Abstract
Blaser returned to San Francisco in 1960, supporting himself again with library work. Over his six years there, he developed his version of the serial poem in pieces like Cups and The Moth Poem, and pursued his love of the visual arts by opening the Peacock Gallery. A quarrel with Duncan over the poetics of translation, however, caused a serious rift in the friendship. During this time, Blaser also met the poet Stan Persky and left Jim Felts to live with him. When Spicer died in 1965, Blaser was estranged from Duncan and disillusioned with the scene; offered a teaching position in Vancouver, he took it. This chapter follows him through the San Francisco poetry wars, the Persky affair, the Peacock Gallery, and the writing of the early serials.
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- 1.
Paul O’Neil published his article on the Beats, “The Only Rebellion Around,” in Life magazine in 1959. The article included a staged photograph of a Beat “pad” with actors dressed in black, a pair of bongo drums and a guitar, and a vase of sprigs representing marijuana. Kerouac’s appearance on the Steve Allen show in 1959 also drew attention to the word “beat” and to On the Road . The publicity, however, focused on lifestyle, not on the substance of what the poets were saying.
- 2.
Stan Persky remembers that the Spicer circle in 1959 consisted of himself, Duncan, George Stanley, Joanne Kyger, Ebbe Borregaard, and Harold Dull. Later, Ron Primack and James Alexander (brother of the painter Paul Alexander) joined. (Persky interview, 19 October 2013). George Stanley, in an interview with Brenda Houglum and Jenny Penberthy, adds David Meltzer, James Broughton, and Michael Rumaker to the list. Joe and Carolyn Dunn hosted some of the Sunday sessions; some were held at Stanley and Borregaard’s apartment (Stanley 2011, 5).
- 3.
Blaser’s notes for the workshop are in MsA1 Box 45, Folder 1, Blaser fonds.
- 4.
A postcard from “Joe” dated 6 March 1961 complains that Blaser is neglecting his students and a note from Blaser to Parker Hodges dated 2 October 1962 comments on poems that Hodges has sent. Both notes are dated well past the end of the Poet’s Seminar.
- 5.
The Vancouver poetry festival of 1963 has morphed into legendary status. See Chap. 6 for a description.
- 6.
Accounts of the sum that Jantzen proposed to donate vary in the correspondence of the period. In a filmed interview with Blaser, produced by Ralph Maud in 1991, Blaser remembers the amount in question as $3000. In an undated letter to Blaser from Jantzen it is $2500 (Jantzen n.d., “It would be better”).
- 7.
In 1978, Greenberg added a note to his famous essay, saying that he had intended it to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but the effect, as least in some art circles, was similar.
- 8.
See The Astonishment Tapes on Duncan’s Medieval Scenes as a first performance of seriality (Blaser 2015, 68, 167–68). Spicer also points to Medieval Scenes as an early serial (Spicer 1998, 52).
- 9.
In The Astonishment Tapes , Blaser says that his Uncle Mitch, a figure from his Idaho childhood, was “kooky” to the point of incarceration in an asylum. Among his eccentricities was a habit of whistling between words. He was also a writer of westerns. When Mitch committed suicide, Robert Blaser burned the trunkful of writings (AT, 32–33). This story turns up in Cups 10 , where musical notes, like Mitch’s whistles, punctuate Blaser’s “western,” a family story about an Aunt Celestia’s presence at the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857. In that massacre, a group of California-bound emigrants was slaughtered by the Utah Territorial Militia and their Paiute allies.
- 10.
In “The Artist of the Beautiful,” watchmaker Owen Warland falls in love with local girl Annie Hovenden. She, however, chooses a blacksmith to marry, preferring a practical man to one she considers a dreamer. Warland creates an exquisite mechanical butterfly for her nonetheless, a masterwork that takes years to create and that flies through the air as if by magic. When he presents his gift to Annie and her husband, however, the couple’s child grabs it, crushing it to shards.
- 11.
The Duncan–Levertov exchange over Levertov’s antiwar poems has been published in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, edited by Robert Bertholf and Albert Gelpi. The relevant letters run from pages 660 to 693; they are numbered 449 to 456.
- 12.
The documents passing the literary executorship of Spicer’s estate to Blaser are in the Blaser fonds, MsA1 Box 55, Folder 1.
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Nichols, M. (2019). San Francisco: The Artist of the Beautiful. 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_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18327-1_5
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