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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures featuring talks by poets, scholars and educators presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we hear a talk by poet and essayist Robin Blaser. Robin Blaser was born in Denver in 1925 and grew up in Idaho. He attended the University of California Berkeley where he met poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and helped spark the Berkeley poetry renaissance of the 1940s. He later lived in San Francisco, where he was active with poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. In 1966, Blaser moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he was a professor of literature at Simon Fraser University from 1966 to 1986. Blaser became a Canadian citizen in 1972.

Robin Blaser's expansive poetry explores the intersections of time, nature and syntax. He has been an important influence on many younger Canadian experimental poets, and in 2006 he received a special lifetime recognition award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. Blaser died in 2009. In this talk, we'll hear Blaser read three extended excerpts from his collected poems, The Holy Forest.

The program took place in June 1995 before a live audience at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Here is Robin Blaser.

ROBIN BLASER:
That I have been, the honor given me is very great indeed and so I wonder how long it will take me to return that honor which is my real concern. (LAUGHTER) You know, there is a potluck problem here. (LAUGHTER) Now, when this was suggested to me by a wonderful group of people, I was very uneasy. I didn't tell them but I thought oh god, I don't want to get busted at 70. So, then I thought, well, alright, you go ahead and try. It's not going to going to work anyway. And now look what's happened. So, well, I'd like to just shake out a moment with a scribbled note, I mean scribbled. There's a turn in my mind that is intolerable, unhappiness. Pungent as Cuban oregano on the windowsill. There's a smart to it, not entirely intelligent as if going through pre boreal willow arches before the salmon start. As if the old man sat on an embankment drying his clothes, having washed them fiercely in water flows. One or the other of his eyes meet a philosophy of as if, without its idealism. That washboard has collapsed into desirous separate of measureless complexity of everyone's bottom dream which is Bottom’s dream.

Now, you know, you look out here and you see the marvels of the writers here, the marvels of the readers here and then when you've been in a community as I have here now, approaching 29 years, you notice you know some of them and you've watched them so much come into their own and we have tonight that wonderful new book of (INAUDIBLE). We will soon have an astonishingly wonderful book by George Stanley and we will have a book of essays by Phyllis Webb. Phyllis Webb is hiding behind my scribbled note. She sent me a postcard by, it's a photograph, a beautiful photograph, an old one from the twenties by a French photographer named Albert Monier. And it is of a, there's an old man sitting on a cave there. And he has, he's washed his clothes and he's got them all spread out and drying around him. And Phyllis said, if you look very carefully, there's a barge there on the sand going towards a bridge and I'm there waving at you. (LAUGHTER). And there I was drying my clothes. I am very interested in what we've been talking about.

This audience tonight is much larger than those, that audience where we'd all talk together. And I certainly want this to be inclusive, that we've talked about something in the world and the public world and so on and I'm very curious about the, a principle that's called, I've taken this from one of the very great people that I so like to read, Martha Nussbaum. The Fragility of Goodness, a book that I would recommend to all your attention. But I particularly wanted to go with a very peculiar sense of the soul here before we move along, that aspect of ourselves that is probably a thing. But we don't know what a thing is. And this is contrary to all realistic philosophy. We don't know what a thing is. So let us just go back for a moment. I'm trying to write a poem of this matter, and since I haven't done so, I thought, well just, why don't you tell me what where it came from in the first place? The platonic soul will be directed in its singleness and purity to ethical objects that are single natured and unmixed themselves by themselves.

The Sophoclean soul is more like Heraclitus image of (UNKNOWN) which we know as psyche, a spider sitting in the middle of its web able to feel and respond to any tug in any part of the complicated structure. It advances its understanding of life and of itself not by a platonic movement from the particular to the universal, from the perceived world to a simpler, clearer world but by hovering in thought and imagination around the enigmatic complexities of the scene particular as we, if we are good readers of this style, hover around the details of the text, seated in the middle of its web of connections, responsive to the pull of each separate thread. Most impressive woman, Martha Nussbaum. I'd like to read from, I'd like to time myself so they don't bell me. (LAUGHTER). So I'll put that out there. How many minutes has that been? I would like, I think ,to open with Even on Sunday. Some of you will have heard it before but it is a problematic that continues all around us in a kind of viciousness.

