In 2002, a year before his death, Gus wrote the bio below to accompany his poems included in IN COMPANY: an anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960
photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey
Gus Blaisdell for twenty-seven years ran an “alternative to an absence,” the Living Batch Bookstore, always close to the Frontier Restaurant. He continues to teach film at the University of New Mexico. He runs a small press, Living Batch Books , that continues to present his alternative to absences. A special line of his books is called Drive, He Said, after Creeley’s poem “I Know A Man.”
A note from Pulitzer prize-winning author, N. Scott Momaday, discussing the GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED book (Gus was UNM Press editor on Momaday’s second book, TheWay to Rainy Mountain, published by UNM press).
Dear Nicole,The book is a clear mirror of the man. It is beautiful and moving. Gus and I made a legendary journey to Rainy Mountain in the hard weather that shapes mind and memory. It was a quest, a journey eminently worth making.With deepest thanks.Scott
In Gus’s “Holygraph” book (a blank dummy book for Ivor Winters’s Forms of Discovery run, filled with friends poems, drawings, autographs and insights) Scott writes,
“Dear Veering, It has been good to be with you on the way to Rainy Mountain. One day you must go to the cemetery there, to see the gravestones of some of these red people you must at times feel that you know. And I hope that the weather is particularly hard on that occasion. N Scott Momaday Christmas Eve 1968"
Gus writes, "On an Inscription in my Holygraph Book for Scott.
We have/ been tog/ether/ now these/ many/ months each on his way to Rainy Mountain, a journey taken in fact, in spirit, and imagination. It is a labor of love without loss, finding my way, finally, to that dark stone that bears your grandmother’s name.
You wish me the hardest weather on my visit Such weather is the weather of my spirit, A semiarid terrain wild with winds, and, At evening, reason’s rage and fury flaming, When the wind blows and wind bells ring Or the snow falls down and no bell rings."
Rainy Mountain from the archive of Gus Blaisdell
N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-Winning Native American Novelist, Dies at 89
I met Gus Blaisdell about thirty years ago – a chance meeting in a bookstore. I was photographing on my first cross-country road trip and I landed in Albuquerque at The Living Batch. Gus showed me Park City by Lewis Baltz. What he didn’t mention is that he wrote the essay for the book – one of the most brilliant essays I’ve ever read about photography and art.
Park City (and a few other influential books) heralded a seismic shift in photography. This astonishing work, which came to be known as the New Topographics, allowed us view the landscape with a new sense of passion, longing, and dread. The style continues to be widely emulated, letting some of us forget the vitality and authority of the original images.
Note: scroll down for a Timeline . . . I just added . . . & a few photographs . . .
“I is now a living Batch”
Ed Dorn, Gunslinger, Book II
I welcome any comments reflections accuracies emendations corrections amplifications of this generously offered material . . . I will put it all together plus more into a tribute to the independent bookstore in America, in this case, as a great example, the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I worked, mostly part time from about 1978 to 1991 . . . and I did everything I could to help with poetry readings, book signing events and I’m grateful to everyone who worked there . . . Sally Blaisdell, Joe, Pancho, Mike, Carl Christensen, Sigrun (Siggy) Fox, Geary Hobson, Jeff Bryan (who did fantastic newsletters that vibrated with visuals and word book energy), Kevin Paul, Gus Blaisdell…
blaisdell Ivey collected 