<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Dear All,</div><div><br></div><div>Just a reminder that our first session of the semester will be this Friday at 3 PM. Our discussion will focus on the collection After Lorca by Jack Spicer and this is part of <em>My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer. </em>Copies of this book are available at our mail slot in the
main office of the Whitney Humanities Center.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> I believe there are a few copies left, but I wouldn't wait much longer. Again, these are available to all group members--even new members. After Lorca will generate conversation about translation, poetics, tradition, and more.</span></div><div><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"><br></span></div><div><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Spicer is a seminal poet of the American poetic avant
garde.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>He was based primarily in
San Francisco and although he died quite early (in 1965 at age 40) his
influence has only continued to grow such that he is becoming recognized by
many as one of America’s most important post war poets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Below I’ll paste two reviews of the
recently published Collected Poems, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin
Killian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>One of the reviews is by
WGCP member-at-large Zack Finch. If you look here: <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html">http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html</a></div><div>you can find Mp3 files of Spicer reading and links to his famous series of lectures.</div><!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment-->
<div><em><br></em></div><div><em><br></em></div><div>As Dwight Garner wrote in a review of the book for the NYTimes: "You finish 'My Vocabulary Did This to Me' feeling you’ve come in contact with an original artist and a genuine one, a writer who is, to borrow from Wordsworth, 'fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy.'"</div><div><br></div><div>all best,</div><div>Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>++++++</div><div><h3 class="article_title">Listening to Poetry</h3>
<span class="article_sub_title">Jack Spicer’s <em>My Vocabulary Did This to Me</em></span>
<span class="article_author"><em>Zack Finch</em></span><p>Toward the end of his short life, Jack Spicer began to relax some of
his purist principles about the publication and circulation of his
poetry. In 1964, impoverished and unable to hold down a job, he
consented to allow Lawrence Ferlinghetti to sell his books at City
Lights bookstore in San Francisco, officially ending his long-standing
boycott of a local institution he dismissed as a mere tourist
destination. “I still think I was right and poets don’t really need a
middleman and a middleman fucks up poetry,” he explained in a letter to
Robert Duncan, “but the number of things that are right and not possible
is as infinite as God’s mercy.” A firm believer in poetry’s capacity to
foment active, local, living communities of dissent, Spicer regarded
most trade publications, anthologies, and national literary outlets as
middlemen who converted poetry into a commercial currency. The
sacramental sharing of poetry among fellow poets should occur at street
level, he believed, in the form of readings, evenings at the bar, and
ephemeral publications to be passed around by hand: Spicer polemically
forbade that his poetry be sent beyond the Bay Area, and he ridiculed
institutions like <em>Poetry</em> magazine for fostering ignominious
societies. As a result of the combative magnetism of his personality and
the groundbreaking character of his poetry, Spicer attracted a
community of Bay Area poets who were as devoted to him as they were
occasionally wary of his power. “It seems to me you want a world small
enough so that wherever you spit you’ll hit something, a world you can
control,” Stan Persky once wrote to his friend.</p><p>Spicer died in 1965 at the early age of forty—no longer able, it
would seem, to control the world in which his poems circulated. Still,
the first generation of Spicer editors remained consistent with many of
his wishes. Spicer’s work was first collected posthumously and in small
journals such as <em>Manroot</em> and <em>Caterpillar. </em>Then, in 1975, Black Sparrow’s landmark edition <em>The Collected Books of Jack Spicer—</em>intended
“for Jack’s friends” according to editor Robin Blaser—honored another
of Spicer’s wishes: that his early work, which he had famously disowned,
be considered separately, if at all, from the serial poems begun in
1957 with the composition of the breakthrough <em>After Lorca. </em>When an assortment of pre-<em>Lorca </em>poems appeared in 1980 in the aptly titled collection <em>One Night Stand and Other Poems,</em> editor Donald Allen recalled these provocative instructions from Spicer’s letter to Blaser, first printed in the book <em>Admonitions:</em>
“So don’t send the box of old poetry to Don Allen. Burn it or rather
open it with Don and cry over the possible books that were buried in it .
