I Am Writing a Biography. . .

This essay reflects on the adventure and trial of writing biography and engaging in archival research. My subject is Robin Blaser (1925–2009), an American poet who emerged from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s alongside fellow poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. Given the extensive archival holdings on Blaser both at the University of California, where he studied as a young man, and at Simon Fraser University where he worked in the Department of English for 20 years, this project has brought me face to face with the biographer’s dilemma: how to select? Between the “garbage is gold” dictum of contemporary archivists and the publisher’s imperative to produce a text of manageable length lies the problem of developing a principle of selection. I argue that there is no unanswerable solution to this dilemma, that in fact biographers and archivists face an irresolvable contradiction between the imperative to include and the practical need to limit. In this essay, I look at contrasting biographical methods before outlining my own. My principle of selection centers on Blaser’s project as a poet: certainly the biography will include life events, but the focus will be on the problematic Blaser’s work addresses