Prodigal Son (Midway Along the Pathway) M

Criticism

Volume 51 | Issue 3 Article 7

2009 Prodigal Son (Midway Along the Pathway) M. D. Snediker Queen's University

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Recommended Citation Snediker, M. D. (2009) "Prodigal Son (Midway Along the Pathway)," Criticism: Vol. 51: Iss. 3, Article 7. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol51/iss3/7 PRODIGAL SON For you I would build a whole new universe around myself. (MIDWAY ALONG This isn’t shit it is poetry. THE PATHWAY) Shit M. D. Snediker Enters into it only as an image. . . .

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The (“Love Poems”) Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer by Jack Spicer. Edited by Peter Gizzi In 1975, Black Sparrow Press pub- and Kevin Killian. Wesleyan lished The Collected Books of Jack Poetry Series. Middletown, Spicer, edited by Spicer’s longtime CT: Wesleyan University Press, friend and fellow poet, Robin Bla- 2008. Pp. 508, 10 illustrations. ser. The Black Sparrow Spicer, as $35.00 cloth. an object, communicates a certain version of Spicer that is as necessary as it is incomplete. The cover illustration depicts the tarot deck’s Four of Cups—a pensive-seeming man under a tree, with three chalices in front of him, and a fourth chalice ostensibly being offered by a hand reaching out from a cloud. Are we to imagine Spicer as the pensive man in his cups, or is Spicer the hand extending a fourth chalice (in which the pensive man qua reader shows little evident interest)? Of course there are many ways to interpret any tarot. In the context of literary his- tory, Spicer has existed—despite the efforts of Black Sparrow Press and coterminous critical attempts at resuscitation—as the neglected chalice, the unaccepted and/or un- acceptable gift. Spicer’s unacceptability, his sta- ked position outside of poetic convention or establishment, is duly noted by Spicer’s admirers. His poetry, however, is not simply that Criticism, Summer 2009, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 489–504. ISSN: 0011-1589. 489 © 2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309. 490 M. D. SNEDIKER of a rabble-rouser, despite Spicer’s Vocabulary Did This to Me does not deep interest in the imbrication of displace Blaser’s 1975 edition, so rabble and arousal. Poetry, like a much as honors it as crucial part of slipknot, only rarely understands the ever-growing Spicer archive— who or what within it, at any given ever-growing, thanks to the efforts moment, is central. Indeed, the of Gizzi, Killian, Michael David- aggressive, sometimes bullying, son, John Emil Vincent, and oth- playfulness of Spicer’s poetics— ers. To say that the new edition is eccentricity that in part explains grand—looks grand, feels expen- his exclusion from a poetry world sive in all the ways in which the beyond that of Berkeley, Cali- Black Sparrow perhaps utopically fornia—has in past decades actu- does not—is not to say that Spicer ally cozened Spicer’s adoption by has arrived. He was already here, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets, from but never so lucidly. Gizzi and Kil- Buffalo to San Francisco. To be lian’s decisions are laudable, par- sure, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry ticularly their inclusion of Spicer’s and its perceived aspirations to- earliest poetry, which hitherto was ward aberrance have become a available only in a separate vol- convention unto itself. The latter’s ume.1 Each of Spicer’s serial se- claiming of Spicer as arch-enabler, quences was originally published like the Black Sparrow edition, in the form of a limited-run, illus- gives a necessary but incomplete trated book; these books, produced impression of Spicer’s importance by White Rabbit Press (principally to contemporary poetics. operated by Spicer’s friend, Gra- Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian’s ham Mackintosh), are works of art. new edition of the collected poetry Illustration (most often by Spicer’s of Spicer includes all of the serial friends or cohorts) and text twine poetic sequences to be found in the into each other in the manner of earlier volume, as well as his ear- William Blake’s illuminations. lier nonserial poems, an extended Gizzi and Killian are therefore to version of Spicer’s brilliant and hi- be commended for reproducing at larious “Unvert Manifesto” (1956), the outset of each of Spicer’s indi- and previously unpublished poems vidual books the original cover il- from both Spicer’s early and later lustration of said work. Eventually, productive years. Gizzi and Kil- ideally, we will have a facsimile of lian’s edition offers a more ade- these works. Until then, we have quate and less affectively distorting this incredible new edition. Spicer’s account of Spicer’s amazing two poems have never looked so new. decades of output. This new edi- And the surprise of rereading tion is elegant and polished in all Spicer in this edition is great. the ways the Black Sparrow im- In 1949, a twenty-four-year-old portantly and justiﬁ ably is not. My Spicer insisted that “[w]e must ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 491

