Yesterday, in my posting “Poet to poet”, I gave you extracts from a Billy Collins poem on the poet Jack Spicer and promised a posting on the poets Spicer and Frank O’Hara. I’ve posted a good bit of O’Hara on this blog over the years, but Spicer has gone unsampled. Looking ahead to the next posting, Spicer and O’Hara share four notable things, beyond their being extraordinary poets: they were almost exact contemporaries (and at one point in their lives went out drinking and dancing together); both their lives were cut off early (at the age of 40; Spicer drank himself to death, O’Hara was killed in a freak accident); they were both openly, defiantly gay (in the 1940s to 1960s, yet); and they both pursued their craft doggedly, compulsively, as if it was something they couldn’t not do.
Their poetry came to me together through the same route, my first male lover, and it was a great gift, but the two men could hardly have been less similar. O’Hara was ebullient, gregarious, self-assured; Spicer was unsure of himself, inclined to depression, a natural loner (who also, however, craved social connections of many kinds). O’Hara’s poetry is famously spontaneous, improvised in the moment, while many of Spicer’s poems were reworked and elaborated over time, though he also longed for poetry that would just come to him through the air, like radio waves. Yes, a bundle of contradictions.
Spicer’s life history is so restless, complex, and fascinating that I’m posting most of the Wikipedia article on him, below. After that I offer you just one, fairly long, poem, “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy” (from the late 1940s), framed as a session between a (maximally laconic) therapist and a patient who’s spinning out a shimmering sensuous vision of California summers that just might never end.
The life history. From Wikipedia:
Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance…
[He] was born as John Lester Spicer on January 30, 1925 in Los Angeles…
He graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943 to 1945 … After graduation he lived in Los Angeles briefly, and worked as a movie extra and a private investigator.
Spicer ended up in Berkeley … He spent the years 1945 to 1950; and from 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). In 1950, he refused to sign a “loyalty oath” during a time of McCarthyism.
During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their “queer genealogy”, Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers. Spicer’s poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.
In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement. In 1955, Spicer moved to New York City and then to Boston, where he worked for a time in the Rare Book Room of Boston Public Library. Blaser was also in Boston at this time, and the pair made contact with a number of local poets, including John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, and Joe Dunn.
Spicer returned to San Francisco in 1956 and started working on After Lorca. This book represented a major change in direction for two reasons. Firstly, he came to the conclusion that stand-alone poems (which Spicer referred to as his one-night stands) were unsatisfactory and that henceforth he would compose serial poems. In fact, he wrote to Blaser that ‘all my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus) looks foul to me.’ Secondly, in writing After Lorca, he began to practice what he called “poetry as dictation”. His interest in the work of Federico García Lorca, especially as it involved the cante jondo ideal, also brought him near the poetics of the deep image group…
In 1957, Spicer ran a workshop called Poetry as Magic at San Francisco State College, which was attended by Duncan, Helen Adam, James Broughton, Joe Dunn, Jack Gilbert, and George Stanley. He also participated in, and sometimes hosted, Blabbermouth Night at a literary bar called The Place. This was a kind of contest of improvised poetry and encouraged Spicer’s view of poetry as being dictated to the poet.
Spicer refused to have his work copyrighted, and after 1960, Spicer refused to publish his work outside of California. He considered City Lights Bookstore a tourist destination, and boycotted selling his work there. He was unable to hold a job and fell into poverty, however, so by 1964 he started selling books at City Lights.
After many years of alcohol abuse, Spicer fell into a pre-hepatic coma in his apartment building elevator, and later died aged 40 in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital on August 17, 1965.
Spicer’s view of the role of language in the process of writing poetry was probably the result of his knowledge of modern pre-Chomskyan linguistics and his experience as a research-linguist at Berkeley. In the legendary Vancouver lectures he elucidated his ideas on “transmissions” (dictations) from the Outside, using the comparison of the poet as crystal-set or radio receiving transmissions from outer space, or Martian transmissions. The radio oracle derived from Cocteau’s film Orphée, often cited by Spicer in his lectures. Although seemingly far-fetched, his view of language as “furniture”, through which the transmissions negotiate their way, is grounded [AZ: metaphorically] in the structuralist linguistics of Zellig Harris and Charles Hockett. (In fact, the poems of his final book, Language, refer to linguistic concepts such as morphemes and graphemes). As such, Spicer is acknowledged as a precursor and early inspiration for the Language poets. However, many working poets today list Spicer in their succession of precedent figures.
Since the posthumous publication of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (1975, 1st ed.), his popularity and influence have steadily risen … The Collected Books of Jack Spicer gathered Spicer’s works beginning from 1957, and specifically did not include his earlier poetry per Spicer’s requests. A selection of his earlier work was published in One Night Stand and Other Poems, edited by Donald Allen. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008) edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian won the American Book Award in 2009. [AZ: 44 years after he died]
I am thinking of an early summer. “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy”:
What are you thinking about?
I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.What are you thinking?
I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.What are you thinking now?
I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.What are you thinking?
I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.What are you thinking now?
I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.
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