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First I should
credit the two pieces. Jack Spicer, Poet appeared as the inaugural
chapbook in the “Poetry P.S.A.” from THE NAMELESS, the publishing imprint of eyedrum art & music gallery [eyedrum.org]. The P.S.A. series, though founded to focus on
poetry may soon expend to consider other sorts of artists (Joseph Beuys for instance).
The Spicer chap has a print run to date of 350 copies and I expect that
more will be made in time. Poetry P.S.A. #2, Gertrude Stein, Poet by
Mark Prejsnar exists in an edition of 300. As a member of the board at eyedrum, this
series was my idea and I take the public service aspect of it very seriously.
Over 250 copies of the Spicer chap have already been distributed for free in
the Atlanta area; through personal networks (“Hey, do you know 5 people who
would read this?”) and by leaving copies in independent video stores, coffee
shops, book stores, galleries and bars.
I’m very appreciative of Octopus of making this text available on line
& thus outside of the local.
“Phantom
Continuities / Poetic Communities” appears in the 2nd issue of the
on-line art magazine interreview [interreview.org],
whose theme is institutional critique.
My thanks go to Ginger Wolfe at interreview
for allowing me to reprint this along side it’s textual companion. The scope of this piece is perhaps somewhat
broader than Spicer, but, as such, I hope that it offers an operationalization
of what I find most crucial in Spicer’s legacy.
John Lowther
Jack Spicer, Poet
Jack Spicer died at age 40 in1965.
His wishes adhered to, he was buried in an unmarked grave.
This is not a séance, exactly.
Language lies between us.
“My vocabulary did this to me.”
—his
last words
Thing Language
This ocean,
humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than
anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to
be listened to. A drop
Or crash of
water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and
butter
Pepper and salt.
The death
That young men
hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the
shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to
poetry.
“No one listens to poetry”
—if this is true… and if all of Jack’s poetry is out of print
and hard to find, why then is Jack Spicer a crucial figure in American poetry now?
I think it is
because Spicer was a subject of poetry.
I don’t mean that he was or that he provided subject matter that a poem could then be about. I mean that he was a subject of poetry in the way that a
peasant is a subject of the Queen.« Or at least that use as an option in the word. Hear it akin to being a ‘subject of the
unconscious’ ala Lacan, or even as being ‘subject to
penalties’ for breaking a lease or ‘subject to some restrictions’ racing by in
the disclaimers.
We are obliged to
postulate an event, perhaps it happenned in
What is it about aliens? Imagine it is the 50s.
The alien. The
other. (
The aliens in
invasion movies all seem to be subject to something, some plan, some
imperative. Has anyone ever suggested that it could be poetry?
It Came from Other Space!
They land.
They come to us. Invisibly.
“Come” to us, in us, through us. If we get too close, we become them? Succumb
to them, are seduced by them? Or are
they us already? Were they us all along?
In Spicer’s time and likewise here and now, all around us,
there is an incessant presumption, or less that than an ideology – if an ideology is what you know without knowing it –
what you know everyone knows without
knowing that you know that…
Self-expression
is (ideologically) axiomatic in this culture. The linchpin. The answer behind
which no answer lies when the question arises; why make art? Why be a poet?
Forced to articulate what the culture has already scripted some artists and
poets have obsessively & consciously foregrounded
their self expressing itself. The
confessional poem, etc.
It’s everywhere
in culture, generally. Romanticism is a fair term to use for this. Or at least a line that leads back toward one
explanation for such a widespread and unquestioned presumption. Others are
always possible. But we know the story, right? The artist’s suffering. The
harsh forces of an unjust society are incapable of seeing what this genius has
wrought, until (of course) it is far too late. The tragedy. & thus rugged
individualism forever engaged in, well,…expressing itself (as a way of
affirming itself against what is not itself? as a rebutal
to a world beyond its control? as a protest against it’s non-identity with
itself?)
***
I am tempted to
suggest that it is the misfit between this conception of the artist or poet and
the real of their subjection to their art is what brings about the common thematics of trauma and suffering as a desperate attempt to
balance the myth of the romantic creator-artist and way that language lies
between, twisting telos out of shape.
Jack Spicer was
coming from somewhere else.
