A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor is the first major study illustrating Robin Blaser’s significance to North American poetry. The poet Robin Blaser (1925–2009) was an important participant in the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1950s and San Francisco poetry circles of the 1960s. The book illuminates Blaser’s distinctive responses to and relationships with familiar writers including Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Charles Olson via their correspondence. Blaser contributed to the formation of the serial poem as a dominant mode in post-war New American poetry through his work and engagement with the poetry communities of the time. Offering a new perspective on a well-known and influential period in American poetry, Miriam Nichols combines the story of Blaser’s life—coming from a mid-western conservative religious upbringing and his coming of age as a gay man in Berkeley, Boston, and San Francisco—with critical assessments of his major poems through unprecedented archival research. This literary biography presents Blaser’s poetry and poetics in the many contexts from which it came, ranging from the Berkeley Renaissance to the Vancouver scene; from surrealism to phenomenology; from the New American poetry to the Canadian postmodern; from the homoerotic to high theory. Throughout, Blaser’s voice is heard in the excitement of his early years in Berkeley and Boston and the seriousness of the later years where he was doing most of his living in his work.

Spanning four decades of meditation on the avant-garde in poetry, art, and philosophy, the essays collected in The Fire reveal Robin Blaser's strikingly fresh perspective on "New American" poets, deconstructive philosophies, current events, and the state of humanities now. The essays, gathered in one volume for the first time, include commentaries on Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Mary Butts, George Bowering, Louis Dudek, Christos Dikeakos, and J. S. Bach. Blaser emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s having studied under legendary medieval scholar Ernst Kantorowicz and having been a major participant in the burgeoning literary scene. His response to the cultural and political events of his time has been to construct a poetic voice that offers a singular perspective on a shareable world—and to pose that voice alongside others as a source of countermemory and potential agency. Conceived as conversations, these essays brilliantly reflect that ethos as they re-read the cultural events of the past fifty years.

The first biography of poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), a key figure in San Francisco’s gay cultural scene and in the development of American avant garde poetries.

Be Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Most of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems. In writings that range in date from his first days in Berkeley in 1945 through to the final months of his life, 20 years later, one sees the full development of Spicer as a writer, in a volume that complements and completes the award-winning My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Readers familiar with Spicer will find countless lines, rhythms, and thoughts that cast new light on old favorites, while the plays reveal a different side of his dialectical and dialogic approach to writing. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer's growing readership to savor and enjoy.

From the 1960s until his death in 2000, Al Purdy was one of the most prominent writers in Canada, famous for his frank language and his boisterous personality. He travelled the country and wrote about its people and places from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. A central figure in the CanLit explosion of the sixties and seventies, Purdy has been called the best, the most, and the last Canadian poet. But Purdy's Canada no longer exists. A changing country and shifting attitudes toward Canadian literature demand new perspectives on Purdy's impact and accomplishments. An Echo in the Mountains reassesses Purdy's works, the shape of his career, and his literary legacy, grappling with the question of how to read Purdy today, a century after his birth and in a new era of Canadian literature. Contributors to the volume examine Purdy's critical reception, explore little-known documents and textual problems, and analyze his representations of Canadian history and Indigenous peoples and cultures. They show that much remains to be discovered and understood about the poet and his immense body of work. The first sustained examination of Al Purdy's works in over a decade, An Echo in the Mountains showcases the critical challenges and rewards of rereading an iconic and influential Canadian writer.

A critical monograph of the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, informed by much archival material.

Through its comprehensive history of post-war queer writing in Boston and San Francisco from the 1940s through the 21st century, Never By Itself Alone provides a new view of queer history. Grundy intertwines analysis of lesbian, gay, and queer literature of the time, centering voices which have not yet before been explored in existing criticism. The book elevates the underrepresented work of writers of color and those with gender-nonconforming identities, underscores the link between activism and literature, and insists upon the vital importance of radical accounts of race, class and gender in any queer studies worthy of the name