The incomparable Robin Blaser

ROBIN BLASER 1925-2009. One of the progenitors of the "open form," an ongoing poem sequence not necessarily written with specific end-boundaries in mind, Robin Blaser first came to a wider public attention through editor Don Allen's seminal anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-60 (1960). Quoted in his early 1960s "Vancouver Lectures" from The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), the late Jack Spicer said that "Robin Blaser once said in talking about a serial poem that it's as if you go into a room, a dark room, the light is turned on for a minute, then it's turned off again, and then you go into a different room where a light is turned on and off."

Full obit by rob mclennan at xtra.ca.