And I think it's really quite proper, and I'm a very proper polite man, to respond. Even on Sunday, of course is playing off Mercouri's wonderful film, Never on Sunday.

I don't know anything about God but what the human record tells me in whatever languages I can muster, or by turning to translators or the centuries of that blasphemy which defines God's nature by our own hatreds and prayers for vengeance and dominance. That he (lowercase and questionable pronoun) would destroy by a hideous disease one lover of another or by war a nation for what uprightness and economic hide and seek. And he lowercase and questionable pronoun is on the side of the always ignorance of politics in which we trust. The polis is at the bottom of the sea as Hannah Arendt noticed and he lowercase and interrogated pronoun walks among the manipulated incompetencies of public thought where I had hoped to find myself ordinary among others in the streets. A murmuring voice of societies. And so one thinks them over.

Blasphemies all against multiplicity which is all any one knows about God. And one can only hate them so much without becoming halt and lame in their kingdom of single mindedness. Their having taken a book too of being once and forever, the language behind language that no one has ever spoken. God's whatnot and mystical rags we call flags. As a friend said, I'm going to become fundamentalist and call everybody asshole. (LAUGHTER). And what would the gods be if I asked them? Our nakedness didn't quite fit, out, as it is, of nature. Yet there is a sentiment at the intersection between life and thought. Streaks of beyondness and that careless relation. October came in August and petunias straggled, sprawling white faces one at a time, though barely a brown and continued blue. The neighbors cut down the sexual cottonwood which kept the whole block from repainting doorsteps for over a month. (LAUGHTER). By the fluffs of its happiness. So we are in the midst of a metaphysical washout. Take for example Verlaine and Rambo.

As Hans Meyer says, being shut out of the social order. They sought to heighten their condition by say publicly embracing in Brussels and thus providing the formula for a new 'condition humaine' That called out to be created. Both failed. Both remain in outsiderdom. One continued to rhyme. The other gave up the whole damned creation, behind this an enlightenment which I'll return to. And Sylvie asked, but what became of the man? Well, the lions screamed at him but it came so slow it were three weeks in the air. Did the man wait for it all that time? I asked. Of course he didn't, Bruno replied, gliding head-first down the stem of a foxglove. For the story was evidently close to his end. He sold his house and he packed up his things where the lion were coming and he went and lived in another town. So the lion ate the wrong man. (LAUGHTER). This was evidently the moral, said Lewis Carroll. the moral is that something does devour the existential given—

Rimbaud, Mayer writes, does not intertwine with visions of Sodom in order

to provoke heaven's fire; it is simply the sole possibility of his own self-acceptance

being shut out of the social order Rimbaud writes de posséder la verité

dans une âme et un corps, which Mayer interprets to say being alive

in the full sense of body and soul the truth is being alive, until you break

on it, ah, Laius, when you ran off with the youth Chryssipus, the Sphinx

flew to a whistling stop in Thebes—and fire fell on Sodomites, on

each one of them, and, I'll be damned, almost everybody—tell me a

tale to explain sublime biology—then, tell me another to explain

sublime human nature—and murder; unmythologized, fell on 20th­

century outsiders pollution of what in the momentary hangup of

the vast biology of things, desiring? a covenant with whom? androsphinx, recumbent lion with the head of a man, answer me—

That is to say each one of us. The sublime, dear everybody and every day is not so simply human, overwhelms—uncanny is Hannah Arendt's word for the face of it—

dangerous—severe, as a blow—mysterious—on which the existential

given floats—the passions of

and Hans Mayer notes the tying and untying that confines things:

