My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  6. The other members of the 6 Gallery were: Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, Deborah Remington, John Allen Ryan, and David Simpson. When Ginsberg and Whalen and others read on October 7, 1955, Spicer was living briefly in New York City.

  7. In a letter from 1989 Schuyler remembered Spicer this way: “When he was in New York in the early 50s he hung out at a Village bar, the San Remo, which went through a gay phase, and I never met anyone else quite so morose and grouchy. And that’s what I find when I try to read him. But my friend the painter John Button said that the poetry was very good, when you stopped reading it that way” (Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, ed. William Corbett [New York: Turtle Point 2004]: 450).

  8. Spicer’s letters to Allen Joyce, edited by Bruce Boone, Sulfur 10:142.

  9. “The Poems of Emily Dickinson,” reprinted in The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer.

  10. For Spicer, both the lines of the poem and the serial structure of the poem are dictated. For a fuller discussion of dictation and seriality see Lectures 1 and 2 and the Afterword in The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer.

  11. From a Berkeley notebook (Jack Spicer Papers 2004/209, The Bancroft Library).

  12. See “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” in Negative Space (New York: Praeger, 1971).

  ABOUT THIS EDITION

  A poet’s life work comes into print culture for many reasons and in many different formats and presentations; that is to say, no poet’s work comes to a final state in a uniform way, nor without the rich life of textual work and its attendant discourse.

  The majority of the work collected here consists of poetry from Spicer’s two posthumous collections, which have served his readers for the past twenty-five years. The primary of these, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975), was edited by Robin Blaser in the decade after Spicer’s death. He adhered as much as possible to his friend’s strictures on seriality, collecting in this volume the poems Spicer published in his individual books (After Lorca, Billy the Kid, Lament for the Makers, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, The Holy Grail, and Language) along with unpublished and posthumously published books (Admonitions, A Book of Music, Fifteen False Propositions Against God, Apollo Sends Seven Nursery Rhymes to James Alexander, A Red Wheelbarrow, and Book of Magazine Verse). That edition also included Blaser’s groundbreaking study of his friend’s revelatory poetics entitled “The Practice of Outside,” now reprinted in The Fire: The Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

  A second collection of Spicer’s work, One Night Stand & Other Poems (San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1980) was edited by Donald Allen and includes a lengthy introduction by Robert Duncan. In 1957, after avowing serial poetry and composition by book, Spicer famously disowned his earlier single poems as “one night stands.” Allen’s aptly titled posthumous edition essentially offers the prequel to Spicer’s mature work, and many of the individual poems collected therein reveal Spicer’s poetics in the making. Though Spicer claimed to have abandoned the single poem for good in Admonitions, strictly speaking he was “printing the legend,” as he continued to write and publish such poems through the end of his career.

  Unlike most poets, Spicer restricted the distribution of his publications to his immediate surround, the San Francisco Bay Area, and this choice is an aspect of the work that must be kept in mind as it moves into a new context. Spicer’s regionalism derived from a deep love of California and from his visionary belief in a magic circle begun at Berkeley with Blaser, Duncan, and others in his youth, though perhaps later it also functioned as a kind of armor to protect him from repeated rejection from commercial publishing venues. In his lifetime, Spicer’s published books were released in small editions of 500 to 1000 copies or even fewer by small local presses, primarily Joe Dunn’s—later Graham Mackintosh’s—White Rabbit Press, along with Duncan and Jess [Collins]’s Enkidu Surrogate, and David Haselwood and Andrew Hoyem’s Auerhahn Society.

  The present volume builds from all of these previous out-of-print publications, retaining Spicer’s own delineation between early and mature work, and uses them to provide the copytext for many of the poems within this volume. We have corrected obvious typographical errors in these earlier volumes but retained Spicer’s idiosyncratic orthography. As Blaser notes in the Collected Books: “All spellings or ‘misspellings’ are intentional—‘le damoiselle cacheresse’ (Holy Grail), for example. After Heads of the Town, Jack seemed not to care for such corrections from the manuscript to the printed edition.” Given Spicer’s interest in folk transmission, his refusal of copyright, his insistence on the local, and his disregard of conventions of many kinds, his orthography cannot be separated from other aesthetic choices in the work.

  We also include manuscript poems and fugitive works retrieved from notebooks. After Spicer’s untimely death, the contents of his apartment were packed into boxes. Blaser stored these effects along with his own archive until he and Holt V. Spicer donated them to UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in 2004. The contents of these boxes became, in effect, a time capsule, containing Spicer’s prescriptions, paperback books, unopened mail, student papers, a calling card, art work, and other miscellany along with notebooks and manuscript pages. Certain works that had been considered incomplete or unfinished—“The Diary of Oliver Charming,” for instance—were pieced together from notebooks. Other serial works emerged as well: Helen: A Revision and a work in progress we’ve titled Map Poems, for example. We have also retrieved single poems written throughout his writing life, including “Homosexuality,” “Any fool can get into an ocean . . . ,” “A Second Train Song for Gary,” “Éternuement,” “Birdland, California,” “They Murdered You” (a premature elegy on the death of Kenneth Rexroth), and the heartbreaking “Dignity is a part of a man . . . ,” among others. While these “new” works were unpublished during Spicer’s lifetime, they make an important addition to our understanding of Spicer’s life work. Also among them is the unfinished manuscript letter to Lorca about sound, to which Spicer refers in the fifth letter of After Lorca. Although it remained unfinished, this document, retrieved directly from Spicer’s After Lorca notebook (and printed in our notes on the poems), is a compelling supplement to the finished series as it considers and complicates the two dueling aspects of the poem: how does it look and how does it sound?

