaser works through these images on the tapes, religion becomes religio: a decentering of the cogito and a binding of the heart and mind to a world that, in losing its anthropocentric orientation, becomes strangely other and polar to cognition—astonishing, one might say. When the anthropocentric goes, Blaser says, words like God and soul disappear from contemporary discourse, leaving instead the mystery of death and the search for a tolerable form of community.

A major consequence of a strong, high stakes project such as Blaser’s is the quarrelling that may erupt over the poetics informing the project. There is plenty of discussion of the differences in opinion between Blaser, Spicer, and Duncan on the tapes, especially in sessions three and ten. Duncan, Blaser says, opts for a poetic language that is true to itself (Blaser’s phrasing) rather than to its historical moment and its own materiality. To say this another way, Blaser sees Duncan as clinging to a sacred language and viewing form as archetypal beyond the point where such a view can be justified theoretically. This puts Duncan fundamentally at odds with Blaser and Spicer. Spicer’s dislike of Duncan’s Venice Poem initiates the hostilities, albeit in an inarticulate way, Blaser says, and the differences eventually extend to Blaser’s argument with Duncan over the translation of Nerval’s Les Chimères.

Blaser’s account of the Berkeley poetry wars displays the seriousness with which all three poets took their projects and the calling of poetry itself. Each poet fought for what was to count as real. From a contemporary perspective, the terms of engagement of this battle have shifted: the stage is global, the technology digital, the economy post-national, and the poem a marginalized genre. However, whenever the fix or a closure of thought appears, the conviction returns that the human universe is a collective venture and responsibility, and that the raw capacity to shape that venture for better or worse is variously present in everyone. Blaser’s contribution to countercultural discourse on these tapes is a passionate insistence on love of the world and linguistic perspicuity as essential to poetry, human creativity, and social regeneration. The Astonishment Tapes captures the excitement of a time when the real did flow. This reminds us that, in fact, it always does, if the poetic means are equal to the historical moment.

Some Notes on the Text

The Astonishment Tapes lived for many years in a shoebox in Warren Tallman’s basement. When I began to work on Blaser’s poetry as a graduate student, Tallman gave them to me. At first, intimidated by the formidable job of transcribing, I simply used the tapes for my exegetical work on Blaser. Before the publication of this book, only two excerpts have previously appeared: one transcribed and edited by Daphne Marlatt and published in 1974 by the Capilano Review under the title The Metaphysics of Light; the other in Even on Sunday, a collection of essays and archival materials on Blaser (National Poetry Foundation, 2002).

Now, finally, the tapes have been digitalized and transcribed. Beyond the sheer volume of the material—roughly 214,800 words or about 840 manuscript pages—the project has been challenging for several reasons. By today’s standards, the technology is very poor: the sound is atrocious and the tapes are fragile. Quite a few unintelligible segments and tape breaks punctuate the conversation at inopportune points. Some participants sat too far from the microphone, making their questions and comments difficult to hear. In addition to the technical difficulties, the sessions are fraught with tensions that eventually, Blaser once told me, caused him to abandon the project before it was finished. One problem seems to have been a disagreement between Blaser and Tallman about what constitutes autobiography. Blaser came to the talks prepared, sometimes with formal notes, to offer a literary biography that would foreground key events in his imaginative life and in the poetry world that he loved and lived in. Tallman repeatedly asks for the more personal details or for commentary on tangential topics. In addition, an oral narrative given in a private home lends itself to digression and repetition. Add to this Blaser’s characteristically paratactic way of thinking and a generous supply of liquor.

To make this book more reader-friendly, I am presenting an edited selection from the tapes rather than the full transcript. This edition represents roughly half of the original transcript. In preparing the selection, I have emphasized major narrative lines and tried to reduce repetition and digression. However, this reduction of repetition inevitably means some loss of texture, especially since the stories that Blaser repeats change significantly in detail with each telling. I am also aware that the sections I deleted may be of primary interest to readers with priorities other than the narratives I featured.

In addition to selecting content, I also intervened editorially at the sentence level, although I mostly preserved the twists and turns of the syntax. Often Blaser begins to reminiscence in the past tense and then switches to the present, as if he were reliving the event, and this, it seems to me, is integral to his style. To reproduce his style of speaking, I also kept some of the pronoun shifts and agrammatical sentences. However, I deleted repetitions, multiple starts (sentences that move in two or three directions before settling down), hesitations of speech (the ums and ahs), and words such as yeah or right. I also reduced interjections, deleted some unintelligible phrases, and added words where the grammar calls for them. When the sound is hard to hear, I indicated best guesses in square brackets with a question mark. I have also reduced the frequency of certain verbal tics. Often Blaser says no, no or oh no to signal agreement rather than disagreement. Sometimes he uses the words because and and as punctuation. I checked Blaser’s quotations wherever possible against published versions and made adjustments in favor of the latter. However, I did not cross-reference the details discussed in the narratives on the tapes. Many of these stories involve memories of events that took place years before Blaser made the recordings. As a result, some of the details may not accord with the memories of others who were present or with historical documents.