become singers, become entertain- seems for Spicer less paradigm of ers. . . . There is more of Orpheus poetic charisma than natal mythol- in Sophie Tucker than in R. P. ogy of poetic failure. We shall re- Blackmur.”2 Bracketing the quasi- turn, likewise, to these ostensibly Rimbaudian bravura of so preco- estranged narratives of failure and cious a pronouncement—precocity charisma. being advantageous for those Spicer’s reputation, far more than who die so young as Rimbaud or that of other poets, has been adum- Spicer (who died at forty)—this brated by his own pronunciamen- dictum, notwithstanding its sur- tos, in part because Spicer seems to facing throughout Spicer criticism, have found irresistible his peculiarly suffers in its transparency so often teetering soapbox. At the same time, being taken for granted. More sim- the foreclosures attendant to hold- ply, Spicer’s accounts of his own ing Spicer to his own words can be poetics too often are understood as redressed only in more scrupulous a nonproblematically sincere, even relation to his provocation rather as Spicer’s poetry admonishes us than recapitulation of it. I think, for against so straightforward a sincer- instance, that there is a lot of Or- ity. The foregoing dictum’s usual pheus in R. P. Blackmur; further, gloss suggests that there is more of that Blackmur and Spicer have far Sophie Tucker in Spicer than there more in common than literary his- is of R. P. Blackmur, given Spicer’s tory and literary criticism would supposed apostasy of the academy otherwise suggest. Beyond the bio- in favor of a poetry along the graphical dovetail of Blackmur and lines of Tucker’s burlesque and Spicer both dying in 1965 (Tucker, vaudeville; although Blackmur for the record, died in 1966), Black- only clumsily represents the acad- mur and Spicer equally engaged in emy, per se, and more persuasively an ongoing study of what Blackmur invokes a rigorous thoughtfulness denominated language as gesture. not dissimilar from Spicer’s own. Not only language as gesture, but Spicer’s poetry often speaks trucu- poet as gesture: Spicer, photogra- lently against its own thoughtful- phically, has been preserved as a se- ness, just as it speaks against the ries of gestures variously resonant givenness of aforementioned sin- with his poetic production—Spicer, cerity. Further, the gloss presumes hunched, Quasimodo of the Berke- Spicer’s attachment to Orpheus ley Renaissance;3 Spicer, blurred as obvious. Obvious, yes, if we equ- into a Francis Bacon of need, ruth- ate Spicer’s career-long fascination lessly inseparable from ambitions with Orpheus as self-explanatory. bent toward abdication of need; Less obvious, if we honor Spicer’s gesture of obliquity, as though the Orphic ambivalences. We shall re- sylph in a mirror, limit of a camera’s turn to the matter of Orpheus, who capture. 492 M. D. SNEDIKER

Spicer as gesture: love child of limp With peals of distant ironical wrist and the middle ﬁ nger. Flipping laughter at every word the bird, again and again and again. I have written or shall As Spicer writes in his anti-Whitma- write, nian “Song for Bird and Myself” Striking me with insults till (1957) (in which the Bird on one level I fall helpless upon the refers to Charlie “Bird” Parker), sand.4