. . all incomplete, all abortive, because I thought, like all
abortionists, that what is not perfect had no real right to live.”</p><p>Twenty-eight years later, the long-awaited publication of <em>My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer</em> honors the “right to live” of <em>all</em>
of Spicer’s poetry, by collecting both early and later work, along with
a substantial number of poems exhumed from Spicer’s private notebooks,
which Blaser and Spicer’s brother Holt donated to the University of
California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in 2004. As a measure of our
historical distance from Spicer’s personality, a new generation of
editors, the poets Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, moves beyond the
Spicer “legend” in order to present the full range of his poetry to
readers both familiar and unfamiliar with his work. Although the ghost
of Spicer may look upon the new book with severe ambivalence, it is hard
to overestimate the importance of a volume that brings his work back
into print with such a generous and surprising selection of poems.
Spicer’s reputation as a pioneer of the New American Poetry has been
acknowledged increasingly ever since his death, in evident defiance of
his pessimistic assessment that “No / One listens to poetry.” Among
certain circles the familiarity of this sentence alone, like Auden’s
line that poetry makes nothing happen, demonstrates the currency that
Spicer has achieved both because of and in spite of himself.</p><p>Gizzi and Killian’s precisely restored chronological arrangement
of poems disrupts the synoptic aura of Blaser’s original assemblage of
twelve discrete books in favor of an authoritative timeline that charts
the course of Spicer’s development. Grouped into two major sections with
<em>After Lorca</em> as the dividing line, <em>My Vocabulary </em>selects
from early poems to create an illuminating context for the later serial
work. Although it is possible to quibble with some of the omissions—one
searches in vain for the modernist experiment “The Bridge Game” as well
as the satirical protest against the Berkeley English Department, “The
Trojan Wars Renewed: A Capitulation or The Dunkiad”—Spicer aficionados
will be placated to learn that the balance of his poems will appear in a
second volume from the University of Wesleyan Press. In fact, Wesleyan
is slated to bring out four Spicer volumes altogether, including a book
of letters as well as an updated version of Spicer’s lectures and
essays, currently available as <em>The House That Jack Built,</em> also edited by Gizzi and published by Wesleyan in 1998.</p><p>Some of the earliest poems in <em>My Vocabulary </em>recall that
Spicer grew up during the academic climate of the 1940s, when American
poetry was still dominated by the prosodies of Yeats and Eliot. As an
apprentice poet, Spicer was trying to balance this inheritance with his
more intuitive affinities with Rimbaud, Lorca, and a poetics of
destructive surrealist violence. “Watching a TV Boxing Match in
October,” written in Minnesota in the early ’50s, offers evidence of an
unformed poet practicing his pentameter chops within a normative
rhetorical stance:</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><blockquote>Within the focus of a crowded screen
<br>The boxers face each other. They pretend
<br>That man can counterpunch real enemies.
<br>They hit each other til the very end.</blockquote><p>Over a decade later, Spicer has fashioned a very different, sentence-based tactic in “Sporting Life” from <em>Language</em> (1964):</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><blockquote>The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
<br> counter-punching radio.
<br>And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even
<br> know they are champions.</blockquote><p>The jabs of Spicer’s later poetry inflict themselves upon the
page in an agonistic series of reversals. Rather than simply report on
the action of the fight, here the poet has become his own drunken
prizefighter (and his own counter-punching enemy) as well as the medium
by which his defeat gets broadcast.</p><p>In the same vein, the new edition encourages us to sample “Orpheus After Eurydice” from the late 1940s—</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><blockquote>Drink wine, I sang, drink cold red wine.
<br>Grow liquid, spread yourself.
<br>O bruise yourself, intoxicate yourself,
<br>Dilute yourself.
<br>You want to web the rivers of the world.
