Robin Blaser

Poet

  • Born: May 18, 1925
  • Birthplace: Denver, Colorado
  • Died: May 7, 2009

Biography

Robin Blaser was born on May 18, 1925, in Denver, Colorado, to truck driver Robert Augustus and homemaker Ina May Celestine (McCready) Blaser. He grew up in desert communities in Idaho, where his father and maternal grandmother, Sophia Nichols, worked the railways. Nichols’s tales and stories gave Blaser a penchant for lifelong narrative poetry writing, and his grandmother paid for his college education.

Blaser said his childhood experiences led him to retain the “resentment and defensiveness” of his father’s working class stance against the “old American pretensions” of his wife’s side of the family. However, his poetry displays a more balanced effort to understand and acknowledge the intentions of both social classes on both sides of his extended family.

Blaser attended Northwestern University and the College of Idaho in Caldwell before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. in 1952. While at Berkeley, he met poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, whom Blaser has called his “two real companions in poetry.” He earned an M.A. at Berkeley in 1954 and a library science degree from that school in 1955.

Blaser took a job as a librarian at the Widener Library at Harvard University in 1956, a date he describes as one year after he began to be a poet in his own right, departing in voice, style, and mechanics from mentors, colleagues, and other poets. His newfound style is evident in his first major work, The Holy Forest (1956), which established Blaser’s poetic voice, imagery, and use of diction. The Holy Forest also introduced Blaser’s favored style, one he described in his autobiographical essay as a particular kind of narrative that “refuses to adopt an imposed story line,” that completes itself only in sequence, and that, acting as a sequence “of energies,” run out when “so much of the story is told.”