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.
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