The Medium

By Robin Blaser 1925–2009 Robin Blaser

it is essentially reluctance the language

a darkness, a friendship, tying to the real

but it is unreal

the clarity desired, a wish for true sight,

all tangling

‘you’ tried me, the everyday which

cuaght me, turning the house

in the wind, a lovecraft the political

was not my business I could not look

without seeing the decay, the shit poured

on most things, by indifference, the personal

power which is simply that, demanding a friend

take dullness out of the world (he doesn’t know

his lousy emptiness) I slept

in a fire on my book bag, one dried wing

of a white moth the story is of a man

who lost his way in the holy wood

because the way had never been taken without

at least two friends, one on each side,

and I believe my dream said one of the others

always led now left to acknowledge,

he can’t breathe, the darkness bled

the white wing, one of the body

of the moth that moved him, of the other

wing, the language is bereft

Source: The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (University of California Press, 2006)

Biography

Born in Denver and raised in Twin Falls, Idaho, poet, editor, and essayist Robin Blaser was educated at the University of California-Berkeley. With poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, he helped spark the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance in the 1940s that preceded the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1965, Blaser met Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, with whom he later worked closely. Miriam Nichols, editor . . .

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