<br>You want to glue the tides together with yourself</blockquote><p>—as preparation for the more jack-knifing disjunctions of the previously unpublished “Birdland, California” from a decade later:</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><blockquote>An embarrassed Orpheus
<br>Arises
<br>With a heavy Eurydice in his arms
<br>What I mean is can a poem ever
<br>Take accidentals for its ultimates?
<br>It is now October 5th (or 6th)
<br>English majors
<br>Can discover the correct date
<br>(The Yankees used seven pitchers
<br>That will tell you the day)
<br>I was lonelier than you are now (or will be)
<br>October something, 1956.</blockquote><p>Here Spicer grabs the bystander by the collar, breaking the
composure of the conventional lyric frame to create a dialogic
experience that seems directed at real readers. Much of the power of
Spicer’s mature work derives from the sense that the poems are <em>not </em>idealized
portraits of “man quarreling with himself” (Yeats), but are in fact
quarrels and conversations with living people extended from actual
occasions, as in the opening lines of the previously unpublished “A Poem
for Dada Day at The Place, April 1, 1955”: “Darling, / The difference
between Dada and barbarism / Is the difference between an abortion and a
wet dream.”</p><p>George Santayana once mourned the decline of “the power of
idealization” in what he called, referring primarily to Walt Whitman,
“the poetry of barbarism.” Spicer extends the barbaric American
tradition by forsaking an aesthetics of eternal forms for an embrace of
the ephemeral that is more real for being aggressively immediate. To
this end, <em>My Vocabulary</em> includes a series of fourteen letters,
written from Spicer to his then-lover James Alexander, which Spicer had
delivered as poems at the now infamous Sunday Gatherings in North Beach
in the late 1950s. (Here we might recall that Spicer had been among the
first of Emily Dickinson’s readers to observe that her letters are often
indistinguishable from her poetry.) The seminal books <em>After Lorca</em> and <em>Admonitions</em>
are themselves interleaved with epistolary correspondences written both
“for” and “to” Spicer’s friends and sparring partners. Rather than
offering mere “shreds and patches” in poems that fail to “grasp of the
whole of reality” (Santayana’s disapproving assessment of Whitman),
Spicer’s embrace of the partial, the hand-canceled, and the random
dispatch of the wet dream serves to elevate the shreds of the real as
inherently constitutive of the ideal.</p><p>Among the many extraterrestrial diamonds drilled loose from the
notebooks by Gizzi and Killian are several series from the early ’60s.
“Map Poems” offers five pieces written in correspondence with California
road maps. “Helen: A Revision” is a far more substantial series
composed during the period when Robert Duncan was at work on <em>The H.D. Book. </em>Spicer’s
own complex response to the Helen myth—suspicious, tender, vulgar,
lyrical, in the end expressing intense poverty of spirit—worships the
idea of a beauty that is barely extant, yet forever between us:</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><blockquote>Nothing is known about Helen but her voice
<br>Strange glittering sparks
<br>Lighting no fires but what is reechoed
<br>Rechorded, set on the icy sea.
<br>
<br>All history is one, as all the North Pole is one
<br>Magnetic, music to play with, ice
<br>That has had to do with vision
<br>And each one of us, naked.
<br>Partners. Naked.</blockquote><p>Against the Prospero-esque fluencies of Duncan, Spicer is a
sibling of Caliban, child of Sycorax. He does not possess the creative
powers that Prospero knows, but counts himself among the creatures of
the earth, knowing well the limitations in what his language can effect.
(“My profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.”) The recently discovered
series “Golem” gives a vivid sense of Spicer’s belief that to be human
is to live under fixed and hostile conditions:</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><blockquote>Give up. The Delphic oracle was
<br> Fixed by the Persians. Pindar
<br>Pindar
<br>Was a publicity man for some
<br> princes. Traded
<br>For a couple of wrestlers and cash,
<br> Anger
<br>Does not purify.
<br>The very words I write
<br>Do not purify. Are fixed in the
<br> language evolved by thousands
<br> of generations of these princes—
<br> used mainly for commerce
<br> Meretriciousness.
