Abstract
In this chapter, Carbery offers an account of the composition of Robin Blaser’s extended poetic project Image-Nations (1975–2007). Blaser’s poetics is informed not only by a serious engagement with the intersubjective phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty but also his reliance on the poetics’ of his close friends, and in particular Jack Spicer’s theory of ‘The Practice of Outside’. In articulating this, Carbery emphasises ‘companionability’, a term which brings together the social and the phenomenological in Blaser’s work. Through reading Blaser alongside Merleau-Ponty, Carbery consolidates recent critical work on Blaser whilst presenting his own cohesive argument that Blaser’s work relies on a phenomenological understanding of intersubjectivity, and in particular Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘Chiasm’.
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Carbery, M. (2019). A Huge Companionship: Robin Blaser’s ‘Image-Nation’. In: Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05002-3_3
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