Robin Blaser always made an impression.
Beautiful with a sculpted face, moody eyes and a delicately attuned ear, he wrote poetry that was both playful and intricately laden with cultural and literary references. George Bowering, an admirer since he first read him in Donald Allen's anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 , calls Mr. Blaser one of “the scholar poets.”
He puts him in the tradition of Dante, Shelley, Pound and Eliot, men who embraced learning and whose poetry “depended on a lot more than honing your skills as a lyricist.”
With his companions, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and others including Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg, he was part the openly gay, poetic movement in the late 1940s and 1950s known as the Berkeley or the San Francisco Renaissance, an avant garde faction that grew out of beat culture, rejected mainstream values and embraced left-leaning social and philosophical attitudes and influences.
But the bulk of his life and career were spent in British Columbia, where he honed his work and was a highly regarded teacher at Simon Fraser University.
His major work was T he Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser , a serial poem spanning five decades that won the $50,000 Canadian portion of the Griffin Poetry Prize last year. The judges, who included Mr. Bowering, wrote that “within the 500 pages of The Holy Forest moves a lifetime's thought” by a poet who is “solemn enough” to approach Dante Alighieri as a “Great Companion,” and serious enough to maintain that “the truth is laughter.”
As a literature professor at Simon Fraser University from 1966 to 1986, Mr. Blaser was as potent as pollen for the students who swarmed around him. Writer and cultural analyst Brian Fawcett “went to university to learn how to write novels,” and “in my first class, there he was. Greatest piece of luck in my life.”
In describing his mentor's approach, Mr. Fawcett said that he made teaching “the base for pursuing his own transgressive version of the History of Ideas.” Mr. Blaser was disciplined, intellectually curious and rigorous. In his classes, learning was neither rote, nor disseminated by osmosis.
“If we were studying Ezra Pound, for example,” Mr. Fawcett said in an e-mail message, “our task was to assemble Pound's antecedents and his intellectual sources, local and historical, and to decipher from them what it was Pound thought he was doing. If that meant (and it did) poring through Homer, Confucian texts and the historic texts from the early years of American democracy, so be it.”
That is not to suggest, however that Mr. Blaser was all aestheticism. As a companion he was engaging, witty, gossipy and fun. Writer and teacher Stan Persky was a 21-year-old sailor who had just been discharged from the U.S. navy when he first met Mr. Blaser in Gino and Carlo's bar in San Francisco in January 1962. Mr. Persky was sharing a drink with “a grousing and bored” Jack Spicer and anticipating a “long winter night” when Mr. Spicer happened to mention that Mr. Blaser had just returned from several years on the east coast.
Mr. Persky, an aspiring poet, had read Cups and some earlier shorter poems and, of course, The New American Poets anthology , but had never met Mr. Blaser. He phoned and invited him to join them for a drink.
“He was one of those people who was gawky as a youth, but became increasingly handsome in middle age,” said Mr. Persky. “He had a neat brush cut, aquiline nose and memorable cheekbones. He was very elegant, knowledgeable in a variety of ways and a peer of my teacher, Jack Spicer.” At the end of the evening, Mr. Blaser walked Mr. Persky home “and private life began.”
The two men became a couple and moved together to Vancouver when Mr. Blaser was hired to teach at SFU in the mid 1960s, in what Mr. Persky described as a “reverse brain drain.” Although they broke up a few years later – Mr. Blaser was never as overtly, politically gay as Mr. Persky – they remained close friends for the next four decades.
