My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

~obin on ~is ~lIIn
There was a stray poet of Idaho
Whose practice of outside was in the know
The poet it seems enquired of things
Both inside and outside of Idaho
I first met Robin Blaser in January 1973. On graduating college I had won
a fellowship for an American to spend a year studying in Canada and had
the good luck to pick Simon Fraser University, which I knew little about
except that it was near Vancouver, where Susan Bee and I had decided to
go, because it was as far away from New York City as we could get. My
idea was to buy a goddamn tiny car (an overpriced, rusting $1,200 VW
bug, 80,000 hard miles, from a used car dealer in downtown Vancouver),
read books, stare blankly and intermittently for increasing stretches of
time, and see what writing might bring.
The University of British Columbia's Dean Walter Gage, the administrator
of the William Lyon MacKenzie King fellowship, had told me right
off that I would have to "sit for examinations" if I was to go to UBC, a
prospect that I found unappealing. (I have always subscribed to the idea,
usually put forward by detractors of student activism, that the anti-war
demonstrations of the late 60s and early 70s were motivated by a desire
to avoid examinations. Such a motivation, it seems to me, is of the highest
order since to demonstrate is human but to avoid examination divine.)
Dean Gage reluctantly let on that something called Simon Fraser University,
on the outskirts of town, might have less rigorous policies than UBC,
and indeed it did: I was able to get a library card to the incredibly useful
archive now curated by Charles Watts and to participate in a small seminar
Robin Blaser was conducting, once a week during the spring semester,
on Emily Dickinson. Since my affiliation was with the Philosophy
Department I did show up to that department's occasional colloquia,
where, as I recall, visiting professors laboriously argued over the combination
of giant steps, baby steps, umbrella steps, ballerina steps, rock star
steps, and elf steps it takes to go from is to ought ("Stopl you didn't say