My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  During this period Spicer found camaraderie with the Boston poets John Wieners, Joe Dunn, and Stephen Jonas. And it was here that he wrote the provocative “Unvert Manifesto” and “Song for Bird and Myself ” in which he compares himself to the dead Charlie Parker as an outsider to the increasingly professionalized jazz and, by implication, poetry scenes. It was in Boston that, he said, he learned from Jonas to write from his anger. His interest in theater and his turbulent inner life came together to produce a more performative sense of poetic voice on the page.

  In reviewing the then-new three-volume Johnson edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson for the Boston Public Library Quarterly, Spicer wrote a meticulous essay in which he points out the problem of distinguishing between Dickinson’s poems and letters.9 The significance of this finding would manifest itself dramatically a year later in his own poetry, After Lorca (1957) and Admonitions (1958). In these works he developed his notion of “correspondence” and included letters as part of the overall scaffolding of the book. It is within these letters that he developed his concept of composition by book—by which he meant not a collection of poems but a community of poems that “echo and re-echo against each other” to “create resonances.” As Spicer put it: “[Poems] cannot live alone any more than we can.” This is why he called his earlier single poems “one night stands.”

  Ultimately, Spicer’s unhappy year on the East Coast solidified his allegiance to the American West and his identity as a California poet. When he returned to San Francisco, he worked once again as a lecturer at San Francisco State University in 1957, where he taught his famous Poetry as Magic workshop, which attracted Helen Adam, Robert Duncan, Jack Gilbert, George Stanley, and others. Afterwards he worked as a researcher in linguistics at UC Berkeley.

  A new writing practice began, first with the imitations and translations of After Lorca which, he claimed, had been “dictated” to him, if not by García Lorca, then by a mysterious unknown force he sometimes characterized as “Martians.” This conceit he borrowed from his poetic predecessor W.B. Yeats, whose experiments in automatic writing fascinated Spicer, and from the French poet Jean Cocteau, whose 1950 film Orphée explores the notion of a poetry given from beyond the grave. These poems rarely came singly; with Robert Duncan, Spicer conceived of and developed the “serial poem”: a book-length progression of short poems that function together as a single movement. In his lectures, Spicer quoted Blaser’s description of the serial poem as akin to being in a dark house, where you throw a light on in a room, then turn it off, and enter the next room, where you turn on a light, and so on. This movement from room to room in an architectural structure makes sense if you think of “stanza” as coming from the Italian for “small room.” As his poetry moves from dark room to dark room, each flash of illumination leaves an afterimage on the imagination, and the lines of the poem become artifacts of an ongoing engagement with larger forces.10 In San Francisco Spicer began teaching, and young poets flocked to him. He wanted to develop a magic school of writing, a kreis modeled on the Georgekreis, the mystic cult of poetry and love organized by the modernist German poet Stefan George to preserve the memory of a dead boyfriend.

  In the last nine years of his short life, Jack Spicer saw to press seven books of poetry (and left behind at least ten more), establishing a poetic tradition on the West Coast that ran parallel, yet counter, to the contemporaneous Beat movement—parallel, yet counter, to the poetry of the New York School poets as well. His anarchist convictions led him to refuse copyright on his poetry since he believed that he was in no sense its owner, and its creator in only the most tenuous sense. Spicer’s own students came to include many of the finest poets, both gay and straight, working in San Francisco. He founded the magazine,J, in 1959, to publish their writing, alongside his own, and in 1964 oversaw another monthly journal, Stan Persky’s Open Space. What he had learned from the internal struggles of the Mattachine was to gain control of the means of production, so the presses that issued his work were all local and, insofar as possible, under his thumb. For Spicer the local became paramount, a seedbed of honest and vital work.

  In 1965 he gave four important lectures shortly before his death from alcoholism at the age of forty. His legendary last words were “My vocabulary did this to me.”

  There is a contradiction between the life and the legend of Jack Spicer, the work and what we want it to say. When we look to him for company, his poems respond with “loneliness is necessary for pure poetry.” When we want to believe that poetry matters, we’re told “no one listens to poetry.” When we read for solace, a sense of location and connection, we find instead “blackness alive with itself at the sides of our fires. . . . A simple hole running from one thing to another.” His poem The Holy Grail, from which these lines are taken, is not so much about the grail as about that fire.

  There is a deep humanity and humor in Spicer’s voice, a desperate push to apprehend what is “real.” In his poems “you’ll smell the oldest smells—the smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep.” You’ll find “white and aimless signals,” “the death that young men hope for.” Here is a striving for a somatic poetry that allows so much to invade the edges of its song that we hardly know where it ends and we begin. His poems combine austerity and vulnerability to unfurl a loneliness that is unflinching. The paradox in his work, which can sometimes be mistaken for cynicism, is honest and wry.