[Or rather, his
poetry would be seen to have come from somewhere different. This is hindsight
and assumes that what Spicer will become over the course of his short life is
in some way continuous with who he started out as. Perhaps this is false,
perhaps, like a butterfly – like some other
born from a cocoon or a pod – the period
of the ‘books’ marking his emergence, already able to ‘take dictation?’]
Regardless of
where it will seem that Spicer has come from, the ideology you get, that I got
and that he got growing up in this culture is that the poetic or artistic self
exists with the goal of expressing itself.
But things get
complicated. Ask any artist.
The work, from
the moment it becomes worthwhile, talks back. Is recalcitrant. Becomes
something other to our supposed, half
remembered intentions. Or they—our intentions—to maintain the fantasy of their
control are covertly modified by the work without their knowing. & in even
those rare instances where intention feels to have found some claim of clear
expression, the work, the language, always exceeds it, managing to mean
something else, to suggest something else– something other than what was intended–
Yet everyone knows
that art is about self-expression.
Imagine then, the subversion, the shock even, when in
Spicer’s last year he spoke of poetry to audiences suddenly swollen by the
ranks of the original ‘wanna-beats’ – their interest
derived, at least initially, from the mass media’s portrayal not of beat
writings so much as what they thereby created in part; beat lifestyle·;
“I don’t think
that messages are for the poet any more than the radio program is for the radio
set. And I think that the radio set doesn’t really worry about whether anyone’s
listening to it or not, and neither does the poet.”
The poet is
figured here as a passive device. Combining things he said one could easily
list the responsibilities of the poet according to Jack Spicer;
·
to know when a
transmission is coming in
·
to take
dictation
·
to know when the
transmission is over
·
to stay out of
the way of the transmission
Though this
wouldn’t be his style at all, this listing, as if of a series of procedures
that one could then follow to cause a poem. There is more.
Think of these responsibilities as the
groundwork for a poem to happen. To use a Spicer metaphor from the lectures,
see this as getting the place ready for a party and note that it says nothing
about whether any guests will show up.
In the 1956 Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, how is it that the pods are able to grow a new
you? Is it, as it seems initially, mere
proximity? (Isn’t that also one of the prime factors leading to sexual
attraction?)
Large, insect- or
vegetable-like pods or cocoons stashed in your home, garage or greenhouse allow
the pod to grow a new you. So, if you allow one of them to live nearby, just
look what will happen, or so says the ideological voice of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The film gives
conflicting testimony regarding proximity as prime cause. Consider the scene near the end when Becky
(Dana Wynter), exhausted from running, drifts to
sleep for but a few moments, while Dr. Miles Bennell
(Kevin McCarthy) goes to scout out the best way for them to go next. All she has to do is fall asleep for a moment
for the transformation to be complete.
(But they look…, just like us.)
An instant other becoming.
For Spicer, language always lies between us.
Hear that lie again. It lies there insisting on an
excess in the words. Ever offered a compliment that as taken as an insult?
Tossed off an email that said something different later? As a Spicer poem puts it, “words/ turn
mysteriously against those who use them.” In a letter he wrote, “Words exhaust
themselves while feelings don’t—that is our greatest tragedy.”
Invasion of the Body
Snatchers is
famously read as an allegory of the
But what is it
about these aliens? Does the pod produce
a new you that then disposes of your body somehow? It seems that way to begin
with. But why are no bodies found? Well,
they must be very good at disposal. But they have our knowledge somehow, our
minds, right? So they are us, but us
with other motives. But then, again,
that late transformation of Becky which leaves no “real” body around
anywhere—what do we make of that? All she had to do was ‘sleep on it.’ &
now she’s one of them? Is being one of them simply sympathizing with
them? Is it sleeping with them? This
film was also known as Sleep No More.
Is it something
about how they reproduce? That it is somehow ‘unnatural’? ie,
that they’re sexual deviants? The film’s
working title was They Came from Another
World. Lots of ‘coming’ goes on it the titles. Make what you want of that.