But the poem isn’t over. Spicer’s “The Poem Isn’t Over” as It keeps going accurately describes the constitutive Long after everybody unfi nishability of Whitman’s own Has settled down comfortably Leaves of Grass, a book revised under into laughter. the same name seven times, across The bastards four decades.5 Only the coercions of On the other side of the paper chronology and adjudication would Keep laughing. indicate each revision as an improve- listen. ment upon those preceding. More stop laughing. interesting in relation to Spicer is the the poem isn’t over. Butterfl ies. notion that Leaves of Grass, divorced from the diachronic, coexists with other versions of itself. Such is an (70) underlying motive in Spicer’s turn to serial poems, and no less, his exp- Spicer’s poem, more accurately, is erimental poetic attempts at both both anti-Whitmanian and Whit- proliferating and sustaining simul- manian. Whitman, campily char- taneously multiple versions of per- acterizing himself as “me imper- sons. Whitman’s contribution to turbe” (191), as often strikes the American poetry too often is vitiated pose of perturbation: in terms of his ancestral function as bardic gay avatar, as though Crane Aware now, that amid all and Spicer learned how to write gay the blab whose echoes poems thanks to Whitman’s earlier recoil upon me, I have gay poems. Whitman’s testing of not once had the least nondiachronic multiplicity is not idea who or what I am, unrelated to questions of queer But that before all my insolent poetic form; but the infl uence on poems the real Me still Spicer of Whitman’s formal assays of stands untouched, untold, genre can’t be underestimated— altogether unreached, neither subordinated nor separated Withdrawn far, mocking from either’s queer poetics. me with mock-congratu- But back to perturbation. “Have latory signs and bows, you ever wrestled with a bird / you ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 493 idiotic reader?” (71). Spicer’s po- situations, but more so when etry asks on many registers to be launched against the predicament dismissed: as irritant, as irascibility. of poetry, as such: In the case of “Song for Bird and Myself,” the poem presumes it has —A human love object is been dismissed before it necessarily untrue. has been, or stages dismissability’s Screw you. incontrovertability as grounds for the poem’s short temper. It is wise, —A divine love object is here, to think of Donald Winni- unfair cott, for whom aggression is the Defi ne the air infant’s experiment in testing the It walks in. limits of another’s love. How long will it take for you to leave me, as Imagine this as lyric poetry. thunder that precedes the light- ning of Don’t Leave Me. (307) Spicer’s poems are both exercises and experiments in gesture. As Spicer’s anger—as both abstraction Blackmur writes, “[W]hen the lan- and particularity—is directed at guage of words most succeeds it form, at voice, at the hypothesis of becomes gesture in its words. . . .”6 content. This is to say that Spicer’s All the more so in Spicer’s poetry, anger keenly surfaces in the rav- in which the form of poetry cleaves eled snags of form, voice, content. to poetic language, conventionally Or to cite Blackmur citing Othello, understood. Spicer’s poems, at their “I understand a fury in your words / most fl inty and confoundingly But not the words.”7 beautiful, are gestures. Not only in Blackmur published Language the sense of gesturing toward, but as Gesture in 1954, as Spicer very gesturing for their own sake. The much was reaching poetic boil. poem as vehicle for some other Spicer’s poems came fast, just as demonstration. If Whitman, ges- Blackmur was hammering away at turally, conceives a poetics of cruis- a corresponding set of poetic prob- ing, Spicer extends a Benjaminian lematics. Blackmur’s attachments topos of cruising-in-ruin. Signals to Hart Crane and Emily Dickin- are overdetermined, or undetected son chime with Spicer’s attach- altogether. Proustian choreogra- ments to Crane and Dickinson. In phies of implicit seduction cede to the case of Crane, Spicer might demands, rejections, and regrets fi nd a template of fl aming inebri- stitched with their own sense of in- ation burning itself out. In the evitability. The anger of Spicer’s case of Dickinson, Spicer might poetry is striking, not only as di- see in her extravagant variants a rected at particular persons or model for Spicer’s variant-like 494 M. D. SNEDIKER