At the height of the Victorian era, the Bible is once again, as in Cromwell's

time. . . . the spiritual and social foundation of everyday life—O, the once­

again in which we trust—Declaration is made in the Bible of what is

proper for woman and what is not. The Bible depicts that which God punished

in Sodom. St. Paul only confirmed the curse one's mind may have a

certain affinity with Christopher Marlowe's, if it is true, as his

roommate

Thomas Kyd tells us, that he thought the apostle Paul a swindler—

who taught a curdled godhead and a curdling view of the existential

given—and the black milk of it is blasphemy, so to revile existence

in the midst of this, an Enlightenment which first and foremost posited

an equality of men and women, including homosexuals—religion and

sexuality go hand in hand in the apple-light

it was not to be merely law, like free speech, but a mental practice

what developed, in the guise of a Darwinian terror advancing in

evolutionary form, was the lion body with a lion’s head, walking in

the garden, so that the underlying principles of liberty and equality, not

even taking fraternity into account, inordinately encouraged combatting all

forms of outsiderdom in favor of what Ihab Hassan calls 'quantities of normed

phenomena'—normed existence excludes the existential given, not being

alive in the full sense of body and soul—and extends, not merely perverts

that which calls itself normality into political form but Mayer asks, what

is it then if the precipitating step outside, into the margins, is a condition of

birth, a result of one's sex, parentage, physical or spiritual makeup?

Then one's existence itself becomes a breaking of boundaries

we can thereby return to ourselves a measure of freedom, and take form

the work of a lifetime in breaking those boundariesagainst,

as Mayer says, a global disposition of thought toward annihilation, which

thinks to admit only majorities in the future and is determined to equate

minorities with worthless life. Worthless are the Jews, there the blacks and

aboriginals, somewhere else (and everywhere) the homosexuals, women

of the type of Judith and Delilah, not least the intellectuals keen on individuation.

'They should all be gassed': the expression has crept into everyday language

Woman is not equal to man. Man is manly man, whatever is to be understood

by that: the feminine man stands out from the race and thereby becomes worthless

life. Shylock must be exterminated: the only final solutions are fire and gas

extreme remedies—pharmakons—Mayer reminds us, have been

proposed: for example, Klaus Mann writing in 1949—remember

when that was? calls for. . . the concerted mass suicide of intellectuals: to

bring public opinion in the world, in the integrity and autonomy of which he

quite clearly still believed, to its right senses well, we know now that this would disappear with a headline in theEntertainment pages, or it might make the Arts and Books section

along with obituaries and sportsmanship, in The Globe & Mail—and

intellectuals?—Mann had not noticed that point in the space of intelligence where they join the system, higgledy-piggledy—I think of that recent hustle in the United States, offering the end of history like a dinky-toy, democracy, pinking, blueing, and off-whiting in plastic

—'My goodness!' everyone said, 'They've discovered Hegel!' and Time

Magazine thought he was little known—and I said, 'My goodness!

Francis Fukuyama, so we finally got here, there, anywhere' so to be reminded once again of Puddin'head Wilson: It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

(LAUHGTER)

this unified mankind—for that's who's there, quantity or lump, at the end of a materialist's or an idealist's history—conceived, Mayer writes as a homogenized humanity. Woe to outsiders

so that was it, was it? an Enlightenment that promised equality to men and

women, including homosexuals! An age in the hole, running three centuries, surely allows one to say, 'Listen, you assholes, a metaphysical

washout means you've lost your top soil'

and this system aims exactly—at the heart of our social existence to be an outsider by virtue of our existence—like statues come to life by

moonlight in the child's desiring mind—has the advantage of voices,

and their attentions, each to each, among quantified multitudes who

wander the computations and rationalities that belong to no one—also going,

going, gone into the corpus Christianum with its sadly separated body

and soul. Among these voices, I think of Montaigne: Embraces remembered (or still vaguely hoped far) are 'our final accolades'

in whose arms

even on Sunday

(APPLAUSE)

Now, this figure is a figure, it's the back of a chair. And it comes from my childhood. And when everything was dispersed in later years, they cut the back of the chair out, threw it out, and remembered my other fascination with this wandering Jew or nomad that he will watch you, I don't know how well in an audience of this size you can see it, but you cannot escape his eyes. I would go to the end of a long room and try to escape. I would do everything to try to escape. And instead I turned into him. (LAUGHTER). And I have enjoyed it ever since. Now, this is an Image-Nation 25 exhibit which takes up these matters in another way. Exody is a word that I love. It rhymes with melody. It rhymes with elegy. I am not elegiac. I hope to be melodic, and I also hope to get the hell out of certain things.

