Robin Blaser: or the problematics of dual-citizenship in Canada

Robin Blaser was (til his recent death this past May) a very well-known Canadian poet, widely read and disseminated (mostly by academic readers), creator of a body of work that represents an interesting synthesis of poetry theory and practice in our day, but alas, he was American. Or was he? Is that even a problem? Not even receiving the "Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2008 from the very lucrative "Griffin Trust", that gives its $ 50 000 prize money to a Canadian and foreigner, seems to have settled the matter of national affiliation: after all, did he receive it for work as Canadian or American, or does the distinction even matter? Is there even one to be made?

Northrop Frye, on the other hand, the canonical voice of  academicism and archetypal studies, was certainly not the agent for literary change Blaser and the Simon Fraser poets were in 60s Vancouver but, along with McLuhan and Innis, perhaps this country's most institutionalizing force. More Canadian than Blaser then? If all I have to rely on for an answer is The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (Ed. Miriam Nichols, 2006), the response seems to strike another blow at Canadian literary autonomy, or even self-respect: no, Blaser, erudite, interesting & well-intentioned as we was, inspiration to Canadian poets and critics who read him (including myself) cannot be touted as a distinctly Canadian accomplishment any more than could the Maple Leafs former captain Mats Sundin. There was just nothing Canadian about him.

Resurrecting old 'nationalist' concerns along lines of Keith Richardson (Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish), George Grant (Lament for a Nation)  and (the earlier and more interesting) Margaret Atwood (Surfacing) may seem in bad taste today, contrary to the modern bias for cosmological citizenship.  A Canadian but with dual U.S. citizenship, understandably,  can perhaps see nationalist limitations—ripe for critique or re-reading—better than those (myself included) who've lived in Central Canada. Or could he? Again, I doubt it and I have Blaser's own words to show he brings forward only the most staunchly American perspectives to the discussion of poetry & poetics, unable to drop them even when reading Bowering, Dudek and Dikeakos. Canadian themes, authors and related artistic disciplines never stray from an Olson-Duncan ("Black Mountain")  project and an even wider socio-cultural assimilation to foreign traditions always part of Blaser's own interpretation of things.

Nichols has divided the Collected Essays into poetics and commentaries, reserving the end for her own summary overview of Blaser's main ideas. But there's also the equally vital anecdotal record, the reminiscences, reading habits and his own quirky predilection for extensive citation: all of which reveal the man & his own biases as forcefully as the essays themselves do. Whether reflecting on poetry or on the practice of poets and artists Blaser is constrained to a single style, terminology and distinctively American modo di parlare. A labyrinth from which he isn't able to extricate himself (even in his best passages).

Blaser's American in the uniquely American postmodernist thinking he everywhere espouses.  The form and content of the man, molded in this poststructuralist didactics, combine to reveal a distinctive intellect and personality, particularly the eclecticism of his method: form is for Art and its primarily postmodern methodologies (Blaser discussing not just poets but novelists and collage-artists), content for the characteristically Blaserian style, "the personalness of language and form" (7), forged in Berkeley Renaissance and cast over a wide body of learning and personal experience. And Canada, of course, is caught in that net of critical commentary.

It's in "The Fire", for example, that the form of Blaser's critical practice announces itself as "a writing about my poetry in relation to poetry" (3), the need to tie the style of the man to an American poetry tradition. Indissoluble everafter.The serial poem (5) emerges as the exemplar: by which is meant not slavish devotion to Form but rather, as the title means to suggest, the "heat of the process" (10), Blaser's primary metaphor from this point on for poetry as a pure engagement with "the specific, the particular, the place" ("Particles" 21), a typically postmodernist move away from the tyranny of "totality" (Lyotard cited in "Mind Canaries" 251) towards a normativity of textual loci, discontinuities and slippages.

