After Walking To And Fro And Up And Down In It

“Douglas Blazek’s net is so broad, his inventiveness so bounding, his marriage of idiosyncrasy and universality so purely astonishing, it leaves the reader more than a little breathless to a book’s worth at once. But that’s the vertigo we want from poems.” – Jane Hirshfield

After Walking To And Fro And Up And Down In It is the eighth title in a long awaited series of books representing the life’s work of Douglas Blazek.

Achieving prominence in his first 25 years, Douglas Blazek was known as an instrumental figure in the sixties literary movement, the Mimeo Revolution: publishing his poems in over 500 journals, authoring several dozen books and chapbooks, and editing the infamous journal Olé, in which formative work by Charles Bukowski and d.a. Levy were published. John Martin of Black Sparrow Press spoke of Olé as “the best and most important of the lot” but added “that Blazek’s own poetry is by far the most important.” This was the moment that Blazek vowed to make poetry dangerous. 

Several years later, reaching what he felt was his limit, Blazek backed away from these accomplishments to write new poetry and painstakingly revise his existing material for the three decades that followed.

After this meticulous thirty year process the series of titles now being published by Edition Muta represents the poet’s complete life’s work.

“Blazek has a surly integrity about his work that I like; his considerable poetic personality is combined with his willingness to live in the flesh. Anything can happen with his verbal inventiveness and intensity!” – William Matthews