serial poems (intimated in Spicer’s if curmudgeonly essay on Crane. brilliant review of Dickinson’s var- Two gay alcoholic poets who die be- iorum edition). The poets that fore their careers could adequately Language as Gesture eclectically ex- explain themselves. The teetering plores are the poets to whom Spicer soapbox: let me say what I can while likewise attaches (as, for instance, I am able. in Spicer’s early poem for Hart The vicissitudes of the soapbox Crane, “A Portrait of the Artist as are further complicated by Spicer’s a Young Landscape” [2000]).8 Lan- eventual attachment to tropes of guage as Gesture, aware of Spicer or vocal displacement. For instance, not, uncannily offers a succinct en- Spicer insists in his eleventh-hour graving of Spicer’s own onerous, Vancouver lectures that the poet brilliant adventures in the pervi- is a radio, receiving the transmis- ousness of person and form. The sions of Martians.10 The insistence following, from Blackmur, citing of a Martian language sustained Yeats’s “Crazy Jane”: through if not redeemed by poetry smacks of the facetious. This is I had wild Jack for a lover; nonsense, and I’m doing my best to Though like a road transliterate nonsense—a return to That men pass over Spicer’s earlier animation of Dada My body makes no moan and Kurt Schwitters’s Mertz: the But sings on: latter of which indubitably pro- All things remain in God.9 poses a false etymology of the Mar- tian, as though the poet’s obligation Or as Spicer would say, Poet, be like were to salvage what for others God (30). I had wild Jack for a lover. was dejecta and jetsam. Nonface- Yeats’s stanza approaches the spati- tiously, Spicer’s fi delity to Martian ality that informs Spicer’s own scru- language registers as fl ippant and pulous investigation of poetic form. simultaneously perhaps resists its Is poetry like a road, or like a room? own fl ippancy (dares us to take it How to distinguish the song from seriously). Sometimes, I am in- the moan? These questions are at clined to think of Spicer’s insistence the heart of Spicer’s poetry, even as on this particular sci-fi Ars Poetica Spicer already resonates with Yeats: not only as fl irtation with its own two poets, distracted and consumed blitheness, but covert means of by the possibility of love channeled keeping safe the sensitive stakes of across the long distance of mortal- the project under hand. One could ity. Which likewise describes the turn here to Derridean theories of lyric experiments of Dickinson and translation, although translating Crane: the distance between life and Spicer’s project into the Derridean death, which, poetically speaking, invariably leaves out too much of Blackmur articulates in his brilliant Spicer’s own innovations: just as ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 495 good-intentioned but similarly “The Italian Lesson” (1925), in scalpeled attempts in previous de- which a silver-tongued, silver- cades have left too much of Spicer’s spooned woman of means “trans- poetry on the fl oor for the sake lates” the fi rst lines of Dante’s of resuscitating Spicer as proto- Inferno. Blanchot, proto-Derrida, proto- Lacan. Translation, for Spicer, Oh what wonderful lines! arises as an amorous ordeal, the Aren’t they marvelous? Now imagined crux of attempting less let’s see, “nel mezzo,” let me to understand than to formulate see, “nel mezzo” just means what arises from beyond. Martians, “in the middle,” doesn’t it? for Spicer, are a limit case. How to “In the middle.” And “del honor not only what is light-years camin” means, um, “of the away, but what is both light-years road.” “In the middle of the away and barely taken seriously? road.” That’s not very poeti- That Spicer dares his readers to cal, is it, in English. Now take and not take the Martians se- well we can take certain lib- riously is compounded by the fact erties, don’t translators al- that Spicer insists on poetic prac- ways, I mean take certain tice-as-Martian dictation for the liberties in order to maintain sake of reneging his own writerly the beauty of it and the mean- self- signifi cance. We have here ing at the same time. For a version of Cocteau’s Orpheus example, we could say instead awaiting a radio signal—Samuel of saying “in the middle” we Delaney meets T. S. Eliot’s poetic could say “midway,” and in- impersonality.11 Such self-abdica- stead of saying “of the road,” tion is complicated not only by the we could say “along the inimitability of Spicer’s presence pathway.” Don’t you think in these poems—affectively, intel- that sounds better?12 lectually, corpulently, erotically, etc.—but likewise by the inimita- Draper’s dilettante is a lovable bility of Spicer’s mythology of nut, and loving her is different self-abdication. Impersonality- from loving Draper doing the nut. as-transmittability doesn’t oppose What matters, in this context, is personality so much as become the way in which Draper was fa- personality unto itself. An analog mous for being other people, and would be the famous “transmis- that the funniness of her mono- sions” and impersonations of Ruth logues arises as much from the en- Draper. I have never heard Ruth actment of verisimilitude as from Draper’s voice, per se, but I’ve absurdity itself. Draper channels heard her voices. Most indelible someone channeling Dante erro- for me is Draper’s monologue, neously, and this meticulous 496 M. D. SNEDIKER

