ABSTRACT
R obin Blaser's work has long been associated with the mostradical and innovative streams in American writing while at the same time laying claim to a place in a tradition that extends from Pound, Whitman, Dante, Lucretius, and Ovid back to Homer. During a period when American poetry has been dominated largely by the lyric (and its dark, noisy twin, the anti-lyric), Blaser's work has opened up new formal possibilities for the epic and philosophical impulses of poetry, impulses that insist on poetry's role as agent in the "composition of the world." In this pursuit, Blaser, together with Jack Spicer, developed the idea of the serial poem and in his masterwork, The Holy Forest (1993), gave it one of its fullest realizations.
