Synopses & Reviews
The Recovery of the Public World is a collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser and the field inhabited by his work. It is a field in which the private and the public are grounded in a poetic thinking that operates within the problematics of companionship and community. The companions are you, dear reader,” the ghosts of Pindar, Duncan, Dante, Sappho, Spicer, Nerval, Mallarmé
and the inquiring voices, echoing throughout this book, of Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Agamben, Serres, De Certeau, Nancy, Ronell.
The community is an image-nation,” a community in which, in Robin Blasers words, the struggle in philosophy and poetry [is] central to our private and public lives.” Speaking, writing, working out a poetics like Blasers, which is both furious and intelligent, compassionate and amiable, as well as active in its imagination, offers to many of us a means of resistance to that conditionless condition” which characterizes the common predicament of the mass societies in which we live.
The Recovery of the Public World provides an introduction to that work which, until very recently, was the least well-known major body of work of all the poets who were included in Donald Allens ground-breaking anthology, The New American Poets. That Robin Blaser is one of the great North American poets is a fact which many of his peers have known for some time; the availability of The Holy Forest in print and the publication of the essays from three generations of poets from Canada, the U.S.A., the U.K. and New Zealand in The Recovery of the Public World now ensure that a wider reading public will know it as well.
Review
"Poets and thinkers describe his work, assess his accomplishments and contribute reflections on the literary projects and subjects Blaser has helped to construct."
Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Cultural Writing. This important collection of essays grew out of the conference of the same name which took place in Vancouver in 1995, organized by editors Charles Watts and Edward Byrne. In the Introduction, Byrne comments about the event and the book: We always thought of that event as the creation of a space in which the virtual, coextensive community that includes such locations as the Berkeley Renaissance, Black Mountain College, the Vancouver Poetry Conference, White Rabbit College, Gino and Carlo's, Tish, the Peace Eye Bookstore, Talon, Coach House, Naropa, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the Kootenay School of Writing, Proprioception Books, Raddle Moon, the apex of the M, the Buffalo Poetics List, fragmente, Reality Street, Sun and Moon and paradise, to name a very few, could be gathered together in one place again .... Includes essays by Charles Bernstein, Michael McClure, Peter Quartermain, Kevin Killian, Norma Cole, Michael Davidson, Steve McCaffery, Steve Dickison, Peter Gizzi, David Levi Strauss, Susan Howe, Charles Al
Synopsis
A collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser.
About the Author
Charles WattsCharles Watts was curator of Special Collections in Simon Fraser Universitys library from 1980-1997. A man of rare enthusiasm and energy, he is credited with having built SFUs contemporary literature collection into one of the best on the continent. In 1995, he and Edward Byrne organised a conference in honour of Robin Blaser and later edited a collection of essays under the same title The Recovery of the Public World (Talonbooks 1998). He published one book of his own poetry, Bread and Wine (Tantrum 1987).
Edward Byrne
Edward Byrne is currently a Director of the Trade Union Research Bureau in Vancouver, and is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing Collective. He is the author of Aporia (1989) and Beautiful Lies (1995). Edward Byrne is the co-editor of The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser (1999).