enactment of meticulous and ex- The voice sounds blond and travagant erroneousness (“Don’t tall. you think that sounds better?”) il- “I’m Barnacle Bill. I sank luminates one aspect of Spicer’s with the Titanic. I rose in own project—to return to earlier salty heaven.” terms, the necessary collision of The voice sounds blond, charisma and failure, or failure, sounds tall, sounds blond lovingly rendered, as its own char- and tall. ismatic allure. As Spicer writes, in his own “loose” translation of the (27) Inferno, As with Ruth Draper, I gravitate Dante would have blamed toward a version of Spicer who Beatrice slips away, even as that slippage is If she turned up alive in a signature,14 and inseparable from local bordello the sense that one is close enough Or Newton gravity to smell his breath. Poetry as inti- If apples fell upward macy of effl uvium. Each ventrilo- What I mean is words quization in the preceding lines Turn mysteriously against only nominally removes us from those who use them Spicer. The very terms of the Hello says the apple channelings characterize Spicer Both of us were object. far more than they do Eve, Min- nie, or Bill. And each conjuring, (“Sheep Trails Are Fateful like a tall glass of water, sounds to Strangers,” 257)13 blond. Spicer, especially in the glory days of Berkeley, was in his Or as Spicer wrote years earlier, in own fashion a tall blond. But is “Imaginary Elegies” (1960), Spicer losing himself to his own voice, or losing himself in the It is as if we conjure the dead voices of others; or some combina- and they speak only tion of the two? Vocal dissipation Through our damned trum- grounds itself in the voice of some pets, through our damned hunkier tall blond man (we’re medium: talking blond, after all, not “I am little Eva, a Negro prin- blonde), both effecting self-loss cess from sunny heaven.” and somehow conducting an The voice sounds blond and austere conduit to an object of tall. hypothetical desire: “blond and “I am Aunt Minnie. Love is tall” as distillation of amorous ob- sweet as moonlight here ject, reduction of person to the in heaven.” statistical (not even, as they say, ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 497 the vital statistics), if only because or otherwise) is nonequivalent to the tall blond man is accessible imagining, as such. Spicer’s poetry only on the level of voice. And doesn’t afford a consoling proxy barely: as Spicer writes, “The sun for what beyond poetry is unavail- that shines so brightly on your lips able (e.g., a tall blond), but reca- has made you forget how to cast a pitulates a calligraphy of empirical shadow. We have been looking unavailability, staging the latter as for you on the insides of mirrors. the fate of both poet (curt, cranky) You might have given us great joy. and poet’s putative fantasy. That No, you are too tall for love” (53). Spicer so demonstratively circum- The pathos of anyone nearly be- scribes the fl ourishing utilities of ing anyone else circulates through- his medium countermands mod- out Spicer’s poems as both the ernism’s Make it New; and, con- occasion and stymieing of poetic trarily, asserts poetry as far less (which, apropos Spicer, is to say availing than it might be. Such an erotic) hopefulness: enterprise, in the end, is what makes Spicer’s poetics so counter- Eurydice could be anyone. Is intuitively availing, full of fl our- I suppose ish. That Spicer’s poetry restricts Anyone. rather than realizes (or perhaps That makes the poem harder. realizes restriction) importantly complicates Spicer’s biographically (60) chronicled interest in magic: for instance, Spicer’s abiding interest Harder as more diffi cult, as more in the tarot,15 or—as wonderfully durable, as more erect, as more un- collected in this new volume— bearable. One can’t have one with- Spicer’s “Poetry as Magic” (1957) out the others. The voice of a tall workshop questionnaires. Contra blond that arises, perhaps unex- apocrypha, Spicer is at best an am- pectedly, is any tall blond, and no bivalent believer in magic and, at tall blond, and in the vexed spirit his most movingly stern, a depo- of Spicer’s multitudes—both appo- nent of magic. The fi rst instance in site with and against Whitman’s Spicer’s poems of magic’s equivo- multitudes—it is this that makes cally charged unavailability ap- lasting poetry, which sustains what pears in “Some Notes on Whitman otherwise feels (for Spicer, for the for Allen Joyce” (1980): poems, for the reader) dangerously fugacious. He was reaching for a Here we come to one of Spicer’s world I can still remember. most disarming and thoroughgo- Sweet and painful. It is a ing poetic enterprises: that poetry’s world without magic and capacity for imagining (erotically without god. His ocean is 498 M. D. SNEDIKER

