Abstract
Blaser and Persky arrived in Vancouver in 1966, Blaser to take up a position at the newly opened Simon Fraser University. Over the next decade, Blaser wrote his most self-defining essays on poetics, including “Particles,” an essay on poetry and politics. He also edited Spicer’s Collected Books and wrote “The Practice of Outside” for it, contextualizing Spicer in then-current literary theories. This chapter tracks the Vancouver art and poetry scene in the 1960s and 1970s; Blaser’s teaching methods and contributions to SFU; his major works of the period, including Image-Nation 1-12 and the Stadium of the Mirror; his editorship of Pacific Nation, his own literary magazine; his account of Olson’s death in 1970; and his unsettled personal life after a break-up with Persky.
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Notes
- 1.
In the essay “The Conference that Never Was: The ‘Landmark’ 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference,” Frank Davey challenges the way in which this 1963 event has been historicized as a “conference,” suggesting that “Tallman’s jamboree would seem to have been permanently normalized into the polite and legitimizing academic event he so much wanted it not to be” to the professional advantage of some (Davey n.d., 20).
- 2.
Established in 1957, the Canada Council for the Arts is a Crown Corporation with a mandate to support the arts in Canada. In the 1950s, Canadian culture was overshadowed by American imports; the establishment of this arts funding body was coincident with a Canadian push toward more autonomy, not only in the arts but in the economy and the management of natural resources.
- 3.
For a more detailed discussion of NETCO, see Nancy Shaw’s article, “Siting the Banal: The Expanded Landscapes of the N.E. Thing Co.”
- 4.
See Adam Lauder’s essay, “Robert Smithson’s Vancouver Sojourn: Glue Pour, 1970.”
- 5.
The British Columbia Social Credit party dominated B.C. politics from 1952 to 1991, with only one break between 1972 and 1975. The party had roots going back to the Alberta Social Credit Party (founded in 1935), which combined the monetary theory of Major Clifford Hugh Douglas with Christian fundamentalism. In B.C., it became a right-wing “free enterprise” party, fiscally and socially conservative. After severe defeat in the 1991 B.C. election, the party dissolved. Its policies have since found a home in the deceptively named B.C. Liberal Party, a party distinct from the more centrist federal Liberal Party of Canada.
- 6.
Blaser describes Kantorowicz’s style in The Astonishment Tapes (77).
- 7.
For a skeptical view of Blaser’s teaching practices, see Stephen Bett’s memoir, So Got Schooled: In the Tower, On the Field.
- 8.
This famous remark of Whitman’s comes in the 1855 “Preface to Leaves of Grass”: “folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls” (Whitman 1977, 10–11).
- 9.
Memo to Blaser from G[erald] M. Newman, Acting Head of the English Department (Newman, 3 September 1969).
- 10.
Maud financed Blaser’s trip to Greece in 1972 and never asked for repayment. David Farwell remembers that Blaser never forgot and often mentioned this debt to Maud.
- 11.
An outline for a graduate course, dated spring 1970, is titled “Classical Sources and Mythology for the Study of Contemporary American Poetry.” The required reading list is as follows: Henry Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods; Hesiod, Works and Days: Theogony; Homer, The Illiad; Károly Kerényi, Promethus; Charles Olson, Causal Mythology; James Pritchard, The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. This list is followed by a much longer one of books reserved for the course.
- 12.
Postcards and trip material are archived in MsA1 Box 43, Folder 7, Blaser fonds.
- 13.
Arendt says in The Human Condition: “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized” (Arendt [1958] 1959, 178).
- 14.
See Sheldon Wolin’s essay, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political” for a critique of Arendt’s division of the social and political. She “never succeeded in grasping the basic lesson taught not only by Marx but by the classical economists as well, that an economy is not merely work, property, productivity, and consumption: it is a structure of power, a system of ongoing relationships in which power and dependence tend to become cumulative, and inequalities are reproduced in forms that are ever grosser and ever more sophisticated” (Wolin 1994, 295). At issue for Wolin in this argument is that Arendt does not seem to adequately recognize that the means to social justice stand between most people and political freedom in her sense of it. Hence Wolin finds her anti-democratic. Even more friendly critics like Margaret Canovan pick up a conservative strand in her thinking (Canovan 1997, 11–32).
- 15.
Like Olson, Blaser uses an open bracket to suggest a thought-vector. All the Image-Nation poems are subtitled with an open bracket.
- 16.
The Language poets were so-called after a journal titled L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews from 1978 to 1982. Like Measure or Origin or Open Space , L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E gathered the interests of a new generation of writers and poets who came to be called, not always to their pleasure, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. In their preface to a book-length publication of selections from the first three volumes, titled The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Andrews and Bernstein note that labels are “troublesome” but that “our project, if it can be summarized at all, has involved exploring the numerous ways that meanings and values can be (& are) realized—revealed—produced in writing” (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, ix).
- 17.
I have in mind Jean-François Lyotard’s comment that the postmodern marks “a kind of flight of reality out of the metaphysical, religious, and political certainties that the mind believed it held” (Lyotard 1984, 77).
- 18.
The phrases in this passage come from Claude Lefort’s “Editor’s Foreword” to The Visible and the Invisible (Lefort 1968, xxx–xxxii). Alphonso Lingis uses the terms “wild-logos” and “operative language” in his “Translator’s Preface” (Lingis 1968, liii). The “operative language” is that of “literature, of poetry, of conversation, and of philosophy, which possesses meaning less than it is possessed by it, does not speak of it, but speaks it, or speaks according to it, or lets it speak and be spoken within us, breaks through our present” (Lingis 1968, liii). Lingis is discussing the embeddedness of perception in the world and the chiasmatic, mutually constitutive relationship between perceiver and perceived. The italics in the passages that Blaser’s quotes are his; they indicate quotation rather than emphasis.
- 19.
Father Knows Best was a television comedy about family life, starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt. It ran from 1954 to 1960.
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Nichols, M. (2019). Vancouver in the Sixties: Context as Explanation. 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_6
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