“What an amazing gift to receive! Such rich, exquisite work, deeply ingrained with a devotional energy to language. The transformative quality of Blazek’s poetry, its intimacy and vision, its perceptive meditative force, all create a billiance awash in intelligence. My acid test for poetry is that it makes me feel excited, in the same way it did in my youth, that sense of discovery, that sense of a new world coming into view. Blazek’s work does exactly that. Much of what I read these days seems so bland and uninteresting and I just feel alienated from it all. Then comes along Blazek with his books full of such vivid grace and I feel at home again” – Don Domanski
ISBN 978-0-9850044-7-7
Poetry | Paperback | 94 pages
Cover artwork by Douglas Blazek
Foolish Visions is the fifth 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.