This book contains two appendices intended to help the reader better understand the identities of the participants and the dynamics of the conversation. Appendix A briefly describes some of the poets, scholars, friends, and historical figures that Blaser references. This list, however, does not include well-known poets such as Dante, Ezra Pound, or Charles Olson. For readers interested in learning more about what I have omitted from the tapes, Appendix B provides a guide to the full transcript. Digital versions of the full transcript as well as the audiotapes have been placed in the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University. In documenting the books that Blaser references on these tapes in the Works Cited, I have tried to locate the editions he actually used; when this has not been possible, I have cited editions currently available in libraries.

One final note about the organization of the book. The original numbering system of the tapes may seem quaint in a digital era, but I preserved these for readers who might like to find their way back to the originals. When the tapes first came to me, I had a copy made through Simon Fraser University’s media services and then deposited the originals in the Contemporary Literature Collection at SFU. Then-curator Charles Watts, a Pound scholar and longtime friend of Blaser, cataloged the tapes. For ease of reference, Watts arranged the tapes into stories, each one representing an evening’s worth of talk. Then he numbered the sides of each tape continuously. Story one is labeled 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4; story two is 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, and so on. Most stories consist of two tapes and four sides, although story four has one tape (two sides), and story ten has three tapes (six sides). There are ten stories in all, twenty tapes, and forty sides. A listen to the tapes, however, shows that many stories carry over into others, and it is not always clear that a story coincides with a single recording session. Rather than try to assign narrative boundaries, I preserved Watts’s numbering system but changed the titling to sessions. I also identified five prominent narrative lines using descriptive titles; these are the chapter titles of this book.

The session numbers, as described above, are indicated within the chapters and reproduced in Appendix B.

1

Out of Idaho

Session 1, Side 1

Warren: So I think you can just, like, start right in.

Robin: . . . like start right in.

Warren: Yeah, wherever you want.

Robin: I suppose . . .

Warren: Like I assume you kind of have a general notion of what . . .

Robin: If my tooth hasn’t knocked the notion out of me, yeah, I’ve got a notion. Well, I’m actually kind of curious because I think of these as conversations, and I would, Warren, like them to be called at the end of the venture, Astonishment, because I think that if they’re going to be all put together, astonishment is the whole thing we’re talking about.

Warren: Astonishment.

Robin: Yeah, because the whole thing does astonish me. And now I’m not really entirely sure what all this is about. It was Warren’s notion, and then I began to respond to it, and I liked the idea of people that I didn’t know awfully well being here because they would force me into textures that otherwise I might ride over or not follow—not understand and so on. The notion was tonight to go all the way back, and what are you before you get mixed up in it with a kind of narrative outline, since I love narrative, and spent my life wanting narrative—wanting to know how to do it. We would go all the way back and then it would head for Berkeley days with Jack and Duncan and that would move through certain ranges of things and then it would move beyond that to Boston where once again there was a strange rearrangement because at that point Duncan is in Banyalbufar, Majorca, and Jack winds up with me in Boston, and Ginsberg winds up in San Francisco, which caused an awful lot of discord from the Duncan-Spicer-Blaser kind of thing. Then finally we move forward into San Francisco in the last period and then on and on. Warren thought of it as a kind of autobiography. I always think of biography as a reduction. The biographical, when one takes it back to the I, at that level one has lost something and reduced it, so as a consequence I am after folds¹ and want things to layer and fold over one another all the time, because—well, I meditate on certain things like Artaud’s line, the business of what my poem is, is what my ego isn’t.² And I believe that. I also move towards that poetics where the I is given up³ in order to give a different visibility and as a consequence that’s what I’m after, and I would like, with the aid of you here, to make it a conversation in such a way that one could make these folds begin to work. I’m obviously a little uneasy about it except that I’d like to sort of throw the weight tonight by at least indicating ranges of the questions that fascinate me, the questions I’ve fallen into, and the range that it seems to me the work has gone into—to throw those, and then let the run of the conversations fold those in and so to speak prove them or whatever. Talking about Spicer, Duncan, Olson—you know the whole run of everything including the Kantorowicz thing. Now I think the Kantorowicz thing will wind up—the funny thing in answer to your question,⁴ it’s a very complicated question in my head, Daphne, and I think I don’t quite know what to do about it, because the formality can be very useful if it’s a matter of my saying, Well look, this is what Kantorowicz was like, this is what these classes were like. I have my notes, for example, and I have Jack’s notes from the courses we took, and what they were. It’s also the place that history has in terms of the poetics. There’s no way to read Duncan’s Medieval Scenes without that kind of information, for example. There’s no way to know what it was to have a sense of time—image in its relation to time—without that stuff. So there can be a formality of that order, but at the same time that’s still got to be broken in some way, because this isn’t supposed to be a system of lectures. I won’t like it much if it is.