<br>Wrestler Plato tried to make
<br> them all into stars. Stars
<br> are not what they are.
<br>Coining a phrase our words are
<br>Big-fake-twenty-dollar-gold-pieces.</blockquote><p>Jewish folklore about the golem provides a fitting image for
Spicer’s conception of the primitive poet: made out of clay, the golem
is an awkward sub-human servant deprived of speech. In some modern
versions of the myth, the unruly golem-servant abuses what powers he has
developed, becoming so dangerous that his precarious life must be
swiftly ended. Spicer took an excruciated delight in the paradoxes of
being highly cultivated, but barbaric; influential, but powerless;
called upon, but expendable. As if to celebrate any such poet’s tenuous,
highly marginalized indentured servitude, in his final work, the
posthumously entitled <em>Book of Magazine Verse</em>, Spicer composed
poems for specific journals and magazines that he knew would reject the
submissions outright—in demonstration of the inalterable “fix” upon
golems and poets alike.</p><p>It is a marker of our moment, however, that Spicer’s first two targeted venues, <em>Poetry</em> and <em>The Nation</em>, have both published poems by him in 2008 (Gizzi’s first motion as the new poetry editor at <em>The Nation</em> was to print Spicer’s “Two Poems for <em>The Nation”</em>
last January). At a moment when an emerging generation of poets is
struggling anew with the balance between writing and being written,
between the constraints of infinite possibility and those freedoms
permitted by “the fix,” <em>My Vocabulary </em>arrives as an
uncompromising and wholly necessary gift, replete with the most riveting
poetry, shot through with the pathos of a man whose austerity is more
haunting now than ever.</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><blockquote>He died from killing himself.
<br> His public mask was broken
<br> because
<br>He no longer had a public mask.
<br>People retrieved his poems
<br> from wastebaskets. They had
<br>Long hearts.
<br>Oh, what a pain and shame was
<br> his passing
<br>People returned to their
<br> business somewhat saddened.</blockquote></div><div>+++++++</div><div><h4><p class="nitf"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 24px; ">Sometimes Love Lives Alongside Loneliness:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; ">MY VOCABULARY DID THIS TO ME </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px; ">The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer</span></span></p><p class="nitf"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 24px; "> </span></p></h4><div>review by (Dwight Garner)</div><p class="summary">The poem that says “I love you,” James Fenton has observed, “is the
little black cocktail dress,” the classic thing that everyone would like
to have written one of.</p></div><div>
<div id="articleInline" class="inlineLeft">
<div id="inlineBox"><nyt_pf_inline><div class="sectionPromo"><div id="reviewInfo"><div class="story"><h4><p class="nitf"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; ">Less sexy, by far, are the types of poems left behind by the West
Coast poet Jack Spicer, who died in 1965. Mr. Spicer’s love poems
curdle around the edges. He was one of America’s great, complicated,
noisy and unjustly forgotten poets of heartbreak and abject loneliness.</span></p></h4></div></div></div></nyt_pf_inline></div></div><p>The
editors of “My Vocabulary Did This to Me,” a new collected edition of
Mr. Spicer’s work, speak touchingly of his “status as an unattractive
gay man.” But Mr. Spicer was an outsider in many ways. While he was a
central figure, along with Kenneth Rexroth, in the so-called Berkeley
Renaissance of the late 1940s, for most of his life he never quite fit
in anywhere. He never blended, in literary or social terms, with the two
groups in which he might have later found affinities, the Beats or the
New York School of poets. </p><p>“Loneliness,” Mr. Spicer declared, “is necessary for pure poetry.” He drank himself to death at 40.</p><p>Mr. Spicer could be, at times, among the irritable race of poets Horace called the <span class="italic">genus irritabile vatum</span>. Yet his work was often improbably humane and lovely. Here is a bit of one of his “Imaginary Elegies,” from the late 1940s: </p><p>When I praise the sun or any bronze god derived from it</p><p>Don’t think I wouldn’t rather praise the very tall blond boy</p><p>Who ate all of my potato-chips at the Red Lizard.</p><p>It’s just that I won’t see him when I open my eyes</p><p>And I will see the sun.</p><p>This
collection’s provocative title, “My Vocabulary Did This to Me,” is
taken from Mr. Spicer’s final words, spoken in a San Francisco
hospital. The other details of his life are almost as tantalizing.</p><p>He was born in 1925 in Los Angeles and befriended the future Secretary of State <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/warren_m_christopher/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Warren M. Christopher.">Warren Christopher</a>
while at the University of Redlands. After college, Mr. Spicer worked
in Los Angeles as a movie extra and a private eye, and then roomed in
the same Berkeley boarding house with a young <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/philip_k_dick/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Philip K. Dick.">Philip K. Dick</a>.
