The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser

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 Blaser’s words, “the struggle in philosophy and poetry [is] central to our private and public lives.” Speaking, writing, working out a poetics like Blaser’s, 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 Allen’s 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.

Charles Watts was curator of Special Collections in Simon Fraser University’s library from 1980–1997. A man of rare enthusiasm and energy, he is credited with having built SFU’s 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), and a number of essays and papers in journals.

Of his vocation, Watts said: “I consider my real graduate education to have begun when I became curator of the contemporary literature collection, I began to know something in detail of the energy, the remarkable production of work by North American poets writing since the end of the Second World War, both of little magazines and books.”

Watts was raised in Roseville, California, and came to Canada for masters studies under Robin Blaser at SFU. Blaser remembers that “Charles had a genius for companionship and drew others to him. He was a key figure in the writing community, particularly in Vancouver.”

Poet, translator, and essayist Edward (Ted) Byrne was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and moved to Vancouver in the late 1960s. His work has been published widely since the 1970s. For many years he was a researcher and later a director at the Trade Union Research Bureau. As a collective member of the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) for over fifteen years, he organized readings, led seminars, wrote grant applications, and edited several issues of the journal W. He has been an active member in the Lacan Salon and one of its directors since 2010. He has a master’s degree in comparative literature from UBC, and has translated poetry from French, Old French, German, and Italian. His books include Aporia (1989), Beautiful Lies (1995), Duets (2018), A Flea the Size of Paris: The Old French fatrasies & fatras, with Donato Mancini (2020), and, as co-editor, Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser (1999).