Warren: Well, Martina and I talked quite a bit about this since I have certain professorial tendencies to want to control things and Martina was saying shut up. Like let Robin just start. But one thing I did feel might be—and does this make sense to you?—that the people who are listening, should be able to pose questions, and the problem is how, when do they pose the questions?

Martina: Well, they’ll just have to figure it out.

Warren: They just have to figure it out.

Dwight: We’ll see if we can break in when they occur and if that doesn’t work we’ll just have to change that.

Warren: Yep, yep, OK. So just go ahead. I think we understand each other. Do we understand each other?

Robin: Is that thing on now?

Warren: Yeah, yep.

Robin: Oh, I certainly have the same response I did—the first effort with tape that I ever have any memory of was, of course, Jack. And it is 1950, something like that, it was between ’50, ’52, and Jack decides we’re going to do something, do jazz, and this was before Kenneth Rexroth got into the scene, who was the first big jazz guy, anyway. And all I get is giggle. That’s all I get—there wasn’t a word on the tape that wasn’t a giggle. I had nothing to say. The most terrifying machinery that I’d ever seen in my life. I giggled. Jack’s disgust was complete. And the jazz people are going over there, pumpedy-pump, and Jack is doing something, and I’m giggling. It was quite a riot. Anyway, tonight the notion that I picked up from Warren was that I was supposed to go all the way back, I mean like before Berkeley, and I kind of wanted to set it up in my head, and for other people, of what the condition of poetry was. Like I have no sense of myself ever as being free from a destiny in poetry at any point. I mean I didn’t want to be a fireman, I didn’t want to be a doctor, I didn’t want to be anything. I had a poem published in the Twin Falls Daily News, or whatever the fuck it’s called, when I was twelve years old. I think my mother wrote that poem. I mean my memory is that my mother wrote that poem. [Laughter] It’s called The Barn Story and it’s obviously a Christmas poem, and the barn is talking throughout. But I’m quite sure my mother wrote that.

Warren: Little Jesus, huh?

Robin: Yeah, little Jesus. But the order of that business of poetry—then it becomes what I wanted to call an astonishment. Elsewhere I said that it was a real kind of destiny, certainly a fateful meeting of the Spicer-Duncan-Blaser combination. And it did something very funny when it happened, because the condition of poetry in California at that point—there were people there. [Robinson] Jeffers was the great man, the well-known man out there someplace. He meant nothing to us poetically. There was Kenneth Rexroth, and he meant mainly to us a man with reputation, a man who ran an anarchist group. And then there was Bill Everson, who worked as a janitor at the University of California library and became Brother Antonius and now he’s back being Billy, incidentally. But these were the people, and somehow or another I think Duncan interchanges clearly with Rexroth and with Everson. Jack certainly at one point corresponded with Rexroth and in ’48 sent him some poems, but ultimately the poetic world was built, as Duncan has said, out of whole cloth by us.⁵ We did it. We did it out of nothing so to speak. The imagery that I use of that is a kind of forest.⁶ Now, coming out of where I come from, it was an extraordinary occasion because contemporary thought wasn’t available at all. One was brought up on romantic poetry, maybe some Shakespeare. My grandmother worked as a telegrapher for the railroad and as a consequence I had a pass, and I could be put on a train with conductors watching over me and allowed to see that awful man who used to do—what was his name?—who used to do Shakespeare all the time in Salt Lake City. And then I would be sent back, and things like that, so you had culture going. But there was no contemporary thought at all. And so moving through that scene, all I could do, when Warren asked for it, was to think of what the images were that were controlling images, images that tended to organize. And this later attaches to my view that there is a primary language, that the interior life is a language and the exterior life is a language, that there probably is no mind without language, and that poetry is both primary thought and ultimate thought, with what we call discourse—all of our logic and all that business of discussion and so on—in between the two enormous realms of the poetic.⁷

The imagery seems to me kind of odd. There was no ocean, so the ocean tends to be an imaginary world and one that fascinates me and draws me. It’s all desert. That desert is marked by certain elements in landscape that I love and that turn up whenever I get to the point where I fall back into the imagery of being young, rather than the ultimate imagery now of a different order. That imagery is stuck like the Craters of the Moon.⁸ This is an enormous lava bed with nothing but lava fields.