But the pod
people, and the other aliens who look just
like us from both Invaders from Mars
and It Came from Outer Space, they
all act differently. They act wrong. They act other than they were. But
this otherness is not visible and thus must reside in their knowledge or their
capacities. What they know of or are capable of and that we can only discern
now and then…
In two of these
instances the aliens are depicted as lacking in or devoid of ‘normal’ human
emotion, as if, dead, but still animated. Still subject to some imperative…
In
It began with
these poets, a teacher, a few others doing what one might think you would do in
an academic setting, that is, share things you are interested in. It happens,
but is not always the case. & surely this level of intensity and commitment
is unusual. A period of ferment for the poetic drive that would contribute to
what all three later accomplished, naturally…
…It
couldn’t go on.
This was the
1950s remember. The teacher that was a part of their group, Kantorwicz,
refused to sign the U of California’s
Loyalty Oath. It was professional suicide but he refused. He was
suddenly not only fired but physically absent from their world. His departure,
a sure sign of the end. This intense
period of poetic involvement, an event in itself for them all, ended by
another, darker and more ominous political event.
John L. Spicer as
he was academically known, also refused to sign the Oath. Spicer already openly
and unapologetically gay, encouraged by Robert Duncan’s own bravery in this
regard was now marked against his will, politically, a leftist label attached
to him. Which, with the loss of job
starts a period of wandering, working fringe jobs, jobs which barely challenged
him. His community, his society of poets scattered and lost.
He was miserable.
He spent time in
Spicer hated
Spicer’s father, he said, had been a Wobbly & Jack,
carrying on this assumed tradition went to anarchist and socialist political
meetings before becoming involved with the Mattachine
Society, one of the earliest homosexual rights groups. Ostensibly a book club it had clandestine
meetings and guarded its rolls dearly.
Jack took on an activist, organizational role in the Mattachine
Society. He attended an historic statewide gathering down in
Recall the scene
in Invasion of the Body Snatchers
where the he & she of the film hide in the doctor’s office – looking out
they see everybody going about their morning lives – but then at a signal we
see these Invaders all working with silent (dead?) precision to distribute the
pods.
Subjects of their
own reproduction?
Reflection and inversion.
Already branded a leftist, a homosexual and a poet Jack
Spicer was well placed to see the collective fear of difference figured in
films like Invaders from Mars or Invasion of the Body Snatchers—fear of
those who look just like us, but are somehow not like us.
Where do their orders come from?
Spicer’s poetry is most known by poets
who are working in some one of the traditions known as avant
garde or experimental— where it also shows signs of
influence and generativity. He is almost entirely
unknown to the literary mainstream – what Charles Bernstein calls, with good reason
– Official Verse Culture. & yet he
is not, at first glance, a wild experimenter with language. A reader knows the
words he uses. He writes of baseball, the ocean, seagulls, radios and of
characters King Arthur and JFK, Buster Keaton and Dillinger. His poems are even deceptively open. They are
also in no sense tradition-less, or as we might hear it these days,
“tradition-free.”
The Grail is the opposite of poetry
Fills us up instead of using us as a cup
the dead drink from.
For Spicer a poem cannot help but to
embody earlier poems. As poets we are the cups that the dead (poets) drink
from. We extend their margin of survival in language – as echoes of various
levels of clarity. Tho it is not them, these dead
poets so much as their poetry. Each poem is thus an always partial and
unfinished redemption of poetry, not of the reader, nor of the poet (living or
dead). But of poetry, of that which
poets are subject to.
Spicer's poems after a certain point in
his development are generally organized into small "books". Series or
sequences is what they amount to but his term is book and it’s a good one.
The
period of the books also marks (hindsight remember) the beginning of poetry
coming from the dead, from the alien, from the ghost, from the outside. The
poet as transcriber rather than creator. Poetry as a practice of dictation.
Here
think of the scenes from Cocteau’s film Orphée in which the poet, Orpheus (Jean Marais)
sits in the Rolls Royce of the Princess “Death” (Maria Casares)
to listen, patiently and anxiously for the next transmission to come thru the
car’s radio. It is only this radio that offers these poems and as a subject of
poetry he has no choice. The world is on hold. It is time to take dictation.
& of course it is the dead young poet Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe), killed in the
opening scenes of the film, who is commanded by Death to transmit these
messages to Orpheus.
Death
loves the poet.