different from my ocean, then what? If poetry cannot, even his moon is different from in the manner of Cavafyesque my moon, his love (oh, God dissatisfaction, acquit its own erotic the loss) is different from pursuits, then what can poetry do? my love. (55) This is a question that Spicer’s work poses again and again. Magic emerges as that which is There is no magic in poetry. Po- needed in the postlapsarian, be- etry cannot produce a world that cause the fallen world, having doesn’t already exist. What would proved insufﬁ cient, needs some- seem deadening in other hands thing like smoke and mirrors, the is Spicer’s contrarian alchemy. variously disingenuous or mer- He trafﬁ cs in magic without sub- ciful inventiveness of hocus-pocus. scribing to it, as borne out in Spicer’s sense of magic’s compen- Spicer’s agnostic and often self- satoriness—a compensation immi- contradictory poems for and about nently jeopardized by its being Orpheus. The self-administered recognized as magic—argues agai- penuries of poetic possibility pro- nst the default of letting poetry duce an economy of scarcity no less accomplish more than persons de- dazzling. Spicer dazzles in the at- nuded of poetry might accomplish. tenuation of radius—even as the If we have fallen from Whitman’s serial poem, as imagined by Spicer, world, which didn’t need magic, irresolutely both repairs the atten- then it seems an act of honesty for uation and further extends it (how Spicer to imagine a poetry that to extend attenuation? a uniquely lacks both Whitman’s ebullience Spicerian question). What one does and the magic that could fake the within the attenuation is itself an former in ebullience’s absence. important question, raised in his Spicer, in this sense, is a realist, and poem, “A Book of Music” (1958), often it is from this realism that his in which the poem’s last image as- crankiness seeps. Spicer in some serts itself as both materiality and fundamental way doesn’t believe the impossibility, within poetry, of in poetry and that, again, makes that materiality on which poetic his poetry all the more transform- trope depends: ing. The bluntness of poetry de- limiting its own shortcomings, Coming at an end, the lovers grouchily effervescing at its Are exhausted like two swim- own self-imposed limits, circuits mers. Where throughout Spicer’s career. (The Did it end? There is no apogee of this disclaiming of magic telling. No love is is Spicer’s serial poem, Billy the Kid Like an ocean with the dizzy [1958].) If poetry can’t make the procession of the waves’ world more beautiful (it cannot), boundaries ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 499

From which two can emerge turns toward (and against) both exhausted, nor long goodbye the amorous and the poetic, even Like death. as the question withdraws into it- Coming at an end. Rather, I self: there is no telling, as refusal to would say, like a length answer as much as inability to an- Of coiled rope. swer. The frustration of the ques- Which does not disguise in tion continues in the negative the fi nal twists of its lengths constative, which specifi es both Its endings. that there is no love like an ocean But, you will say, we loved and that the experience or fact of And some parts of us loved “no love” is itself oceanic. What is And the rest of us will our subject? Coming or going? remain And where? As the poem corrects, Two persons. Yes, retracts, recapitulates its attempt Poetry ends like a rope. to understand a possible eluding of understanding, we realize that (178) from the outset we have been on the brink of ending. There is much to say about such a The eventual analogical prefer- poem. First, that Spicer can write ence for “a length / Of coiled rope” as gorgeous an aubade as any other over the “dizzy procession of the writer. Less hedged: that Spicer is waves’ boundaries” intimates that one of our greatest poets. The no love is graspable or utile. Or, de- poem is not a lover, nor is it two pending on how one reads, “No lovers, it is two lovers “coming at love is. . .”, that the absence of amo- an end,” the prepositional specifi c- rousness is graspable, potentially ity (“coming at an end,” versus useful. The two formulations are “coming to an end”) opening the related but nonequivalent. We are ending before the poem barely offered something that is graspable commences. only in the logic of the poem, a rope Is the coming a good thing painted by Magritte. This is to say (the exhaustion that follows eja- that materiality arises as the pathos culation) or a bad thing (the ex- of its own nonsustainability to the haustion that follows amorous extent that it was conjured at all. dissolution)? The poem doesn’t To put rope in the poem is to doom begin, so much as begin to end, as the rope to life on the other side of though “Coming at an end” impli- the looking-glass. The poem’s re- cates us in the poem’s own undo- treat and advance recall Marianne ing, in an iteration already aware Moore’s trickily magical disappear- of its half-life. Again, prepositional ances, as analyzed by John Emil specifi city (“Where / Did it end?” Vincent.16 Spicer “takes” disap- versus “how,” “why,” “when. . .”) pearance further (or elsewhere) in 500 M. D. SNEDIKER