  Another series collected here, the Letters to James Alexander, functions both as correspondence and as a serial poem; on occasion, Spicer read from the series of letters at poetry readings. Given Spicer’s interest in the blurring of letters and poems in After Lorca and elsewhere, this work offers another significant manifestation of his poetics of “correspondence.”

  The poems in this edition are arranged as precisely as possible by date of composition. Though both Blaser and Allen arranged their editions in roughly chronological order, new findings have emerged within the Spicer archive that alter the story considerably and, for the most part, a thorough picture of Spicer’s writing career can be established. We have established the chronology of Spicer’s writing in two ways. Most importantly, the notebooks (dozens of them in the Spicer papers at UC Berkeley) show when and in what order all the major works were composed, along with most of the shorter pieces. Through the evidence of these notebooks we can see that Lament for the Makers, which precedes The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether in Blaser’s edition, actually succeeded it, as did A Red Wheelbarrow. When notebooks were not available (and some seem to be missing, especially from Spicer’s early years at Berkeley and in Minnesota), we came to depend on a selection of aides-mémoire Spicer made for himself for various reasons. In one he names the man (or woman, but usually a man) who inspired each of his poems. In another he attempts to establish a series of different “periods” into which his early work might be placed. Several lists reveal that he, like other poets before and since, made a table of contents for the “selected poems” of his d
reams even before he had published his first book. Using these methods, and following comments in his letters which date the poems more precisely, we have come up with a consistent, sometimes surprising timeline.

  While the first part of this edition, 1945–1956, doesn’t include every poem he wrote at this time, our aim has been to make a judicious selection of single poems from One Night Stand and from notebooks and manuscripts in order to provide something more than an adequate sense of Spicer’s first decade of writing. Therefore this edition is not a “complete” but a “collected” poems. The poems we chose not to include from this period are poems that we deemed to be largely student work, imitations, or formal exercises. These works are not without interest, and many of them will subsequently appear along with Spicer’s plays in a companion volume of uncollected work.

  The second part of this book gathers a more complete picture of the second half of Spicer’s writing life. It includes all the poems from the Collected Books as well as several fugitive series that have been uncovered and pieced together in the decades following the Black Sparrow edition (Helen: A Revision, Map Poems, and Golem, among others).1 The dates that appear on the half-title pages of each of his “books” are dates of composition, not publication. The notes at the back of this volume provide brief publication information.

  It is our aim in this volume to present a comprehensive edition of Spicer’s work from 1945 to 1965 and to establish a fair text of his major poems, creating, in effect, his first collected poems to function as a standard reading edition. In gathering texts from Spicer’s unwieldy archive we have sought to show the continuities as well as the evolutionary leaps within his writing practice. While the poetry gathered here represents a mere twenty-year period, it has all the features of a full and productive life work.

  Note

  1. Poems Spicer clearly didn’t intend for publication, such as “An Exercise” (which appeared posthumously in Boundary 2), will appear along with other works in a second volume.

  I (1945–1956)

  BERKELEY RENAISSANCE (1945–1950)

  BERKELEY IN TIME OF PLAGUE

  Plague took us and the land from under us,

  Rose like a boil, enclosing us within.

  We waited and the blue skies writhed awhile

  Becoming black with death.

  Plague took us and the chairs from under us,

  Stepped cautiously while entering the room

  (We were discussing Yeats); it paused awhile

  Then smiled and made us die.

  Plague took us, laughed and reproportioned us,

  Swelled us to dizzy, unaccustomed size.

  We died prodigiously; it hurt awhile

  But left a certain quiet in our eyes.

  A GIRL’S SONG

  Song changes and his unburnt hair

  Upon my altar changes;

  We have, good strangers, many vaults

  To keep the time in, but the songs are mine,

  The seals are wax, and both will leak

  From heat.

  A bird in time is worth of two in any bush.

  You can melt brush like wax; and birds in time

  Can sing.

  They call me bird-girl, parrot girl and worth

  The time of any bird; my vault a cage,

  My cage a song, my song a seal,

  And I can steal an unburnt lock of hair

  To weave a window there.

  HOMOSEXUALITY

  Roses that wear roses

  Enjoy mirrors.

  Roses that wear roses must enjoy

  The flowers they are worn by.

  Roses that wear roses are dying

  With a mirror behind them.

  None of us are younger but the roses

  Are dying.