In 1949 he hosted a folk music radio show in Berkeley and connected
with the archivist Harry Smith. He assisted Mr. Smith in the compilation
of his classic Anthology of American Folk Music (1952).</p><p>A
political anarchist, Mr. Spicer left the Ph.D. program at the University
of California, Berkeley, after refusing to sign a loyalty oath, and he
was a member of early gay liberation groups. He made recordings of his
poetry (now lost) with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. With five visual
artists, he opened the Six Gallery, where <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/allen_ginsberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Allen Ginsberg.">Allen Ginsberg</a> first performed “Howl.” (Some of Mr. Spicer’s own work was read that night.) </p><p>He
had other contacts with Ginsberg. The editors write, in an
unintentionally hilarious biographical entry for 1959: “At a drunken
party in Berkeley, Allen Ginsberg attempts to fellate Spicer in public
in the name of love, peace, and understanding; gets rejected.”</p><p>Mr.
Spicer also presided over a popular event called Blabbermouth Night, at
which, the editors write, “poets were encouraged to speak in tongues
and to babble and were judged on the duration and invention of their
noises.”</p><p>Mr. Spicer was as much in love with sound as with sense,
agreeing with Archibald MacLeish that “A poem should not mean/But be.”
Mr. Spicer’s poetic notions could be wackier than MacLeish’s, however.
Mr. Spicer viewed poets as radio transmitters of a sort, broadcasting
the words of other disembodied voices. He claimed he merely took
dictation, from voices he sometimes called Martians. He was opposed to
what he called “the big lie of the personal.” He refused to copyright
his work.</p><p> The flavor of Mr. Spicer’s more sound-driven work is
suggested by this snippet from a 1959 poem: “He will learn words as we
did/I tell you, Jay, clams baked in honey/Would never taste as strange.”</p><p>His
occasional high spirits were on display at the start of “Billy the
Kid,” a poem from 1958 that includes bits of prose like this one: “Let
us fake out a frontier — a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff’s
posse after him — a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to
go a thousand miles — a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get
lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic ... only a place where
Billy the Kid can hide when he shoots people.” </p><p>To read Mr. Spicer
in bulk, however, is to become intimate with the poet who wrote the
lines “I am going north looking for the source of the chill in my bones”
and “We are all alone and we do not need poetry to tell us how alone we
are.” As he wrote in 1957:</p><p>No one</p><p>Has lots of them</p><p>Lays or friends or anything</p><p>That can make a little light in all that darkness.</p><p>There is a cigarette you can hold for a minute</p><p>In your weak mouth</p><p>And then the light goes out,</p><p>Rival, honey, friend,</p><p>And then you stub it out.</p><p>
You finish “My Vocabulary Did This to Me” feeling you’ve come in
contact with an original artist and a genuine one, a writer who is, to
borrow from Wordsworth, “fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest,
shy.” </p><p>You also finish the book thinking that these poems are
ready to find a new audience. As Mr. Spicer elliptically put it toward
the end of his life: “Death is not final. Only parking lots.” </p></div></body></html>