Blaser, Robin

Identity area

Type of entity

Person

Authorized form of name

Blaser, Robin

Parallel form(s) of name

    Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules

      Other form(s) of name

        Identifiers for corporate bodies

        Description area

        Dates of existence

        1925-2009

        History

        Robin Blaser was born in Colorado on May 18, 1925, and raised in Idaho. He was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a principal member of the group of poets that became known as the ‘Berkeley Renaissance’, together with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. In 1955 he moved to Boston, where he worked as a librarian at Harvard’s Widener Library. He returned to San Francisco in 1959 where he worked at the California Historical Society and San Francisco State University. He moved to Vancouver, BC in 1966 and worked for Simon Fraser University, where he taught in the English Department until his retirement as a Full Professor in 1986. He became a Canadian citizen in 1972. Blaser has influenced and mentored many writers, including Stan Persky, Brian Fawcett, Sharon Thesen, George Bowering, and Phyllis Webb, among others. He has published numerous works of poetry, many of them sections of a single long serial-poem collected in The Holy Forest (1993). He was also an essayist, librettist, and editor, most notably of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (1975). In 1995 his achievement was celebrated with a major conference, The Recovery of the Public World, held in Vancouver and attended by many notable Canadian and American poets. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2005. In 2006 he received a special Lifetime Recognition Award from the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. He also won the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry in 2008 for his revised and expanded edition of The Holy Forest (2008). In 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University. Blaser wrote and resided in Vancouver, BC until his death in 2009.

        Places

        Legal status

        Functions, occupations and activities

        Mandates/sources of authority

        Internal structures/genealogy

        General context

        Relationships area

        Access points area

        Subject access points

        Place access points

        Occupations

        Control area

        Authority record identifier

        Institution identifier

        Rules and/or conventions used

        Status

        Published

        Level of detail

        Dates of creation, revision and deletion

        Language(s)

          Script(s)

            Sources

            Maintenance notes