It's in the elixir of "particularity" that poetry works as a kind of world, complete with inhabitants, rivers and maps (25), a deleuzian "thousand plateaus" vision of reality made sayable through a radically heterogeneous language. "The reading of a poem," Blaser says, "is the re-enactment of the images of contact with the world" (24), landscape and language set as limits to the possibility of any artistic expression. The key to that last statement is in "images". "The Stadium of the Mirror" is where three traditions meet at a crucial crossroads for an understanding of the poetic "image": the personal (Blaser), American (Olson) and European (Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan). Through a reading of his own "Image-Nations" series (from the Holy Forest collection), Blaser appropriates for his uses a basic Lacanian "image" motif, abetted by Arendt's socio-cultural insights into the modern condition & Olson's own grand designs on Language (envisaged as no less than a return to a Pleistocene poetics), with Merleau-Ponty providing a useful "phenomenological process" vocabulary. The man's repertoire is amazing.

A ménage of influences and personal idiosyncrasies that results in a highly delicate kneading of experience into the stuff of the "serial" poem. The necessity for native & foreign influences is seen to lie in the very living substance (embodiment) they confer on a poem's genesis and growth. Again, the dominant metaphor of alchemical "fire" in which a poem crystallizes. In Blaser's own words:

The serial poem constantly circumscribes an absence that brings its presences to life. An indefiniteness that is one of the providing aspects of the world. The reader is disclosed in an act of such worldliness, or rather, he(sic) is open to it, and has not constituted the real himself. He may enter a disclosed obedience, different from the polis imposed upon our time. He—there—then—comes to a gate. And as he steps through, he becomes invisible—suddenly to begin his visibility again ("The Stadium of the Mirror" 34).

Poetry, in this Blaserian synthesis, is an artifact of the world, a living testimony to sense & sensuality, a real contact with the image because of the way it meets us at many levels of our Dasein. Blaser's own term for that Heideggerian engagement is the "world-image", again typical of his penchant for synthesis and critical appropriation. But, of course,  membership in this new poetic Cosmos comes with the death of anything that smacks of "lyric voice" ("Poetry and Positivisms" 39): par for the poststructuralist course. Only the materials of language, art and music count, so that Art turns into so many types of "positivisms", collage in a radical Rauschenbergian sense and atonality, respectively. Even a "materiality of soul" where a sense of the sacred is concerned (41): no hostages taken. The arts and the sacred form parts of the same discourse ("The Recovery of the Public World" 78)

Blaser is certainly countenancing an anti-modernist stance, as his repeated references to Arendt attest or, at least, those great modernist figures with outside-the-"Western box" instincts like Rilke, Mallarmé and Broch who seemed to prefigure and eschew the terror of Absolutist tendencies in their own age. The way they are, as Blaser says in regard to Mallarmé, a "kind of distillate of so many intellectual challenges to art." (57)

Well and good: Berkeley Renaissance poet with strong anti-modernist roots in the historicism of  Olson and Arendt and the irreparably "shattered" transcendentalism ("The Irreparable" 107) of Mallarmé, Lacan, et. al. Whose reading of Spicer, the best and most impassioned of them all, is a definitive catalogue of Blaser's own poststructuralist beliefs: that (a) the 'serial' poem, after Spicer, is a sort of Jamesean house of fiction in which lights flicker on and off ("The Practice of Outside" 119); (b) content is a "doubling" of the unsayable and the act of "dictation" by which the invisible becomes visible, again after Spicer (121); (c) the ghostly voice is not that of narrator but of a "composition" made visible through its cryptic, gnostic and intensely lonely language (123); and (d) the journey from the unsayable to poetry constitutes a "field" or "topology" of writing, the ground from which a writing begins, resulting perhaps even in a new literary form (127). Was all of it bound to lead him in the end to make the definitive case for an Americanized poststructuralist poetics in which

the push of contemporary poetics towards locus, ground and particularity is a remaking of where we are. In this sense, the poem becomes an extraordinary field of forces which measure and contain the I of men(sic) and poets. From Pound's hierophanies to Williams's ground to Olson's cosmology to Spicer's narrative of the unknown, a remaking of the real is at stake. One needs only to notice how much of it is a common experience and also something regained, rather than an invention.(133)

And which Blaser carried with him even into Canada's dark waters (his portmanteau criticism), talking about Bowering and Dudek, in particular, as if they were special cases of a pretty even paradigmatic model. With really little or no attention paid to the quintessentially native sensibility of the writings (without exception) of all Canadian poets since at least the modernist 30s and 40s. Including even the bad boys of Tish whose voiceless, fractured and asyntactical writings always kept room for opposition from their intimidated critics.

