Return-path: <@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU:owner-poetics@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU> Received: from UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu by ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu (PMDF V4.2-13 #3449) id <01H68NT2KNS08WZYGV@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>; Wed, 8 Dec 1993 14:37:33 EST Received: from UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU by UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7201; Wed, 08 Dec 93 14:19:44 EST Received: from UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@UBVM) by UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 2106; Wed, 8 Dec 1993 14:19:42 -0500 Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 11:09:04 -0800 (PST) From: peter quartermain Subject: Robin Blaser: Launch of _The Holy Forest_ Sender: UB Poetics discussion group To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group Message-id: <01H68O1YNRUU8WZYGV@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu> Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII X-To: poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu Robin Blaser's new book _The_Holy_Forest_, published 30 November by Coach House in Toronto, was officially launched with a reading by Blaser at the Western Front in Vancouver, 3 December 1993. What follows is the text of my introductory remarks, prefaced by five messages received from those unable to come. For about two hours Blaser read to well over 200 people: a new work _Fax 1 (to Sharon Thesen_, followed by the whole of _CUPS_, _Image-Nation 9 (half and half_, "yellow ribbons", "As If By Chance", "Interlunar Thoughts", "Even on Sunday", "in the tree tops", _Image-Nation 24 ("Oh, Pshaw"_, _Exody_ and some others. 1. [from Michael Ondaatje, Diana Martin, Margaret McClintock and everyone at Coach House Press:] Everyone at Coach House Press is thrilled and proud to be publishing this book. 2. [from Phyllis Webb:] Dear Robin: You are the great moth that can't be pinned down. Thank you for that. Thank you for your moth music, for all your perfect canticles. Phyllis Webb 3. [from Michael Palmer:] Night out west, early this time of year, and I'm thinking in the dark of the dark. I'm thinking of the sweet darkness, the burning pages -- a dream I remember called _In the Dark_. About being lost, of course. In a dark wood. I'm thinking of friends such as Robin, all of us, in the Lost & Found Department of the Holy Forest. Love from the company in your other city, Michael Palmer 4. [from Fred Wah:] Dear Robin: Another night in the forest. I wish I could be there with you tonight, among the silences, lost in the indecipherable, forgetting the way in order to find it. I can almost hear your voice over the Rockies, your careful deference to the wild residue of the inside word, your handsome astonishment at the beauty of the book. But, surely, it's not the end of the plot? Congratulations Fred Wah 5. [from Charles Bernstein:] I'm not sure what sort of note I could send to Robin re. _The_Holy_Forest_, except that there is no book I have waited for longer or with more eagerness and I appreciate all that Blaser has done for and in poetry and poetics, without which I don't know how I could have gotten any grounding at all. Charles Bernstein [The unspoken title of my remarks was "(no fixed address)"] When Stan Persky and Coach House Press asked me to introduce Robin tonight I started marking up passages in _The_Holy_Forest_ that I thought I might quote, only to discover that I was marking *everything*. These poems utterly resist predatory reading. I'm not going to take up much of your time, and to make sure of that, I'm going to read to you. For there is so much, and so little, to say. "a candy-wrapper with a phone number / on it suffices to call the largeness, and / the smallness." Of all the poets I can think of, none so quickly -- in the space of two lines, three perhaps, draws the reader so into his language, into the world of the poem, into the imagination. The poems retrieve what we did not know we'd lost, but whose lack we mourn. They retrieve the reader's imagination, retrieve imagination, reminding us of what it is, then, to read. Composing the good, the imagination invents its own landscape by seeing where it is. The fact that we have lost our way in the holy forest does not mean we can shit in the soup. or cut down the trees. or lose our alertness. It is a place of terrors and wonders. It is the only forest we've got. And it's unknowable. "transcendence," the poet tells us, "like ourselves is historical, even in dreams" (324). That's why the truth is laughter. Of course there's another way to say this: in Allen Ginsberg's words, we're not souls, communicating, we're just meat talking to meat. And *that*'s all we've got: "a lacunary system, a cosmos unsure of its postulates" (368). The absurd comedy of that condition is also an absurd nightmare, of course. But spirit begins in matter -- as does our language and all histories. There's another way of saying this, too. Blaser says it with great wit: If there's one thing Harry learned to love more than the sacred, it was the sacred in ruins. This is the only world we've got. There has always been a garden and it has always been among the ruins, a path, and a relief. If paradise is to be found anywhere, it can only be found here. The difficulty with Heaven and Hell is that it's hard to tell the difference. Each, after all, is a source of light, and neither is a source of ease -- the sense of paradise includes its loss. But turn your back on the sacred, shit in the soup, and all hell breaks loose. Turn your back on the sacred and you force