There are two videos in which Your Humble Narrator plays a role that are well worth watching. The first is an interview with Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma and Shin Yu Pai on a new series at Town Hall called Lyric World Conversations with Contemporary Poets: Poetry and Wonder. An excerpt:
PEN: …Thomas, tell us about how your work expands our understanding of civic life as you understand how it does that.
Thomas: Well, that’s a great question. The first thing that comes to mind is that I came to poetry through the language of Tamil Nadu. And one of the things that really struck me about Tamil is how present the entire poetic tradition is in everyday life, including an entire tradition of public poetry or poetry that addresses questions of politics, questions of ethics, questions of how the larger community or the larger community of communities gets along. And, while the poems that I’ve written most recently don’t as a whole focus on polity or on civic life, there are two things. One is that there’s a kind of underlying concern with ethics, which is an underlying concern with how we get along with each other, both at the level of personal relationships and at the level of the larger relationships between communities of people. But also there are some poems that have come out of my practice, and out of circumstances, and opportunities that have presented themselves to me that are more directly related to civic life.
Thomas: One in particular is a poem called Here, which I wrote for the Vashon Maury Heritage Museum. Last year they did an exhibit called Joy and Heartache about 125 years of Japanese American history on Vashon Island. And it traced five historical periods in the unfolding of life on Vashon, focusing particularly on the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. And because, you know, a historical exhibit can be informative but not necessarily engage the imagination, the curators wanted to have some way to enter into the deeper stories of the stories of the exhibit. And so they invited me to write a poem that appeared at the entrance of the exhibit to as a kind of existential preparation, if you will, for experiencing the exhibits.
Thomas: So I wrote a poem which traced not only the experience of Japanese-Americans on Vashon Island, but the relationship between the living and the dead, and the relationship between the original inhabitants of Vashon, what we now call Vashon, the Sqababsh people, the part of the Coast Salish peoples. And how the first internment of the first incarceration began then, in the 19th century with Europeans and other settlers coming to that, to Cascadia, and how we see these patterns repeating through time, not only in our public life, but also in our hearts and in our dreams. And so as a poet, I’m interested in that intersection. The intersection of the inner world and the outer world, the heart and the community together, intertwined.
Tom Prince was on the ball again with his video camera and editing skills to film the memorial tribute to Judith Roche at Jack Straw Productions on January 5, 2020. I read my elegy for Judith:
Of the post-war North American poets that wrote from a stance of spontaneity, there are few that spring to mind immediately, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure and George Bowering. All were friends of Robin Blaser, who lived most of life in one of two hot beds of projective literary activity, the San Francisco Bay Area and Vancouver, B.C. But it may have been Blaser’s life and work that provided the most comprehensive statement on this stance toward poem making he would call “The Practice of Outside.” It may also be Blaser too who could offer the most astute rebuttal to rival trends in avant garde 20th century poetry that sought to supplant this stance. Miriam Nichols was Blaser’s student, became his friend, was his editor for his collected essays, The Fire, is his literary executor and is clearly the world’s foremost Blaser scholar, which is cemented by the recent publication of A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor. We caught up with her on January 3 & 4, 2020, at her apartment in Vancouver, BC, to discuss the book and her literary friendship with Blaser.
In the first segment we discuss how she met Robin Blaser as a student at Simon Fraser University, how she began to see how necessary Blaser scholarship was and set about to do it and ended up editing his books of collected poems (The Holy Forest, second edition) and collected essays, The Fire.Part 1 – 10:10.
In part two, Miriam talks about how it was Ellen Tallman who was most instrumental in connecting California Bay Area poets (Spicer, Duncan, Blaser) with the Vancouver poets and ended up being a very good friend of Robin for many years. Tallman planted a seed in Miriam’s mind by introducing her as Robin Blaser’s biographer over and over. Miriam also talks about the book title: Mechanic of Splendor and Blaser’s teaching by context style. Part 2 – 13:32.
In part 3 Blaser’s preoccupation with making a public world presence, his attempts to find himself in relation to a cosmology and discovering though his teacher Ernst Kantorowicz at Berkeley that poetry could be noetic. A key passage:
Robin thought all his life, never wavered on this, that poetry was a particular kind of knowing, that it was as valid in its way as all the other disciplines, as say, biology or psychology or philosophy. It didn’t erase, it didn’t trump those other modalities, those other ways of approaching the world, but it was equally valid, that it was a mode of knowing. And that without it, the human universe, if I could borrow that phrase from Olson, is incomplete. You’re missing something. You’re missing an important element of the way that human beings are in the word, the relationality of how they are in the world. I always think about poetic knowing as relational thinking.
In part four Miriam discusses the impact Ernst Kantorowicz had on young Robin Blaser (and on Spicer and Duncan too), about he was one of the junior members of the Stefan George Circle, one of the last to be brought in under the wing of Friedrich Gundolf, his book The King’s Two Bodies and the cosmologies at work with Blaser, Spicer and Duncan. Part 4 – 13:00.