In addition to the notion of dictation is Spicer’s idea of the “serial
poem.” Much could be said about what he
means by serial poem. Often he uses it
to mean that the poem is written as a series of events, i.e. that he writes one
line then the next, then the next (He speaks in the lectures some place about
having to wait hours upon hours for the next line to arrive) instead of
"conceiving" the poem and then writing different parts of it and
revising—it’s tied up in with notion of "dictation" and that’s what
probably gives the poems the feel at times of dialogue.
A
good example is in the “Imaginary Elegies” when he says at the beginning of one
stanza:
Yes, be like god. I wonder what I thought
When I wrote that.
This references the ending of previous
section:
Poet,
Be like God.
Here, in a poem written before the
transition from ‘one night stands’ (what Spicer called his poems before the
serial poem idea took hold) shows clear indications of what he would only
articulate as dictation much later.
& notice that what is written is not “I wonder what I meant when I wrote that” but “I wonder what I thought…” One might
hear an echo here of “what was I
thinking?” or consider that uncanny experience, when something other speaks
thru you. Maybe you’ve never made a Freudian slip.
The opening two poems from Spicer’s book Billy
The Kid [1958] exemplify his notions of serial poem and the outside from
which the poems ‘come,’ concepts which tend to give the poems a feel of
narrative argument games.
1
The radio
that told me about the death of Billy The Kid
(And the
day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky)
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, no New York Jew salesmen
of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots
people.
Torture
gardens and scenic railways. The radio
That told
me about the death of Billy The Kid
The day a
hot summer day. The roads dusty in the
summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going
beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are
going.
The Poem. In all
that distance who could recognize his face.
2
A sparkling of gold leaf looking like hell flowers
A flat piece of wrapping paper, already wrinkled, but
wrinkled again by hand, smoothed into shape by an electric iron
A painting
Which told me about the death of Billy The Kid.
Collage a binding
together
Of the real
Which flat colors
Tell us what heroes
really come by.
No, it is not a collage. Hell flowers
Fall from the hands of heroes
fall from all of
our hands
flat
As if we were not ever able quite to include them.
His gun
does
not shoot real bullets
his death
Being done is unimportant.
Being done
In those flat colors
Not a collage
Memory.
Dictation, the transmission of poetry to
the poet. The poem collecting, sequentially in serial forms. If this were all
there were to Spicer’s poetic practice, he would still be a significant poet,
but there is something beyond these practices, something to do with the
creation of a society or community of poets.&
Spicer's
poetry requires this community of shared understandings, and throughout his
life he actively cultivated poetic communities, the scene which developed
around him is generally referred to now as the
Another
expression of this sense of community was embodied by the magazine Open Space which collected the work of
Bay Area poets associated with the Spicer circle and was intended to stay
local. Spicer infamously tried to forbid any distribution of Open Space outside of the poetic
community of which he was a part. For one issue only enough copies were printed
so that contributors could each have one. Although Spicer believed that poetry
was necessarily an activity of the social rather than the individual, he didn't
believe that poetry was destined to have wide social or political impact (at
least within the present age).
It
is here that he’s clearly broken with the rugged individualist model of poetic
creation. Duchamp’s comment that no masterpiece can
be painted in isolation touches on the same truth that upsets the myth of the
romantic creator.
Why did the pods come to earth? Here I hear the Lacan’s
famous line on desire; “Desire is the desire of the other.” Poetry as the
poetry of the alien? The ghost?
Who
or what is transmitting these messages that the poet must transcribe?
Enter
the myth of Orpheus, stage left. Spicer was particularly taken with the detail
that when Orpheus sang his songs, not just the people or the animals came to
listen but the trees and rocks listened as well. But Orpheus’ songs are not his own, they come from the gods.
Spicer’s come from somewhere less clear.
His friend Robin Blaser wrote; “Spicer’s
blasphemy, in fact, is directed against that thought which would protect the
purity of God.”
In After Lorca
the first of his books (properly so called & thus found in The Collected
Books), Spicer is engaged in “translation” but he’s also exchanging
letters, conducting correspondence with the then already long dead poet Garcia Lorca in which Spicer is the channel for both sides. The
poems veer from being more or less what we think of as “straight” translation
to being things quite unrelated to translation as generally conceived, though
perhaps they maintain correspondence with the poems (in the same way that
Spicer corresponds with Lorca?).
Here
Spicer is the cup from which Lorca drinks.
In the lectures given in the last year of
his life, 3 in