Ebbe Borregaard opens: "Someone must love words an awful lot, to have even more words." Then, noting "someone can interrupt me if he wants," he begins reading what he calls "Notes of Arrogance and Possibility," a kind of philosophical discourse on the use of the intellect, among other subjects.
Robin Blaser proceeds to interrupt several times throughout Borregaard's recital, the first time at mention of Blake's Urizen, his character of reason. He notes "the future of poetry is very much the coming together of poetry and scholarship," citing Merleau-Ponty and Foucault to help illuminate his sense of "open poetry."
A question from the audience [mostly inaudible] follows, with Blaser responding by noting his "Image-Nation 12" as a turning point toward "an active language beyond anything I've done before." He reads from a poem as illustration of that purported turn to "my new movement."
Borregaard is asked about building his boat. He says he now builds furniture, and feels himself turning away from words. "If we could only consider the universe our home, we could leave all our nasty little problems here in some nightmare of the past...." He says that's what he'd like to do with his boat, though he hasn't yet. "I'm not a participator in the political or social levels... but more and more they seem to encroach."
He cites Robert Creeley, from "the Linda Wagner interview" in Donald Allen's The Poetics of the New American Poetry, on the need for a sense, after William Carlos Williams, of restoring the language from its "criminal distortion on the part of those who make use of it."
Blaser interjects that "all known civilizations have been based on slavery, including the one you're in." He notes "we have three great dreams": labor (viz. Marx, and "the way labor bounds our lives"), biology ("an ultimate otherness from the suddenness of your body"), and language ("older than you are and other than you are").
He notes his "hostility to anthropomorphism." Intelligence, he says, "belongs to all of us, and I'm talking a democratic poetics."
He responds to a question on the meaning of history, and replies that history is the record of man's acts and is violently insufficient, "without cosmology and cosmogony," and that it reduces life into "a history of what man has done."
He points to Freud and Marx as his "saints," and says his own "entire pursuit" is to show how we are contained in cosmos, "and how we are held in it, in care and joy and laughter, rather than terror and fear and brokenness."
An exchange with an unknown audience member ensues, with Blaser insisting on the transcendence of language "as an actual perceptual form."
Another person in the audience asks about Jack Spicer, and Blaser says Spicer's sense of "outside" was his trying to "argue that language back into a public space." Spicer, he says, was after the recognition that "something else speaks, other than this shit we sit inside of."
Spicer's genius, he says, is to have had a "total vision" that's coming out of poetry rather than out of philosophy, which leads to totalitarianism. Someone in the audience asks about physics, and Blaser turns to the idea of entropy, black holes and white holes, and the poetic language of physicists.
They conclude after noting William Blake's physics as a poetic conception of the universe.