Extracted from the New Yorker site:
“Thought a Rarity on Paper”
by Billy Collins
February 19, 2024
Here I am thanking you for this fine copy
of Jack Spicer’s posthumous
“One Night Stand and Other Poems”
(Grey Fox Press, 1980),
introductions by Donald Allen and Robert Duncan.It’s such a rare little bird,
I was careful to purify my hands
before sliding it out of its clear Mylar sleeve.I was careful, too, when I turned the pages,
but when Jesus began making out his will
and Alice in Wonderland went missing from the chessboard,
the book had to be restrained from taking flight
and flapping its many wings against a window pane.So now, the front cover is bent back a little
like a clam with its shell slightly ajar
the way Spicer’s mouth could look sometimes
when we would see him at Gino and Carlo
or in the park by the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul,
where he would often sit cross-legged under a shade tree.There on hot summer afternoons
he would suffer the company of young poets
if they observed the courtesy of arriving
with cold quart bottles of Rainier Ale,
as green as the sports section of the paper.… And here I still remain,
more than twice Spicer’s final age,
rolling through the pages of his little book,listening to his bewildering birds,
and watching Beauty walk, not like a lake
but among the coffee cups and soup tureens,causing me to open my hands
and allow this green aeronaut of paper
to lift off and fly around my yellow house
and beat its wings against glass
as the thrilling sky continues to change
slowly from blue to black
then, miraculously, back to blue once more.Published in the print edition of the February 26, 2024, issue, with the headline “Thought a Rarity on Paper.”
Billy Collins (born 1941; former poet laureate of the United States) you probably know about, Jack Spicer (1925-1965) maybe not.
From my 12/25/08 posting “Jack/Mr. Spicer”, about My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian; Wesleyan University Press):
The treat for linguists is that his little book Language (White Rabbit Press, 1965 [listed as 1964 in Robin Blaser’s now-out-of-print The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975), but that book lists dates of writing, not publication]) is possibly the only book of poetry with a photocopy of a cover of Language (the journal of the Linguistic Society of America) on its own cover — that because the issue (July-September 1952) included a paper by David W. Reed and John L. Spicer on “methods of comparing idiolects in a transition area” (from Spicer’s student days at Berkeley, before he had to leave because he refused to sign a loyalty oath). (Oh yes, he was also a very early gay activist.)
Here I pause for today. To come: a much more personal posting about how the poetry of Jack Spicer and Frank O’Hara came to me, through my first male lover, a gift that has resonated with me for over 50 years now.
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