In the fifth segment Miriam talks about Blaser’s move to Boston, about how it was about funding himself as a poet and not be content to let Spicer and Blaser “write his poems for him.” She talked about Blaser’s interest in Boston in surrealism and the occult, the beginning of his serial poems: Cups, The Park, The Faerie Queen, The Moth Poem, Les Chimères, Image Nations 1-4, how his practice of poetry composition differs from Spicer’s notion of “dictation” and criticism by Charles Olson of his work, that it “lacks syntax.” Part 5 – 18.15.
Our second interview session happened that same evening, (03-January-2020) after a break and included several more segments.
In the sixth segment she talked about Blaser’s method, which she calls “The Open Space Poem” and said it is an appropriate term because of Blaser’s use of seriality:
That’s what I called it, the open space poem, because the open space poem is also tied to the idea of seriality because it’s what comes into the space. You create a space in the poem for what is going on all around you, so it’s time-bound. You’re attentive to what’s happening in the culture. That goes back to Pound. We have to know what’s happening. It sounds like an off the cuff remark, but actually it’s not. It’s kind of a directive. If you have a very, very stable world-view that in your opinion you think is fixed then you might not need to know what’s happening because your world-picture is stable. But if you don’t have that then you do have to know what’s happening, and that’s also, I think, part of the 20th Century that Robin came to join after he went to Berkeley. The serial poem, the open space poem, would be a poem where the poet gives space to and is attentive to, in a sense, assembles in what’s going on around him or her. And of course it’s curated. How could it not be? You want to know where the poet is. Well, the poet’s inside there, and the poet is making the selection. He, in this case it’s a he, is not the only voice and sometimes not even the dominant one in that space. And it’s a moveable space. It has to keep evolving and going somewhere without closing itself off in advance, who gets in, who gets out.
She also discussed the “dust up” between Blaser and Robert Duncan over the translations of Nerval’s Les Chimeres at the crux of which was Spicerian translation in which things don’t connect, they correspond. Part 6 – 11:15.
In part seven the similarity between the ending of the friendship with Blaser and Duncan is compared to that of Duncan and Levertov and Nichols believes that for those he {Duncan] felt were his “juniors” in poetry “he did not well tolerate insubordination.” She also talked more about Blaser’s approach to serial form and how “every serial reworks and modifies the poems that precede it so that the scope and meaning of the whole evolves indifference through repetition” and “with the idea that the end of the story is not within your grasp.” Part 7 – 12:44.
Part eight is a discussion of how Blaser ended up in Vancouver, in a way being pushed out of San Francisco by Robert Duncan, landing in Vancouver thanks in part to divination, becoming a very popular professor at Simon Fraser University and helping their library become a world-class location for Beat and Black Mountain literature. Listen to Part 8 – 10:51.
In part nine Miriam discussed Blaser’s slow work on putting together and publishing the long awaited book The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, about the inclusion of (then new to English readers) deconstructionist philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, about his use of the work of such philosophers and his engagement with Language Poetry icon Ron Silliman on the subject of Spicer’s poetry. The effort to “de-center the self.” Part 9 – 17:13.
In part ten, the final part of the January 3, 2020 interview, Nichols discussed how Blaser came to Canada at a time when Canadian literature was a priority and he was, in part, seen as an American “interloper.” Though the TISH poets knew you could take a process like Projective Verse out of the U.S. and it would be more Canadian than slapping a maple leaf on “Brit-lit” and would not be concerned with the settler story, which now looks like white supremacy, as 70s Canadian nationalism appears now. She discussed Blaser’s short-lived magazine effort, Pacific Nation and about the Projectivist nexus in Vancouver, BC. Part 10 – 17:59.
The following morning I came by and we talked for over an hour on Blaser’s actual poetry, reading examples and having Miriam discuss specific poems. The unedited discussion is 63:41.
I came across my cover letter for the Mud Proposal:
Dear Editors,
I am in year seven of a twenty year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia. (See attached maps.) There are several components:
1) A serial poem re-enacting the history of Cascadia. It started with A Time Before Slaughter and has continued into Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia. See:
2) Interviews with poets, indigenous people and whole-systems activists. See: www.AmericanProphets.org although my interview project pre-dates the bioregional one and, as such, is not all bioregion-specific. 3) The Cascadia Poetry Festival. See: www.CascadiaPoetryFestival.org
Cascadia looks more to Asian and Asian wisdom traditions than to Europe, has a deeper connection to indigenous thought and culture, though indigenous people have been treated in horrific ways in Cascadia and Spanish is the dominant second language after English. In addition, the connection to the natural world is stronger here than in most other bioregions in North America and perhaps the Western world.
Looking forward to your response with gratitude and admiration for your project.
Sincerely,
Paul Nelson Seattle, WA Cedar River Watershed Cascadia Bioregion
There are two videos in which Your Humble Narrator plays a role that are well worth watching. The first is an interview with Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma and Shin Yu Pai on a new series at Town Hall called Lyric World Conversations with Contemporary Poets: Poetry and Wonder. An excerpt:
In the first segment we discuss how she met Robin Blaser as a student at Simon Fraser University, how she began to see how necessary Blaser scholarship was and set about to do it and ended up editing his books of collected poems (The Holy Forest, second edition) and collected essays, The Fire. 
