Robin Blaser Stan Persky Brian Fawcett 9781554200528 Books
Download As PDF : Robin Blaser Stan Persky Brian Fawcett 9781554200528 Books
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Memoir. Divided into two parts, ROBIN BLASER consists of two essays by people who knew Blaser intimately, as a lifelong friend, a mentor and intellectual influence. In part one, award-winning author Stan Persky offers a cohesive guide to reading Robin Blaser's poetry and the ways in which Blaser's work was "an attempted rescue or defense of poetry." In part two, Brian Fawcett discusses how Blaser inspired and guided him in his formative years as a writer at the newly-opened Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. From the authors' recollections, we are given a glimpse into the personal and professional relationships that developed between Persky, Fawcett, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and many of the other poets associated with the "San Francisco renaissance" and the New American Poetry. At once a memoir and a reader, ROBIN BLASER is also an illustrated account of the remarkable life of the poet, with dozens of previously unpublished photographs included.
Robin Blaser Stan Persky Brian Fawcett 9781554200528 Books
I taught with Robin in the English Dept. at SFU during the early years. He became my friend and very much my mentor in modern poetry. Brian Fawcett was briefly my student and back in those halcyon days in the late 60s/early 70s, Stan Persky was becoming a notable poet in the Vancouver landscape. For all those associative reasons, I read this book with special care and recommend it highly. Persky's section gets close-in with some detailed exegesis of Robin's extraordinary poems, some of which can be obtuse. Persky offers some excellent strategies for readers unfamiliar with Robin to get the most from his work.In between Persky's lead-off essay and Fawcett's concluding one, are almost 20 pages of candid shots of Blaser, in descending chronology, culminating in Blaser's late years before his death in 2009.
Fawcett's candid (and amusing) description of his transition from a rough-hewn wannabe writer coming out of BC's North into a Canadian writer of note in his own right, much of that recognition fueled by Robin's example, is written in a deft and animated style that helps place Blaser in the tradition of the New American Poets.
And much more, of course. This is just a review. If you're interested in mainstream modern American/Canadian poetry, you MUST read this book. Along the way, Persky and Fawcett offer a sensitive, multi-layered portrait of one of the finest men it's been my privilege to have known.
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Robin Blaser Stan Persky Brian Fawcett 9781554200528 Books Reviews
When I first moved to Vancouver in late 1988 two of the writers I turned to understand where I had washed up were Stan Persky The house (convention centre, stadium, rapid transit system, etc.) that Jack built Mayor Jack Volrich and Vancouver politics and Brian Fawcett Virtual Clearcut or the Way Things Are in My Hometown. Stan Persky had written a wonderful series of histories of the city, the province and its politics. Brian Fawcett's writing helped me to understand the larger context of this resource based province and how it was responding to globalization, environmental slaughter and the emerging communication and commercialization networks that were (are) rewriting its social structure. Their work helped me to better understand where I was. It was not until some years later that I learned of Stan Persky's relationship to Robin Blazer. I had begun reading Blazer's poetry while living in Tokyo at the suggestion of Eric Selland The Condition of Music, who was also in Tokyo at the time, and was able to discuss his work with Cid Corman Of (Lapis Press Poetry Series) on a number of occasions. At that time I saw Blaser as the most distant star in the constellation of San Francisco poets that included Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, and like many young writers I read and reread Spicer's books many times. Soon after we moved to Vancouver we bought a house in Kitsilano and I was delighted to find that it was just around the corner from where Robin Blaser lived on Trafalgar. I would occasionally run into him on the street and speak with him, usually about the season and the plants associated with it, almost never about poetry. I was away from Vancouver in Boston when Blaser died in May 2009.
The book reviewed here has two very personal essays by men who knew Blaser in very different ways. Persky was a follower and lover of Blaser's and he moved with Blaser from San Francisco to Vancouver. In this book he provides an elegy for Blaser, going deep into specific lines and poems. It sent me back to the poetry to reread passages from The Holy Forest and settled some of the lines deep into my mind. The essay "Reading Robin Blaser" is a wonderful way to remember the poetry and to reengage with it and is a compelling plea for poetry as its own mode of thought, separate from narrative, discursive writing or mathematics. A mode of thought that has been essential to most cultures and that has been marginalized in our own at a heavy cost in understanding who we are, how we speak with each other, and where we live. Without poetry our ability to live large in the universe is stifled, but more seriously, we can miss what is in our own voices as we talk to each other.
Brian Fawcett was a student of Blaser at Simon Fraser University and a poet himself in the style of the New American Poetry. I confess I was only vaguely aware of Fawcett as a poet and as he matured out of the influence of Charles Olson he also left poetry behind to begin his wonderful series of narratives. (Generally people who `mature out of poetry have not dine much useful poetry to begin with). Fawcett's essay is a more difficult piece to read than that of Stan Persky. Fawcett used Blaser's death to look carefully at how Blaser influenced him as a teacher and mentor and how the New American Poetry impacted 60s and 70s Vancouver poetry. There have been strong lines between Vancouver and San Francisco from the 1960s through the 1990s (perhaps less so this century) and one reason that Vancouver writing is so different from that of Toronto and other Canadian cities is the long conversation up and down the coast (as Olson might have pointed out and I am sure Snyder has, the mountains run north-south). Fawcett's discussion of Olson and his school is not always generous. It has the grumpy disaffected tone of much of his recent writing, and will annoy some people. It left me feeling distant from the man but closer to Blaser. But it is worth reading slowly and thinking about how one's influences shape one in unexpected and sometimes unwanted ways. I am glad that Fawcett did the difficult work of remembering and distancing in this short essay and glad that I read it. I need to do this work myself. I am a generation younger than Fawcett and Persky and spent my formative years as a writer living in Asia and reading in Japanese. I did not get the direct influence of the Black Mountain or subsequent Language School poets. I have always found a distance between their doctrines and my own experience a distance that leaves me separate from poetry circles in Vancouver. Reading this little book on Robin Blaser asks me to think and rethink the writers and other artists that shape my own life and assumptions.
Both essays describe the writer's very personal farewells to Robin Blaser and after reading one I went back to the other, and did this several times. There are strange echoes between the two passages, and for me each meant more by being read with the other. And back to The Holy Forest Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, Revised and Expanded Edition.
This is a very welcome book on Robin Blaser. I loved Stan Persky's essay, very much from the heart.
I taught with Robin in the English Dept. at SFU during the early years. He became my friend and very much my mentor in modern poetry. Brian Fawcett was briefly my student and back in those halcyon days in the late 60s/early 70s, Stan Persky was becoming a notable poet in the Vancouver landscape. For all those associative reasons, I read this book with special care and recommend it highly. Persky's section gets close-in with some detailed exegesis of Robin's extraordinary poems, some of which can be obtuse. Persky offers some excellent strategies for readers unfamiliar with Robin to get the most from his work.
In between Persky's lead-off essay and Fawcett's concluding one, are almost 20 pages of candid shots of Blaser, in descending chronology, culminating in Blaser's late years before his death in 2009.
Fawcett's candid (and amusing) description of his transition from a rough-hewn wannabe writer coming out of BC's North into a Canadian writer of note in his own right, much of that recognition fueled by Robin's example, is written in a deft and animated style that helps place Blaser in the tradition of the New American Poets.
And much more, of course. This is just a review. If you're interested in mainstream modern American/Canadian poetry, you MUST read this book. Along the way, Persky and Fawcett offer a sensitive, multi-layered portrait of one of the finest men it's been my privilege to have known.
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