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The Holy Forest

The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, Revised and Expanded Edition.

Edited by Miriam Nichols
Foreword by Robert Creeley
With a new afterword by Charles Bernstein
Copyright Date: 2006
Edition: 1
Published by: University of California Press
Pages: 544
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pphk2
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  • Book Info
    The Holy Forest
    Book Description:

    Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene.The Holy Forest,now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time-from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

    eISBN: 978-0-520-93225-8
    Subjects: Language & Literature

Table of Contents

  1. Front Matter
    (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    (pp. v-xvi)
  3. FOREWORD
    (pp. xvii-xxii)
    Robert Creeley

    For a reader to begin here may well prove displacing if one expects to find either a simple explanation or some securing directions. I have read Robin Blaser’s consummate poetry for years, but I cannot predicate its authority on any sense that it has answered the questions which compelled it or come to the conclusion of what it thought to say. What has to be recognized is that these poems are not a defining “progress,” or a skilfully accomplished enclosure. Above all else I must emphasize a sense often echoed here, that the “unfolded fold” to be found in his...

  4. A NOTE ON THE TEXT
    (pp. xxiii-xxiv)
    Miriam Nichols
  5. AUTHOR’S NOTE
    (pp. xxv-2)
    Robin Blaser
  6. The Boston Poems 1956–1959
    (pp. 3-28)
    Cleo Adams
  7. Cups 1–12 1959–1960
    (pp. 29-46)
  8. The Park 1960
    (pp. 47-56)
  9. The Faerie Queene 1961
    (pp. 57-64)
  10. The Moth Poem 1962–1964
    (pp. 65-86)
    H.D.
  11. Image-Nations 1–4 1962–1964
    (pp. 87-94)
  12. Les Chimères 1963–1964
    (pp. 95-108)
    Fran Herndon
  13. Charms 1964–1968
    (pp. 109-138)
    Stan Persky
  14. Great Companion: Pindar 1971
    (pp. 139-146)
  15. Image-Nations 5–14 and Uncollected Poems 1965–1974
    (pp. 147-188)
  16. Streams I 1974–1976
    (pp. 189-200)
  17. Syntax 1979–1981
    (pp. 201-242)
    David Farwell
  18. Pell Mell 1981–1988
    (pp. 243-332)
    David Farwell and Rob Dunham
  19. Great Companion: Robert Duncan 1988
    (pp. 333-340)
  20. Streams II 1986–1991
    (pp. 341-366)
  21. Exody 1990–1993
    (pp. 367-396)
  22. Notes 1994–2000
    (pp. 397-434)
  23. Great Companion: Dante Alighiere 1997
    (pp. 435-458)
  24. Wanders 2001–2002
    (pp. 459-486)
  25. So 2003
    (pp. 487-494)
  26. Oh! 2004
    (pp. 495-506)
    Robin Blaser
  27. AFTERWORD
    (pp. 507-510)
    Charles Bernstein

    Robin Blaser’s poems are companions on a journey of life, a journey whose goal is not getting someplace else, but, rather, being where you are and who you are—where you is always in the plural.

    In the pluralmight be a good motto for Blaser’s courageous and anti-declamatory poetics, his profound continuation, deep into the darkening heart of contemporary North American poetry, of Emily Dickinson’s core value: “I’m nobody . . . Are you nobody too?” For Blaser, it is not only nobody but also no mind, or “no” mind, for this is a poetics of negation that dwells...

  28. INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES
    (pp. 511-519)
  29. Back Matter
    (pp. 520-520)