My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

170 ROBIN ON HIS OWN
ment into poetry as the art of thinking and thinking as an activity of words
and phrases leaping together through vast, scarring, differences; figments
and fragments that become companions in the poem's provisional journey
of self -cancellation as self -consolation (69). "The story is of a man / who lost
his way in the holy wood" (45). Or, as Blaser writes in Charms, a telling of
"the courage to be lost" (105): which is to say, courage in the face of loss
but also courage in the face of the loss of courage. "The words are lost" (48),
"scattered" (41, 80); "the language is bereft" (45). But in this tale what is lost
is never our individual words but their connections. And the art of weaving
(96; V 63) them together-not back together-is what Blaser calls the
"secret of syntax" (194). For if you've got no syntax then you've got to make
it up as you go, and that just might be a poetic advantage. 3
Loopey Locket lost his socket
And Slippy Slappy found it
Nothing in it, nothing in it
But the blinding round it
"The sorrow is sharp" (83), an edge to cut the shapes; and in the sharpening
make sparks in the dusks that enfold, jolts of wild logos in a world
accustomed to taming dogmas.4 For Blaser's is a practice of leaps of association
that bind us not into families or states or nationalities or groups but
into image nations, those imaginary nations of speculation and desire,
jelled not by coercion or law but by Blake's tears, or it tears?, of intellect:
"the pure efficacy of poetry" (238).
This work offers no comfort to those who seek the piety of spirituality
or the smugness of self-confident expression, nor does it proVide
encouragement to those who would back away from the difficulties of
meaning and "The turbulence" (16) of representation:
at the edge of
the real
the work of obscurities
are the edge of
necessary
to a luminous passage (135)
Blaser's "art of combinations" (258) buoyantly and sometimes mischievously,
deflects any notion of the self, of selves, as prior to their coming
3. "Olson said, 'I'd trust you
anywhere with image, but
you've got no syntax' (1958)" (184).
4. See Robin Blaser, "The Practice of Outside", in The Collected Poems of lack Spicer, ed. Blaser
(Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1975), p. 305; further citations to this essay are preceded by
"PO". On "folds" see the citation from PO 179, in the main body of the text, as well as note 9.