the fire behind myself
by Douglas Messerli
Robin
Blaser The Fire: Collected Essays of
Robin Blaser (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006)
Beginning with his famous manifesto-like essay, "The Fire,"
Blaser argues that the business of poetry and poetics is creating a cosmology.
He means that, as he explained in 2009 interview with Paul Nelson, not so much
in a "religious" sense—although he himself admits to the influence of
his Catholic childhood—but in a larger system of a world view. When asked for
the specific components of the cosmology that he and his friends Robert Duncan
and Jack Spicer attempted to create, Blaser answers in that 2009 interview
(published in Golden Handcuffs Review):
“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? Well
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. ....It was simply
a matter of finding language as the way with which you could walk on a piece of
earth....”
In short, as Nelson suggests, for Blaser the search for a cosmology, an
entire system of being, was a process rather than an end. As opposed to a lyric
self-expression, Blaser approached poetry as a serial-like search—what in other
essays he describes a revelation of the "real"—that in its intensity
metaphorically "burns up" the poet, leaving a fire behind him.
This "process," he argues, moreover, can only occur in a
community, and most particularly in a community of poets. Attacks against
"coterie" ignore the reality that poets band together because:
Such communities tend to build
a structure for men who wish to keep, hold
and record the passionate
relation with the outside that the world, the
nation, need. This is the only
place where such talk goes on.
Discourse, accordingly, is at the center of Blaser's poetics, even in
this early essay, and most of the works in this volume resound with voices,
often contrary voices that express a kind of explosion of ideas surrounding the
subject at hand.
This kind of dialectical commentary can often seem an onerous task for
the uninitiated reader; Blaser's essays are filled with references not only to
his poet friends, Duncan, Spicer, Olson and others but to philosophers and
contemporary thinkers, from Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan,
Alfred North Whitehead, Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty to all of Greek
and Roman mythology along with writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, and Dante.
Fortunately, Blaser's commentary is accompanied by an Introduction and highly
informative Afterword by Miriam Nichols who expertly takes the reader by the
hand through the dense thickets of Blaser's poetics.
If nothing else, what any reader comes to realize early on in Blaser's
work is that his writing, both the poetry itself and the criticism, is not a
historical recounting of the "other," but an immersion in both the
thinking process and in the lives of the writers on whom he focuses, all
creating a kind of Memory Theater, "a box with tiers, where the initiate
would take the place of the stage and look out on the tiers, which in an
ordinary theater would hold the audience—here there are images upon images, so
that a man could hold the whole world in view."
Such an impossible undertaking, made even more difficult by the impact
of differing demands upon the poet's attention, particularly the call for
social and political involvement that claim little role in the poetic
imagination, itself might truly "burn up" the poet. One by one,
Blaser takes up some of those issues, in "The Particles" the role of
the political, for example, in which he dismisses various views of what
political poetry might be before going on to argue that it is the passionate particularity of poetry, its
never-ending search for truth or "reality" and the commitment of the
poet to this search that demonstrates most clearly poetry's relationship with
the polis as opposed to statements about political
positions which merely reiterate frozen thoughts, dead images of the society at
large.
Blaser cites the wonderful example of the Spanish writer, Miguel de
Unamuno, Rector of the University of Salamanca. After a rabid speech by General
Millan Astray, "thin, emaciated, one eye and one arm," in which he
called for the extermination of all who stood against Franco, Unamuno rose and
gave a speech beginning:
"All of you are
hanging on my words. You all know me, and are aware
that I am unable to remain
silent. I have not learnt to do so in seventy-
three years of my life. and
I do not wish to learn it any more. At times,
to be silent is to lie. For
silence can be interpreted as acquiescence. I
could not survive a divorce
between my conscience and my world, always
well-mated partners."
Describing the General as a
"symbol of death," Unamuno closes: "Unfortunately there are all
too many cripples in Spain now. And soon, there will be even more of them, if
God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millan Astray
should dictate the patter of mass-psychology. ...You will win, but you will not
convince. You will win, because you possess more than enough brute force, but
you will not convince, because to convince means to persuade. And in order to
persuade you need what you lack—reason and right in the struggle."
The crowd might have killed the Rector right there had not a Professor
of Law taken Unamuno by one arm and Madame Franco by the other and quietly left
the dais. Unamuno remained a prisoner in his house, Blaser tells us, until his
death at the end of that year.
For Blaser it is the persuasion, through particularities, the
"particles" of reality, that matter and are at the heart of any
truthful political act.
That argument continues in "The Stadium of the Mirror," in
which Blaser explores the relationship of poetry to the public in terms of
aesthetics and psychology rather than the political. Here Blaser argues against
the imaginary stage of poetry which the child mistakes as an "image of
psychic wholeness," and argues instead for another version of the Memory
Theater in which the mirrored stadium incorporates "as much of otherness
as the poet can see and hear," internalizing, in short, a great part of
the world inside of the poet's self.
One of two Spicer essays in this book, "The Practice of
Outside," describes some of Spicer's methods, the creation of the serial
poem beginning with not having any idea where one is going. Spicer, as Blaser
claims, used a simple language that resembled his own way of speaking so to be
able to live in that language and, as he wrote in his book, Language, to "have the ground cut
from under us." Blaser argues:
Just here, poetry may
become a necessary function of the real, not
something added to it.
This living through poetry came, however, at a "remarkable
cost." As Spicer once declared: "Neither baseball nor poetry are for
amusement." Spicer's life, filled with contrariness and complexity, along
with a deep dependence on alcohol, demanded a price.
At the end of this long essay, Blaser returns to a scene in which he had
previously left us, at Spicer's beside in the San Francisco General Hospital,
where he is soon to die.
I have already said his
speech was a garble. He could manage a name
once in a while. Otherwise
there were long-runs of nonsense sounds. No
words, no sentences. That
afternoon, there was something like a dozen
friends around his bed, when
it became clear that he wished to say
something to me. By some
magic I can't explain, everyone left to let
it be between us. It was odd
because I didn't ask them to leave and
Jack couldn't be understood.
their affection simply accounted for
something inexplicable. Jack
struggled to tie his speech to words. I
leaned over and asked him to
repeat a word at a time. I would, I said
discover the pattern.
Suddenly, he wrenched his body up from the
pillow and said,
My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will
let you go on.
The strain was so great that
he shat into the plastic bag they'd wrapped
him in. He blushed and I saw
the shock on his face. That funny apology
he always made for his body.
Along with Blaser's observations in short and long essays on Olson,
Louis Dudek, George Bowering, Mary Butts, the artist Jess and others, The Fire encapsulates the immense
demands he puts upon the role of poet, a figure, like Joan of Arc destined to
be burned up in the glory of his or her faith.
Los Angeles, November 1, 2009
Reprinted from Sibila [Brazil] (December 2009).