it into the violence of leashed imagination, which will burst its bonds and us in the process; turn our backs on the sacred, make the artist (as one poem quotes) _the_deodorant_puck_in_the_ urinal_of_life_ (191), and WE erupt into violence, or we become dull grey, the poet tamed, our dreams our musics and our architectures our joys our sorrows our passions come home at last members of no more than a classroom education. Blaser is the poet who makes a stink. He reminds us that we are creatures of language and it is our very nature to be in need. He is the poet of disturbance; our doom is that there is always more, and the only surety we have is the violence of our desire. What holds these poems, what holds the attention, is the strength of their passion and their love, their attention to what is. The mind / the poet / the imagination exfoliates , in- forming and out-forming, the dis-covery re- covery of what is and what-it-is-to-be alive. Mind as body, thought's flesh. Making sense / making Sense / extending the perceived/able. the unseen is not beyond our vision. Blaser is a visionary poet, but not by that with his eyes on any world but *this* one. A great player of syntax, sound, and line break, Blaser always resists completion, every line always turns to another -- or to potentiality, potence -- never resting, but without display. The event we are celebrating tonight, the publication of _The_Holy_Forest, is major. I can't think of another book of Canadian poetry which has been so anxiously and eagerly awaited, and which is so well worth the wait. It is an astonishing and wonderful book, the integrity of the writing, the refusal to pander to taste or to fashion, to kowtow to the demands of others, unmatched save perhaps by Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky. Please welcome (and honour) Robin Blaser. Peter Quartermain 3 December 1993 ----------------------- Return-path: <@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU:owner-poetics@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU> Received: from UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu by ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu (PMDF V4.2-13 #3449) id <01H696BKT2LC8X03PS@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>; Wed, 8 Dec 1993 23:20:40 EST Received: from UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU by UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 0103; Wed, 08 Dec 93 23:17:36 EST Received: from UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@UBVM) by UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 9327; Wed, 8 Dec 1993 23:17:36 -0500 Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 23:18:49 -0500 From: Kenneth Sherwood Subject: Violent Dictionary Sender: UB Poetics discussion group To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group Message-id: <01H696BKU56A8X03PS@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu> Organization: University at Buffalo Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Tradi{c}tional Close Reading : Tina Darragh's "'A' was for 'ox'" A movement/moment from on/off too. As if "A" were dependent on "ox" which "suddenly exposes his autonomy as illusory." ("Theoretical" qts. from Judith Butler, _Gender Trouble_) "A" as in origin, as in "the political stakes in designating an origin and cause". (B) "Those identity categories that are in fact effects of institutions, practices, discourses..." (B) "The elements surrounding it were strong..."(D) A site of ordering, an arbitrary "a b D ". It is "motor-wise' to write: write our own ticket..." as if volition; "write-down" as if fixed, a unified construct; "write in" as if believing there were the potential for change, political actions. Representation in both senses: mimesis and a political standing in for. What is "edge". Where the lines broken by contingencies of a book's form. These happenings are quite random, occur naturally, *cannot yet be predicted with significant accuracy*? Trying to convince students that words don't _come_ from dictionaries, aren't born there, that their (who be they?) status in The Book is an effect/affect. Resist "con ce s s i o n . ' ' That a subject be defined in order to be (re)presented. Requirement of articulation through received forms in order to challenge said forms with efficacy. KS ______________________ Copy text: (Below is a translation--presumably illegal--of Tina Darragh's published, copyrighted poem. Please don't forward this all over the place. We can have hacker anarchy with etiquette, right?) from %on the corner to off the corner% Sun & Moon 1981 "A" was for "ox" The first oxygen conversion occured as an incline, a sharp bend as in "wrench". The elements surrounding it were strong, physically violent ones--wreck, wrestle, wretch--with the exception of "wren". The next major activity was "wrinkle", again related to "wrench" with the addition of "wind". Wrist action proceeded from there--wrist-lock, wrist-pin, wrist-shot, wrist wrestle, wristy--preparing us "motor-wise" to write: write our own ticket, write-down and write-in. "elaborative" to "Eleatic" for "D" "Egg" and "oxygen" both contain "edge", with egg's edge located at "share" and oxygen's at shear". The distance doubles from one to the other along this line: shar et vb farme atim domin numer iz cti porta acio torti him sho SHAG low ME L dou sha tio HE min ears cou ock metim semb dj ____________________________________________________________________________ Kenneth Sherwood | "Fragments are V001PXFU@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU | our wholes" RIF/T (e-poetry@ubvm) | --Clark Coolidge ____________________________________________________________________________