A Talk by Dr. Miriam Nichols

Dr. Miriam Nichols is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Fraser Valley where she teaches modernism, American and Canadian literature, and literary theory. She is an alumnus of SFU English (BA, Hons & M.A.) and received her PhD. from York University. Her publications include scholarly editions of the poet Robin Blaser's The Fire: Collected Essays and The Holy Forest: Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2006), and a series of essays on the New American poets, Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (University of Alabama Press, 2010). She has recently completed an edition of Blaser's The Astonishment Tapes (U. of Alabama Press, 2015), an annotated transcript of a series of autobiographical audio tapes that Blaser recorded in 1974. She is currently working on a literary biography of Blaser, which will be the subject of her talk. "This talk is about the adventure of writing biography and engaging in archival research. I am writing a biography of Robin Blaser (1925-2009), a poet who emerged from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and '50s alongside Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. Blaser was an SFU professor for twenty years after his move to Vancouver in 1966. The finding aid for Blaser's papers at SFU now sits at 257 pages. At the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, there is more Blaser woven into the Spicer collection, and there are many boxes of documents and photos in the private holdings of Mark Samac (Blaser's nephew) and David Farwell (Blaser's widow). The biographer's dilemma is how to select. Writing a biography means a continual wrestle with the angel called Method. Between the 'garbage is gold' dictum of contemporary archivists and the publisher's imperative to keep it all down to 80,000 words comes the imperative of developing a principle of selection." -- Miriam Nichols