Robin Blaser

The Astonishment Tapes is the edited transcript of revealing autobio­graphical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser, a founding member of the Berkeley contingent of the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry. Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, ex­plored his homosexuality, engaged in a lively arts community, and met fellow travellers and poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. The three men became the founding members of the Berkeley core of what is now known as the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry. In the company of a small group of friends and writers in 1974, Blaser was asked to narrate his personal story and to comment on the Berke­ley poetry scene. In twenty autobiographical audiotapes, Blaser talks about his childhood in Idaho, his time in Berkeley, and his participation in the making of a new kind of poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is the ex­pertly edited transcript of these recordings by Miriam Nichols, Blaser’s editor and biographer. In The Astonishment Tapes Blaser comments extensively on the poetic principles that he, Duncan, and Spicer worked through, as well as the differences and dissonances between the three of them. Nichols has edited the transcripts only minimally, allowing readers to make their own interpretations of Blaser’s intentions. Sometimes gossipy, sometimes profound, Blaser offers his version on the inside story of one of the most significant moments in mid-twenti­eth century American poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is of considerable value and interest, not only to readers of Blaser, Duncan, and Spicer, but also to scholars of the early postmodern and twentieth-century American poetry.

Pell Mell, the middle voice, the syntax meeting its astonishments in its forward stride looking backwards, imagining an image nation where the heart is always torn--to pieces possessed by the other(s). A book so sure of itself that Blaser can begin, after the act of said-and-done, a series called Great Companions. Lesser poets might, and have, called them "masters." But only because they lack Robin Blaser's insistence on the audacious ever-present. A scatter of pearls for Aphrodite, and a lovely place to enter Blaser's life work, The Holy Forest. As to the plot, Blaser himself has said: "These poems follow a principle of randonnee --the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour. Thus, randonnee is another title of this book, written, so to speak, in invisible ink. These poems are also a further movement in one long work that I call The Holy Forest, though that need not trouble the reader before the forest is full grown. Poems called Image-Nations come and go throughout, never to become a complete nation. And Great Companions of the art of poetry, a series which begins to gather here with Pindar and Robert Duncan, will continue until their voices close The Holy Forest. That's the plot."

Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene. "The Holy Forest", now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time - from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought, such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.