Blaser and Dudek

On May 14, in Ottawa, I picked up a copy of the Globe and Mail to read on my return trip to Montreal following a book launching. I was saddened to read that poet and teacher Robin Blaser—part of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 40s and 50s—had passed away a week earlier at age 83.

Sandra Martin's fine obituary quotes Stan Persky: "What Blaser did was to enlarge the world by showing us things both marvellous and horrific that we would never have thought to pay attention to without his finger pointing at them." Blaser's The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser was the Canadian winner of the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. (Hear Blaser read at University of California, Berkeley.)

Blaser edited and introduced Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek for us in 1988. He was generous to a fault. In the intro he called Dudek "Canada's most important--that is to say, consequential--modern voice." Robin Blaser will be missed.