Robin Blaser

Poet, editor, and essayist Robin Blaser is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Nomad (Slug Press, 1995), Syntax (Talonbooks, 1983), Cups (Four Seasons Foundation, 1968), and The Moth Pœm (Open Space, 1964). Blaser’s poetry and prose has been collected into three volumes: The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (University of California Press, 2006), The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (University of California Press, 2006), and Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser (edited by Miriam Nichols, National Poetry Foundation, 2002).

Blaser was born in Denver and raised in Idaho. In 1944, he moved to California to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied literature and library science. With poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, he helped spark the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance of the 1940s, which preceded the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.

Blaser’s expansive poetry explores the intersections of time, nature, and syntax. In a 2007 interview with Paul E. Nelson, Blaser said,

Language is a way in which you are never simply yourself. I think the attachment to language [...] those poets I’ve admired so much in my life were all poets TIED IN with the language something so alive that it was close to having a body.

Blaser edited Louis Dudek’s Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek (Véhicule Press, 1988), George Bowering’s Selected Poems: Particular Accidents (Talonbooks, 1980), and The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975). In 2000, his libretto for Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Last Supper premiered in Berlin.

In 2006, Blaser received the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award. Two years later, Blaser’s The Holy Forest won the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Blaser worked as a librarian at Harvard University, the California Historical Society, and San Francisco State University. He was Professor Emeritus of Simon Fraser University, where he began teaching in 1966. Blaser received the Order of Canada in 2005, Canada’s highest civilian honor.

Blaser died in 2009, and is survived by his partner of many years, David Farwell.