  Men and women have weddings and funerals

  Are conceived and destroyed in a formal

  Procession.

  Roses die upon a bed of roses

  With mirrors weeping at them.

  A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG LANDSCAPE

  Watch sunset fall upon that beach like others did. The waves

  Curved and unspent like cautious scythes, like evening harvesters.

  Feel sorrow for the land like others did. Each eating tide,

  Each sigh of surf, each sunset-dinner, pulls the earth-crop, falls

  A little fuller; makes the sand grain fall

  A little shorter, leaner. Leaves the earth

  A breathless future harvest.

  I watch, as others watched, but cannot stand

  Where others stood; for only water now

  Stands once where Arnold stood, or Lear or Sappho stood.

  Retreating shore (each day has new withdrawals)

  Breaks in feeble song—it sings and all abandoned history is spread,

  A tidal panic for that conqueror.

  I. The Indian Ocean: Rimbaud

  I watched and saw a sailor floating in that sea

  And melt before he drowned.

  Asleep and fragrant as that sleep, he seemed

  To draw the sun within his flesh and melt. He seemed

  To draw the fire from that angel and to melt. Now he is dead.

  To melt is not to drown but is enough

  To shear the body of its flesh; the sea

  Is meant for drowning, but when God is short

  Of waters for his purpose then the sea

  Becomes a pool of fire; angels ride

  Astride their flamy waves

  Pale as desire

  Terrible angel, out of that fire

  Out of the beach-bones, melted like butter

  Out of the blazing waves, the hot tide

  Terrible angel, sea-monster

  Terrible fish-like angel, fire breather

  Source of the burning ocean.

  II. The Atlantic Ocean: Hart Crane

  But I watch slowly, see the sand-grains fall

  A little riper, fuller; watch the ocean fall

  From sunset dinner. Watch the angel leave

  His fire-pleasure.

  Deep in the mind there is an ocean

  I would fall within it, find my sources in it. Yield to tide

  And find my sources in it. Aching fathoms fall

  And rest within it.

  Deep in the mind there is an ocean and below,

  The ocean-ripened sand-grains and the lands it took,

  The statues, and the boundaries and the ghosts.

  Street-lights and pleasant images, refractions; great

  Currents of pleasant indirection.

  The statue of Diana in the railroad station

  The elaborating, the intense, the chocolate monsters.

  Under the ocean there are crushing tides, intense

  And convoluted stuffings for a dream.

  Deep in the mind there is an ocean and below,

  A first and fishly paradise.

  It is the deep-end of dreaming. There are stacks

  Of broken sailors, sweet and harvested; the tacks

  Do not decay; they do not bleach with daylight; they remain

  Like grain in harvest.

  But there is little human there, the face

  Of statues, nothing colder than that face; it is the end

  An Easter Island end of dreaming; paradise

  And always afternoon.

  But he is dead

  Untroubled swarms of bees pursue their pleasures, lax and drowsy; steal

  Sweet honey from a drunken sailor’s bones.

  But he is dead

  And nothing human there can chafe his flesh;

  Only the fertile sea can chafe his flesh; it is the end,

  An island end of dreaming.

  Harvesting angel, out of these pleasures

  Out of the kelp-fields and the sea-brambles

  Tide-weaver, hunter and planter,

  Harvesting angel, paradise-keeper

  Harvesting dolphin-angel, coffin-lover

  Keep safe his sl
eeping bones.

  III. The Pacific Ocean

  But there are times the sea puts on its rouges, looks

  A doom-bedraggled whore with eight diseases; seems

  To cruise her ancient beaches and demand

  An answer to her question—“Will you sleep?”

  An answer from the living—“Will you sleep?”

  “No no my girl, my dooming ocean, no

  It won’t do,” I answer, “it won’t do.

  Who, girl, would drown, if all the fragrant ocean, girl,

  Would be his bride and bed?

  Though he is dead

  And though he sleep with you, your cheapness is not dead

  And you are old and deep and cold and like a cheap hotel

  Of sleepless corridors and whisperings.

  No, I can spare your charm, my harpy ocean, spare your charm

  And grunt and turn away.—No, it won’t do.”

  This world, it will not end, it will not end;

  It would look well in ashes, but it will not end. (Though he is dead.)

  Dr. Johnson stamped his goutish leg upon that ocean; proved

  That rocks are rocklike as the sea’s a sea

  Of real appearance. If the mind’s a sea

  And rocks are feathers in it, do not say

  The sea’s a feathered creature. She may fly,

  The mind, I mean, may fly, but cannot spin,

  The Doctor’s lithic stumbling block would break her shin.

  How shall I answer the whorish sea?

  Sir, says the doctor, leave it all to me.

  How shall I visit him where he is dead?

  Sir, says the doctor, I shall go instead.

  The gloomy whore is chastened and he goes.

  The sun becomes a nest of singing birds and he is gone

  The painted sea is gone.

  Gout-ridden angel, out of these terrors,

  Out of the mind’s infidelity and the heart’s horror

  Deliver my natural body.