So the word means exodus. And I thought I'd made it up. And to my great disappointment in the very large dictionary there I found it. 17th century English meaning exodus. Now there are voices here and they are usually directly identified. There is also a section in which we are looking at a painting by Hieronymous Bosch called The Earthly Paradise, and it becomes a total phantasmagoria of the imagery. So that not only does the painting is the great triptych. I've loved it for 40 years. And then I found Michel de Certeau had studied it carefully. And here we are looking at it together while I hold a magnifying glass on a reproduction in order to try to get through this phantasmagoria of what it is, what we are, what it is and so on.

Image-Nation 25, Exody.

Nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal or the order of the world. We are drifting together toward the noise in the black depths of the universe, Michel Serre tells us, a town crier, trying to imagine the intermediary states, trying to imagine the man of the multiple, trying to imagine the margin that separates the multiple from the ordered.

The moment when the solid is at the point of setting in agitated crystals, when turbulence spins in its whirlwind, when life is connected, liberated, awakened, organized. This admirable, charmed mind of Hermes (INAUDIBLE) billions that is whirlwinds, whirlpools, vortexes, fireworks. The writer writing twists their, his or her chance possessed breath, blew out the Sentinel's sentences, ancestral and beautiful. They are now of changed, substance, perhaps of joyous tourmaline often black, sometimes blue, red, green, brown or colorless, polished pieces of jeweler's tourmaline tongs that would distinguish glass from crystal. My naivety then in cosmos. The profound corners of a room, of streets of the beloved's angular form falls out of (INAUDIBLE) including the huge chest of drawers crammed with God, self, history and book are (UNKNOWN) Taylor tells us, bound in an intricate relationship in which each mirrors the other, steps over the hills and then the forest and Pleistocene change one of them let's say probability enters among them in the 17th century, and you're in the funhouse becoming tall, squashed, thin, fat, protuberant, at the beach and laughing your head off.

Space time, time space, imagination’s mind. Time is the life of it. With a little raunch thrown in from the start. Sense of the origin, eros, sweet, bitterness, beloved sexual intelligence and stupefaction, hours swerve folds in the magnificence When proto-Indo-European trees walked in Eden delight in life at the edge of the glaciers. The apple among them requiring minimum cold for its winter dawns, trying to say in primitive semantics, my love (INAUDIBLE) north and south, walking among them west, some small thing, man or woman universal and unconfined in its relations, hewing down a tree with a stone axe. The physical difference between an elm and a linden or even an English and a live oak would be obvious. Calluses. Gone to thought, apple trees, my love. 1503, 1504 Hieronymus Bosch. His garden of earthly delight studied long and intensely by Michel de Certeau in the mystic fable, and I guessing over it for 40 years join him now with my magnifying glass. This forbidden tree of life sprung from the phallus of (INAUDIBLE) walking in the garden.

Delight in life, coming into meaning and going out. This space is curved inward upon itself like the circles and ellipses Bosch endlessly generates. There is no entrance, only interpretative delirium, fragments of language, a lacunary system, a cosmos unsure of its (INAUDIBLE). Displaces units of meaning piece by piece. Everywhere Bosch smuggles in lapses, disproportion and inversion. What it means, nevertheless reappears endlessly. This (INAUDIBLE). A figure folding into or out of a dolphin’s tail, a man's torso, a duck's head reading an open book. Just emerging from a cave, a man, the only one wearing clothes in the panel points to a nude woman leaning on her elbows behind an ornamental glass, an apple in her hand and her mouth closed with a seal. A pig adorned with a nun’s headdress holds out a quill pen to a seated man. With (INAUDIBLE) caresses her folded over his leg a document ready to sign. They are approached by a shiny black knight's helmet with spiky antennae stooping on pudgy legs and claw feet.