Warren: Where is it?

Robin: It’s in Idaho, and not far from where I lived. It’s a huge field of nothing but pouring lava. It was always called the Craters of the Moon because it looks like the surface of the moon. It is black, it is crusted, it’s broken, it’s full of holes in the earth, and so on. It is a beautiful, magic place without life in it at all. It’s a dead spill of lava, and it looks like lava. It’s black, crusted, and shiny.

Warren: Now wait, how old are you?

Robin: At the Craters of the Moon, I’ll be running four and five, and the next point in the landscape would be a thing called the Lost River. And the Lost River is again in the California⁹ landscape. It is not the Snake River. It is a river which pours into a big hole in the earth and disappears.

Daphne: This is in Idaho?

Robin: This is in Idaho. And it is again not far from where I lived. Where I lived is called Magic Valley and it’s 80 miles from Sun Valley and from the Tetons,¹⁰ from the Rockies, from Stanley Basin and all that. The Lost River is a very strange place, because when you follow it through—and I once followed my father’s father, my paternal grandfather, up there and they thought I’d fallen down in the hole of Lost River¹¹—it’s pitted and there are holes for water all the way around it as the river begins to sink into the ground. That river then comes out, according to the geophysicists, many miles distant again in an area that I know very well and where we had a little cabin on the Snake River with a whole lava wall—the canyon of Snake River—it pours—it’s called Thousand Springs—and the water just pours out of that side of the mountain. Now, another image of that landscape that captures my—all this is in a desert, mind you, this is all sagebrush, it’s full of killdeer, it’s full of coyotes. It has nothing much else there. The sheep are driven across it in the summer and spring for grazing. The sheep tend to lamb in January and February but there are always the lady lambs who are off the mark and they leave the babies behind. And one of my trips as an eight-year-old was to collect—I wound up, I remember so well—eighteen lambs that I had managed to talk my mother into driving me out in the desert to find, and I had my little herd of lambs. Oh, they were marvelous, and many of them had that tuft on the forehead, the tufted lambs. But they’re left for coyotes because the sheepherders simply can’t handle it. The sheepherders tend always to be Basques from Spain, dark-skinned, blue-eyed, and very beautiful men. Loads of stories about how they fucked sheep all the time and all that which entertained one’s childhood.¹²

Warren: How’d they do it? [Laughter]

Robin: Yeah—how’d you do that? I mean, how did it feel? I’ve never tried it. I must try that some day. Well, though, the other horrible story was Rocky Mountain oysters. You were always being threatened with Rocky Mountain oysters. Those are sheep’s balls, and they’re said to be delicious. [Laughter]

Daphne: You never tried them?

Robin: I never had them that I know of, but I did have sourdough bread made by the sheepherders and things like that. The other kind of thing in the landscape, again in the desert, [were] these strange areas that collected like the Craters of the Moon, the Lost River, the ice caves, and Fran Herndon’s portrait of me tries to reproduce that ice cave. But there in the middle of the sagebrush is a mound and a cave, and when you went down in the cave, there was this crystalline pool.¹³ You had to have flashlights and so on to look at it, and at the back was a completely buried glacier which continued to melt, and this very, very magical cold cave in the middle of the hot realm of the desert made for another one of those spots. The killdeer, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a killdeer. They make a sound that is a call. They nest in the roots of the sagebrush and they call to one another, and the name killdeer is really close to the way they sound—kee kee all across the desert. You hear it at night with the sound calling. They also apparently use it to warn of snakes, because it’s big rattlesnake country. Yeah?

Warren: Warn of snakes? What do you mean?

Robin: They tend to warn one another of snakes in the area, or this is at least what the childhood realm was, and they will then collect and try to draw the snake’s attention away from the nest where the babies nest on the ground rather than in a tree up high. They’re very special and marvelous birds.

Well, now, the business of living in that land was really very strange because we lived in places like Wapai and Kimama and Dietrich and so forth. Those places all had from eight to twenty-two people and that’s all.¹⁴ Nearly always built by the railroad tracks. In Kimama, for example, we lived on the railroad track itself and in the winter it was really quite extravagantly exciting because the snow plows would go down the railway tracks and throw the snow off and it would hit the house, nearly knocking it down. It was the most amazing way to clear the snow without much attention to the people who were supposedly running the signals.