  Politically rebellious, Spicer despised the left-wing pieties that, he thought, were turning postwar poetry into a culture of complaint and “self-expression.” The urgency of his desire to disrupt convention occasionally led him into some extreme choices of style and content that jar and disturb. Spicer’s father had been a Wobbly, and Spicer carried with him his father’s book of labor anthems, but the Left had let him—and all gay men—down severely, and the traces of his disappointment are evident in his writing. Early on, he saw a kinship, a solidarity, between homosexuals and other oppressed groups internationally. The narrator of an unfinished Berkeley story observes a gay “tea dance,” and compares the boys dancing with each other to figures in a “minstrel show.”

  Somebody tells me that these people are human. That’s silly. They are not human they are homosexual. Jews are not human either, nor Negroes, nor cripples. No one is human that doesn’t feel human. None of us here feel human.11

  The terms he has chosen here are intentionally provocative, drawing his readers into a crisis of ethical judgment in order to determine for themselves the truth value of the paradigms he presents—and more importantly, where his readers stand in relation to his provocation. In such passages, Spicer carries over into the poetry something of the sociological reality of his time—using the raw terms with which one’s humanity might be judged by a governing body. Note that two of these categories (homosexuality and disability) disqualify one for military service, and that the status of all oppressed groups was certainly part of his consciousness during the conservative 1950s, when ad hominem attacks were common and names were named before congressional committees like HUAC. His 4-F status (deemed unfit for military service), his status as an unattractive gay man, his resistance to many of the conventions of his period, and his abject loneliness, conspire at times to take the form of self-loathing. What remains is a raw, unedited, contaminating voice, using outrageous tropes of hate speech to provoke or shock the “genteel reader” into an unsettled reality. In some of his poems, and in his proto-serial work, “The Unvert Manifesto and the Diary of Oliver Charming,” Spicer conflated a Trumanesque “plain speaking” with his lifelong drive to approach the abyss and view it head on, and that’s when his writing embraces the repulsive, as satiric tropes of racism, misogyny and self-loathing attach themselves to the underside of the work. A streak of abjection animates Spicer’s poetry, as his dissatisfaction with his own body sometimes flips over into ugly projection.

  And yet Spicer remains one of our great poets of love and heartache. His love poetry is rueful, tender, colloquial, anguishe
d. It’s as though he felt that if he could just write well enough, the poem would become “almost a bedroom.” He may also be characterized as a late devotional poet who wrote from a mix of doubt, irreverence, and belief. He is an erudite poet, with a knowledge of linguistics, Latin, German, Spanish, French, Old Norse, and Old English, but one who also delighted in organizing and presiding over “Blabbermouth Night,” an event in which poets were encouraged to speak in tongues and to babble and were judged on the duration and invention of their noises. He was deeply committed to the depth and authenticity of sound. He worked on a linguistic project that mapped slight changes in vowel sounds from town to town in northern California, a project that would profoundly inform his later poetry, in particular Language and Book of Magazine Verse. He hosted Harry Smith on the first radio show devoted to folk music at KPFA in the late ’40s, where he also troubled the folk movement’s quest for the authentic and original by presenting his own fake versions of songs he claimed his friends had just heard down on the pier.

  Spicer delighted in provocative and incongruous combinations. His statements are mercurial, and his lines refuse to be pinned down into a single register. His poems repeatedly disrupt even their own procedures by jamming the frequencies of meaning they set up. They make use of his life-long fascination with games and systems: bridge, baseball, chess, pinball, computers, magic, religion, politics, and linguistics. Like a grail search, what Spicer’s work ultimately accomplishes is not so much a declared goal but the gathering of a community for a potentially endless adventure in reading. Even though he’s a dissembler—using misunderstanding, misdirection, puns, or counter-logic—his poems don’t leave us with a lack of meaning but rather an excess of meaning, with figures echoing and bumping against each other. The “Camelot presidency” becomes a grail circle; the Tin Woodman’s heart is made of silicon. His poetry engages in conversations with other texts, both high and low, often invoking works that have already been widely retold and transformed and are thus already “corrupt”: The Odyssey, grail legend, bible stories, Alice in Wonderland, the Oz books, the legend of Billy the Kid, nursery rhymes, and the evening news—the H bomb, the deaths of J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe, even the Beatles’s U.S. tour.

  Spicer’s outrageous literary debut exemplifies the gamesmanship, macabre humor, and sheer brilliance of his work. After Lorca was published in 1957 by White Rabbit, a small San Francisco press edited by Joe Dunn, the young Boston poet who had gone west. In the 1950s one of the most established venues for a first book was the Yale Younger Poets Series. In that decade, W. H. Auden was the judge, selecting work and writing introductions to books by Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, James Wright, John Hollander, and James Dickey. For his own book, Spicer adapted the format of the established older poet vetting the emerging poet, turning to Federico García Lorca to introduce him even if the martyred Lorca had to do so from the grave. Understandably put out, Lorca begins: “Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction for this volume.” And thus begins Spicer’s provocative poetics of engaging the dead in his literary practice.

  Lorca is perhaps the only major international gay poet he could propose to rival Auden’s endorsement. But as a reluctant interlocutor whose cultural capital is surely compromised by the fact that he is dead, Lorca supplies, in many ways, the opposite of an Auden introduction. His approval is unlikely to help the poet get reviewed, find an agent, get a second book taken, or even get a job. But his position offers unique connections to the underworld for an orphic poet, and he provides both the perfect vehicle for unrequited love and the perfect emblem of literary inheritance and tradition.