At least, it's the way Blaser always appears to speak (at least to me). The Canadians (and I am excluding Blaser's reading of collage-painter Christos Dikeakos) come in for a heady dose of the indeterminacy-become-determinate elixir of Spicer poetics, bolstered always by the Berkeley Renaissance pulsions whose weak version took place in 60s Vancouver, at Simon Fraser University where Blaser taught for two decades. It's as though ours has also been a literary destiny forged in the same American "fire". But it isn't and the great poet-critic should have known better.

In his reading of Bowering Blaser almost seems to be applauding a 60s experimentalist student on correctly ingesting the Olson-Duncan aesthetics: he everywhere praises Bowering (and bpNichol and Fred Wah, almost in the same breath) for simplicity of expression ("George Bowering's Plain Song" 179), the right use of "indeterminacy" (179) and the consequent "doubling" effect of a wounded writing that's always reminiscent of Spicer. As though all he ever talks about is Spicer. Death of lyricism reinforced by fragmented expression, and an always accompanying sense of alienation in a cultural landscape result in the desired "multiplied voices" technique of postmodernist writing (182): the usual haunting cri du coeur for the loss of artistic unity & identity. Typical of Blaser's "palimpsest" criticism is his reading of Bowering's novel A Short Sad Book, of which he says (among other things):

The text begins with an apparent naïveté of surface and brief, simple sentences that stop and start as if the "novel" itself were talking back, and it is. This is the beginning of a lost innocence in writing, which is our own, the reader's loss, and of a regained language and imaginative form. A marvellous, raucous laughter works on us throughout (183).

The case of Dudek is more interesting still since of all the Canadians Blaser praises, he's the poet of "large imaginative structures" (190) and so the most opposed to the Olson-Duncan literary agenda, and so to Blaser himself. Perhaps a case here of the purveyors of "fragment-structure" always guiltily giving leeway for their critics to speak. A very strategically placed acknowledgement. Dudek with Layton, Avison and Page formed the only counterpoetics to Tish, the modernists whom Simon Fraser had successfully strangled. Almost equating them, in the minds of a generation of future poets and readers, with the outmoded Confederation poetry the original Canadian Imagists (& Objectivists) had directed their polemics at the turn of the century. I'd like to think of them as the recurrent nightmare in  literary experimentation not likely to dissipate and that, in my view, makes the poststructuralist project ripe for overthrow.

Dudek is touted as if were the Canadian Ezra Pound ("Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek" 262-3), the modernist problematic that an era of "fragment-structure" won't dispense with easily (if at all). Even Blaser must see Dudek and his work as "an inheritance, directly engaged, from that whirlwind of meaning which identifies the modern project in art, philosophy and science. Dudek's work belongs to that project; that is its argument and that is one measure of its size." (263) Devoted to long narrative poetry, and to cherishing the cultural continuities it's designed to carry forward & hold as part of a tradition worth saving in the face of the age's love of "vanity", "the commonplace" (278) & junk aesthetics, Dudek may very well be Blaser's own inverted mirror-image. Image of the problematical Other that doesn't seem to sit well with him (notwithstanding the profuse praises) because it's perhaps himself he's sensed as foreign, the ex-pat faced with the difficulties of transporting a viewpoint that's not that adaptive to the Canadian tradition. Problematics of dual-citizenship!

In the face of a real Canadian , Blaser has no option save to smother the man & his work in the usual layerings of American poetics: the same descriptors for Dudek's works, like "indeterminate", "doubling", "fragment-structure", etc., as have been pretty consistently used throughout the entire essays. Except, of course, that here modernism won't dissolve and the Canadian literary experience won't give up too handily its strong Dudek lyrical and narrative voice.