Aperture Mirror

“What I admire about the poems of Douglas Blazek is that none of it has been said before. Their imagery is astonishing. Their craft well-learned over the years. The poems are compact and gnarled with insight—wise. And they are many.” – Dennis Schmitz

Aperture Mirror is the first 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.

“There is a fine consistency to the poems of Douglas Blazek. They have, again and again, a visionary charge that is delivered with economy and precision. He is gifted with second sight and spiritual penetration. A great delight in language carries his work forward, stylistically, on a tide of enthusiasm and even rapture.” – David Young