  After Lorca is ostensibly composed of translations of Lorca’s work, the faithfulness of which even Lorca questions. There are also nearly a dozen original Spicer poems masquerading as translations, combined with six now-famous programmatic letters to Lorca in which Spicer articulates his poetics and his sense of personal woe with respect to poetry, love, and his contemporaries. With these letters, translations, and fake translations, Spicer established a unique correspondence with literary tradition, one that would further evolve into a resonant intertextual practice of assemblage.

  His debut had an element of punk youthfulness, but in that stroke he revealed himself as a traditionalist as much as an innovator. The first letter to Lorca describes tradition as “generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem. . . .” Rather than distinguishing himself as a uniquely promising younger writer, the letter places Spicer within the context of poets as a class of workers who are all engaged in the same basic project. In this way, the correspondence between Keats’s negative capability, Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of the senses, Yeats’s vision, Rilke’s angelic orders, Lorca’s duende, Pound’s personae, Eliot’s sense of tradition, and Moore’s imaginary gardens can “build a whole new universe”—albeit a universe in which things do not fit seamlessly together. As he puts it, “Things do not connect, they correspond.” Later, in his “A Textbook of Poetry,” we find:

  It does not have to fit together. Like the pieces of a totally unfinished jigsaw puzzle my grandmother left in the bedroom when she died in the living room. The pieces of the poetry or of this love.

  For Spicer, reading and writing are repeatedly associated with a loss of boundaries. Spicer makes what the film critic Manny Farber has called “termite art,” an art that eats its own borders.12 As the poem just quoted continues, this aesthetic is literalized: “As if my grandmother had chewed on her jigsaw puzzle before she died. // Not as a gesture of contempt for the scattered nature of reality. Not because the pieces would not fit in time. But because this would be the only way to cause an alliance between the dead and the living.”

  As his last letter to Lorca suggests, the mingling of poets in the sheets of a book is the mingling of lovers, but this union suggests an eros beyond sex, through which their textual bodies become as indistinguishable as bodies decaying together in the earth, gradually recombined into the same substance—in effect, made new: “the pieces of the poetry or of this love.” Surely no poet was more aware of this blurring of the here and the hereafter than Jack Spicer, who aptly characterized the haunted nature of poetry this way: “The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems. We have it second-hand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making.” Indeed, Spicer left behind an achieved body of work whose afterlife continues to astonish, admonish, and haunt his readers.

  Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian

  Notes

  1. For more on Spicer’s early years see his biography: Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian (Wesleyan U P, 1998).

  2. In response to a questionnaire for Robert Duncan’s workshop at San Francisco State in 1958, Spicer named Lindsay as one of his major influences, along with Yeats, Lorca, Pound, Cocteau, his teacher Josephine Miles, his contemporaries Duncan and Blaser, Untermeyer’s anthology, Dada, The English Department, and his favorite bar of the period, The Place. He left one space designated “to be found.”

  3. “The Poet and Poetry,” reprinted in The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan U P: 1998).

  4. In her brief omnibus review of The New American Poetry, Marianne Moore praises Spicer’s elegies: “Jack Spicer is not indifferent to T. S. Eliot and is not hackneyed, his specialty being the firefly flash of insight, lightening with dry detachment . . . the accents suiting the sense.” Given Moore’s affection for Eliot and his work, and Eliot’s high literary standing in the period, this was high praise (Complete Prose [New York: Viking, 1986]: 536).

  5. Spicer’s petition against the oath was found in his handwriting in one of his Berkeley notebooks. He was 24 at the time:

  We, the Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants of the University of California, wish to register our protest against the new loyalty oath for the
following reasons.

  (1) The testing of a University faculty by oath is a stupid and insulting procedure. If this oath is to have the effect of eliminating Communists from the faculty, we might as logically eliminate murderers from the faculty by forcing every faculty member to sign an oath saying that he has never committed murder,

  (2) That such an oath is more dangerous to the liberties of the community than any number of active Communists should be obvious to any student of history. Liberty and democracy are more often overthrown by fear than by stealth. Only countries such as Russia or Spain have institutions so weak and unhealthy that they must be protected by terror.

  (3) Oaths and other forms of blackmail are destructive to the free working of man’s intellect. Since the early Middle Ages universities have zealously guarded their intellectual freedom and have made use of its power to help create the world we know today. The oath that Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to swear is but a distant cousin to the oath we are asked to swear today, but both represent the struggle of the blind and powerful against the minds of free men.

  We, who will inherit the branches of learning that one thousand years of free universities have helped to generate, are not Communists and dislike the oath for the same reason we dislike Communism. Both breed stupidity and indignity; both threaten our personal and intellectual freedom. (Jack Spicer Papers 2004/209, The Bancroft Library)

  For a discussion of the impact of Spicer’s non-signing of the Oath, see Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance.