Abstract
In 1955, Blaser moved to Boston to take up a position as a librarian at the Widener Library, Harvard. Over his four years there, he wrote intensely, working out his views on life, language, and the role of poetry in the world, often in poems touched by the surreal. He also broadened his literary relationships, visiting and corresponding with poets John Wieners, Ed Marshall, Steve Jonas, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Denise Levertov. Although he was successful at Harvard, Blaser came to dislike the place and left in 1959, using his savings to take a much dreamed-of European tour. This chapter follows Blaser through the Boston scene, the early poems (many still unpublished), and his first grand tour of London and Europe.
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- 1.
In a draft of a job-seeking letter dated 11 November 1959 from Clay Street in San Francisco, Blaser describes his position at Harvard as “Administrative Assistant” (Blaser 1959c, Application for Employment); in a CV prepared for Simon Fraser University in 1972, however, Blaser lists the position as “Administrative Librarian,” a supervisory post (1 May 1972, Curriculum Vitae).
- 2.
In a letter to Michael Boughn, 6 May 1999, Blaser describes the exhibit:
When I did the exhibit at Harvard in 1958 of American Philosophy for the American Philosophical Association (which Olson saw) I opened with Jonathan Edwards, then moved directly to Emerson—and Olson knew or understood what I meant to do—meandering through the depths—until I reached Whitehead—cases upon cases down the staircase in Widener—
- 3.
Blaser preserved a news clipping announcing Felts’s fellowship, but the name of the newspaper and the date have been cut out. The clipping is in MsA1 Box 8, Folder 7, Blaser fonds.
- 4.
The Boston Newsletter is a very rare hand-produced publication. Michael Seth Stewart has provided me with photographs of a private copy and this is where I have found the Ford Foundation letter. I have no archival reference for the Newsletter.
- 5.
Blaser does not mention the title of O’Hara’s “little book” in this letter to Duncan, but in terms of timing it is likely that he was referring to Meditations in an Emergency, published by Grove Press in 1957.
- 6.
One of the most difficult points of the Olson letter dates the postwar “revolution” in poetry to 1875:Verse
Verse ((date 1875 I’d take to be something like 1300 and not, say, 1429 which was the Renaissance, and the change of 1875 was on an order to establish premises which go out the back door of Athens at 500 and probably the change is only, as I remember once preaching in “Gate and Center”, the 2nd heave! (Olson to Blaser, 3 May 1957)
Writing in retrospect, Blaser says, “This letter still leaves me with problems that were never settled in conversation. These are involved in Olson’s fundamental concern with historical change, more clearly outlined in his Special View of History (many have noted the play on Einstein’s famous title), which was not published until 1970” (Blaser 1995e, 7).In another section of the letter, Olson turns to his theme of the fourfold which he would develop in the Special View and in the second volume of Maximus. In the Special View, Olson lays out a cosmology in series of fours, each series an analogue of the others: nature, man, civilization, culture; love, beauty, idea, will; space, time, history, and discourse; form as primordial, consequent, structural, and creative (Olson 1970, 60–61).
- 7.
Many years later, Blaser would write an essay called “The Violets” on Olson’s reading of Whitehead’s Process and Reality. In this essay, he cites a Black Mountain lecture in which Olson dates his study of Whitehead to 1955, just a few years before writing that letter to Blaser (Fire, 202). Working through the marginal notes in Olson’s copy of Process and Reality, Blaser shows that Olson connected the dream message, “of rhythm is image” to Whitehead’s philosophy (Fire, 209) and to the “‘end of the subject-object thing’” (Fire, 218).
- 8.
This comment is in an undated letter from Levertov to Blaser, marked “Tuesday” (see Archival References).
- 9.
In 1964 while she was poetry editor at the Nation, Levertov wrote to Blaser that she would like to publish one of his poems, but that she would not be able to explain it should anyone ask (15 December 1964).
- 10.
James Maynard points to the essay “Reviewing View, An Attack,” published in 1947, as evidence of Duncan’s impatience with what he saw as a growing conservatism in the journal (Maynard 2018, 53–54).
- 11.
See James Maynard’s discussion of Duncan’s early surrealist explorations in the chapter “‘Seas of Desire’” in Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime (Maynard 2018, 35–73).
- 12.
From references he made to it in various letters, I believe the title intended was “Letter to Freud.” The plural “Letters to Freud” was an editorial mistake (my mistake) in the second edition of The Holy Forest (16).
- 13.
Spicer’s sur-real anticipates the neo-Freudian writings of Jacques Lacan, especially in Lacan’s essay, “Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire” (Lacan 1977, 292–325). Lacan proposes that consciousness, enabled through language, forever cuts the mind off from a perceptual immediacy that is, in fact, an effect of language and never available to begin with. The result is incurable desire for an intimacy with “the real,” the satisfaction of which is impossible and the pursuit of which would logically lead to madness or death (one would have to think outside one’s own means of thinking). Spicer’s logic is similar, but he is emotionally very far from the kind of theoretical joy that some Lacanians took (take) in the critique of perception. Spicer’s and Blaser’s use of the word “real” should not be confused with that of Lacan: for both poets, the real has an unsayable component, but it also connotes the “human universe” (Olson’s term)—the world as humanity experiences it.
- 14.
In a 1925 letter to his Polish translator, Witold Von Hulewicz, Rilke writes: “We are the bees of the Invisible … at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitations of our own nature….” (Rilke 1948, 374).
- 15.
The phenomenological and the surreal need not contradict each other if we take seriously Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the entanglement of perceiver and perceived (see the concept of the “chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, a book Blaser came to after Boston). The surreal image literalizes the hybridity of perception as both familiar and strange, conscious and unconscious. The drama of surrealism (the shock of the imagery) comes from the challenge it represents to the assumption that reality must be either subjective or objective. Once that assumption is dropped, the hybrid loses its power to astonish. Perhaps this is why Blaser did not pursue the kind of imagery he was exploring in “A Preface” and other early poems. What remained of the experiment, however, was a lifelong pursuit of the Other—the strange in the familiar that would morph into a long meditation on the de-anthropomorphized sacred.
- 16.
Georges Bataille proposes that the animal is in the world like “water in water” (Bataille 1992, 25), meaning, I think, that the animal is continuous with the flow of life: the creature does not face the world as not-me in quite the same way as does humanity. I realize that this view might be disputed by contemporary animal researchers. My point, however, is about the myth of language acquisition rather than current science on animal cognition. For humanity, individuation is bound up with language acquisition and because we cannot get behind or underneath that process, our account of it amounts to an origin myth: at some point or another we crawl(ed) out of the womb/ocean without language and then we acquire(d) it. After the fact, we imagine the preverbal state through the mediation of language.
- 17.
On this August 1957 visit, Blaser managed to seriously hurt Spicer’s feelings by failing to stop by The Place, Spicer’s watering hole and unofficial office. Here is Spicer’s response to the apology letter that followed:
As far as the personal hurt feelings, I know myself well enough to know that they will disappear whenever I see you regularly again. Our friendship has never stood up well to the sudden—it almost (because we are so different) has to be a day to day thing or nothing. In the meanwhile—you know me well enough to know that I’d be lying to tell you that the hurt won’t stay. I think (hope) that you’d be insulted if it didn’t. (“Thanks for your letter,” n.d.)
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Nichols, M. (2019). Boston: The Librarian. In: A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18327-1_4
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