We've moved across the three panels. de Certeau calls them playlists. My eyes catch a figure caught in the strings of a heart. A figure hanging from the loop of a key. A conversation with a bird headed moth with owl eyed wings, a youth bend backward riding a spotted, kerchiefed cat whose balls shine highlighted, arrows, flowers, sticks, bird beak stuck up asses, two figures shut up in a modest shell. One of them (INAUDIBLE). Another whose face looks back over his shoulder. And at us a broken eggshell with a tavern in it entered by a ladder whose legs are also tree trunks. Indeterminate realities and imaginings. No entrance, no exit. My eyes strain even with the guide through the phantasmagoria. The phantasmagoria looks back as if Ovid’s metamorphosis without his cosmos became delirium. And it's an aesthetic exercise in the sense in which one speaks of spiritual exercise, de Certeau tells, us a reality made up of peaks, beaks, arrows and sharp points. And anal and oral poetics, a marvelous anomality of asses and mouths, a greedy flowering of amorous play.

Among the lion, panther, camel, bear, stag, boar, horse, ass, goat, pig, unicorn, stalk, herons, spoonbill, rooster, hen, owl, hoopoe, woodpecker, pineapples, cherries, blackberries, gooseberries, strawberries, orange, apple, melon, pumpkin, squash, fish and shellfish, pearls, topazes, emeralds, (UNKNOWN) fairies, mermaids and mermen, de Certeau suggests an encyclopedia of details become opaque in the Phantasmagoria. Proposes this. That Bosch's garden says to me or you, you there, what do you say about what you are while you are saying what I am? One might celebrate this unintelligibility that extinguishes itself like (INAUDIBLE) or thereupon old friends. The startled branches listening to DJs. How can a body be made from the word? Language, a shivery of transparence, jigsaw (INAUDIBLE). Gods are such fine things. Such filigrees, (INAUDIBLE) immortalities among things. Lucretius tells us we need not fear the propitiate sacrifice or often pungent smoke. The pleats of matter and the folds of the soul reading Gilles Deleuze.

A labyrinth has said etymologically to be multiple because it contains many folds. The multiple is not only what has many parts, but what is folded in many ways. A cryptographer is needed, someone who can at once account for nature and decipher the souls, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read the soul. They threw the old rocking chair from the lost house out, but they cut the leather back rest out with the portrait of the wandering Jew or nomad on it, whose eyes follow me or you into corners. To the end of the boxcar parlour, even into the brilliance of reading under the library table, and sent it to me. Nevertheless, I rocked their wandering Jew and nomad. I imagine mortality, its unrest and proses. I imagine evolutionary love, my thousand and one celebrations.

(APPLAUSE)

Let me read one last one, The Nomad himself, and then we can say good night and the bell will ring.

Nomad.

The grounds shift all the time as paradises must. Images exit from Plato's kismet and other irreparable absolutes, deserted shoes and barefoot, desirous walks a long way.

Lion's teeth spring from crevices in the sidewalk. When I reach the age wherein words and books are upside down, down as up is a more engaging proposition than to say they are one. C-sharp minor whistling at every crossing which said, come into my wild yellow room, into wild yellow poppies, into wild (INAUDIBLE) upon woven sand and willowed shores (INAUDIBLE). Now and again honey hands reach for life's measureless body. I think therefore I am. I think therefore I am. I think. I am. Therefore, I think. I walk therefore I am as paradises must.

Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE)

ED HERMAN:
That was Robin Blaser speaking at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The program took place at the Frederick Wood Theatre and was part of The Recovery of the Public World Conference sponsored by Simon Fraser University on June 4th, 1995. The recording of this program is used by permission of the Bennett Library, Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University and the Estate of Robin Blaser. Robin Blaser's poetry and prose has been collected into three volumes: The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, The Fire, Collected Essays of Robin Blaser and Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser. You can read more about Robin Blaser as well as some of his poems and other writings at poetryfoundation.org where you'll also find many articles by and about poets, an online archive of more than 10,000 poems, the Poetry Learning Lab, the Harriet Blog about poetry, the complete back issues of poetry magazine and other audio programs to download.

I'm Ed Herman. Thanks for listening to poetry lectures from poetryfoundation.org.