[Wgcp-whc] this fri--Jack Spicer (books still available)

[Richard Deming]

Dear All,

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  My Vocabulary Did This to  
Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer.  Copies of this book are  
available at our mail slot in the main office of the Whitney  
Humanities Center. 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.

  Spicer is a seminal poet of the American poetic avant garde.  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.  Below I’ll paste two reviews of the recently published  
Collected Poems, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian.  One of the  
reviews is by WGCP member-at-large Zack Finch. If you look here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html
you can find Mp3 files of Spicer reading and links to his famous  
series of lectures.


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.'"

all best,
Richard Deming, Co-coordinator


++++++
Listening to Poetry

Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me Zack Finch
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 Poetry 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.

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 Manroot and Caterpillar. Then, in 1975, Black  
Sparrow’s landmark edition The Collected Books of Jack Spicer—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 After Lorca.  
When an assortment of pre-Lorca poems appeared in 1980 in the aptly  
titled collection One Night Stand and Other Poems, editor Donald Allen  
recalled these provocative instructions from Spicer’s letter to  
Blaser, first printed in the book Admonitions: “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.”

Twenty-eight years later, the long-awaited publication of My  
Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer honors  
the “right to live” of all 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.

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 After Lorca as the dividing line, My Vocabulary 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 The  
House That Jack Built, also edited by Gizzi and published by Wesleyan  
in 1998.

Some of the earliest poems in My Vocabulary 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:


Within the focus of a crowded screen
The boxers face each other. They pretend
That man can counterpunch real enemies.
They hit each other til the very end.
Over a decade later, Spicer has fashioned a very different, sentence- 
based tactic in “Sporting Life” from Language (1964):


The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
       counter-punching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even
       know they are champions.
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.

In the same vein, the new edition encourages us to sample “Orpheus  
After Eurydice” from the late 1940s—


Drink wine, I sang, drink cold red wine.
Grow liquid, spread yourself.
O bruise yourself, intoxicate yourself,
Dilute yourself.
You want to web the rivers of the world.
You want to glue the tides together with yourself
—as preparation for the more jack-knifing disjunctions of the  
previously unpublished “Birdland, California” from a decade later:


An embarrassed Orpheus
Arises
With a heavy Eurydice in his arms
What I mean is can a poem ever
Take accidentals for its ultimates?
It is now October 5th (or 6th)
English majors
Can discover the correct date
(The Yankees used seven pitchers
That will tell you the day)
I was lonelier than you are now (or will be)
October something, 1956.
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 not 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.”

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, My Vocabulary 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 After Lorca and Admonitions 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.

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  
The H.D. Book. 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:


Nothing is known about Helen but her voice
Strange glittering sparks
Lighting no fires but what is reechoed
Rechorded, set on the icy sea.

All history is one, as all the North Pole is one
Magnetic, music to play with, ice
That has had to do with vision
And each one of us, naked.
Partners. Naked.
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:


Give up. The Delphic oracle was
       Fixed by the Persians. Pindar
Pindar
Was a publicity man for some
       princes. Traded
For a couple of wrestlers and cash,
       Anger
Does not purify.
The very words I write
Do not purify. Are fixed in the
       language evolved by thousands
       of generations of these princes—
       used mainly for commerce
       Meretriciousness.
Wrestler Plato tried to make
       them all into stars. Stars
       are not what they are.
Coining a phrase our words are
Big-fake-twenty-dollar-gold-pieces.
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 Book of Magazine Verse, 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.

It is a marker of our moment, however, that Spicer’s first two  
targeted venues, Poetry and The Nation, have both published poems by  
him in 2008 (Gizzi’s first motion as the new poetry editor at The  
Nation was to print Spicer’s “Two Poems for The Nation” 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,” My Vocabulary 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.


He died from killing himself.
       His public mask was broken
       because
He no longer had a public mask.
People retrieved his poems
       from wastebaskets. They had
Long hearts.
Oh, what a pain and shame was
       his passing
People returned to their
       business somewhat saddened.
+++++++
Sometimes Love Lives Alongside Loneliness:MY VOCABULARY DID THIS TO ME  
The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer




review by (Dwight Garner)
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.

  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.


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.

“Loneliness,” Mr. Spicer declared, “is necessary for pure poetry.” He  
drank himself to death at 40.

Mr. Spicer could be, at times, among the irritable race of poets  
Horace called the genus irritabile vatum. Yet his work was often  
improbably humane and lovely. Here is a bit of one of his “Imaginary  
Elegies,” from the late 1940s:

When I praise the sun or any bronze god derived from it

Don’t think I wouldn’t rather praise the very tall blond boy

Who ate all of my potato-chips at the Red Lizard.

It’s just that I won’t see him when I open my eyes

And I will see the sun.

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.

He was born in 1925 in Los Angeles and befriended the future Secretary  
of State Warren Christopher 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 Philip K. Dick. 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).

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 Allen  
Ginsberg first performed “Howl.” (Some of Mr. Spicer’s own work was  
read that night.)

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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:

No one

Has lots of them

Lays or friends or anything

That can make a little light in all that darkness.

There is a cigarette you can hold for a minute

In your weak mouth

And then the light goes out,

Rival, honey, friend,

And then you stub it out.

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.”

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.” 
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