“giving” the poem’s fi nal lines to but the poem does not make me an unspecifi ed “you.” Like Mozart’s cry. “A Book of Music,” however, requiem, one needs to listen care- nearly does. Which is to say that as fully for where Mozart’s line cedes, bastard, I’m the bartender, lining in death, to another hand. Or per- up Spicer’s shots. Which is to say, haps more like Poe’s game in The contra Spicer’s gothically infamous Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym last words, “my vocabulary did this (1838) (from which this uncoiling to me,” that I’m doing this to him. sea-poem surely learns): one is told We’re all doing “this” to “him,” be- that Poe’s voice stops and Pym’s ing hoodwinked, cozened, and co- begins, and we are asked less to be- erced into a poetics that is lieve in the fi ction of vocal shift sometimes brutal, sometimes an- than to consider why such a shift gry, sometimes rueful, as we are would matter. interpellated into these positions as The poem coils, uncoils, and as much as the poems self-interpel- with many Spicer poems, recoils late. Brutal and rueful, the against the vulnerability of its own possibility—following Whitman’s open voices. Just two poems later, revisions and Dickinson’s vari- in A Book of Music (1958) (a book of ants—of coexisting as both at the poems titled after the poem in same time. Contra Spicer’s sense of question), Spicer announces that a break in his poetry between the “Dante blew his nose / And his single lyric and the serial venture, nose came off in his hand.” A Book the awful generosity of this coexis- of Music most recoils from the sen- tence appears even in the fi rst poem sitivities of “A Book of Music” in of the collection, “Berkeley in Time its last lines: of Plague” (1957):

The bartender is not the Plague took us and the land United States from under us, Or the intellectual Rose like a boil, enclosing us Or the bartender within. He is every bastard that does We waited and the blue skies not cry writhed awhile When he reads this poem. Becoming black with death.

(181) Plague took us and the chairs from under us, I confess to being one of those bas- Stepped cautiously while en- tards who does not cry when I read tering the room this poem. The story of the bar- (We were discussing Yeats); it tender ﬂ inches, for me, in relation paused awhile to Spicer’s own relation to booze, Then smiled and made us die. ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 501

Plague took us, laughed and This poem speaks of prodigious reproportioned us, dying. We might well consider Swelled us to dizzy, unaccus- Spicer, beyond most poets of the tomed size. ilk, as a poet of prodigious dying. We died prodigiously; it hurt His poetry is prodigious in the fact awhile of its exuberantly ambivalent accu- But left a certain quiet in our mulation. And his poetry is that of eyes. the prodigal, the one who leaves, the one who errs, the one who re- (5) turns. The parable of the prodigal strips the gild from the myth of The poem’s title suggests not only a Orpheus. The prodigal son is Or- time of plague, but that time itself pheus without instrument, or to arrives as the poem’s plague, which transpose Spicer’s prodigality onto the poem’s Berkeley weathers (that that of Elizabeth Bishop, an Or- Spicer imagined himself as part of a pheus in pig-shit17—predicament Berkeley Renaissance already sug- of which suggests more than the gests the capacious weirdness, for Orphic, the particular unbearabili- Spicer, of aberrant temporalities). ties of Spicer’s commitments and The poem’s three quatrains do not retreats. Beyond which, even as we follow from each other chronologi- might imagine this new Spicer vol- cally, per se. One might speculate ume as a poet’s belated return, we that each quatrain produces the po- might likewise consider the extent etic predicament from a different to which Spicer is a poet who vantage, or that each quatrain re- leaves. His poems sometimes leave vises those preceding. Each qua- me with a punch in the gut, some- train begins with “Plague took us,” times with the sense of left-to- as though this unspecifi ed calamity be-desired (in all the idiom’s were the catalyst or theorem from underthought registers). But that which the experiment or proof this poetic leaves—aubade without were tested. Chronology would fi llip—speaks likewise to the diffi - rule out, for one, the movement be- culty of approaching Spicer. As tween second and third stanzas. elsewhere I have discussed, this is a The end of the second, “Then poetics no less attached to Eury- smiled and made us die,” echoes in dice’s aversion as it is to Orphic the third stanza’s “We died prodi- ambition. This poetic leave-taking giously.” The capacity to die several (I dare you), breaks its own heart, times within a given poem would and signals what in Spicer is un- indeed suggest prodigiousness, and matchable. I dare you to look, not it behooves us to think of prodi- to look. I dare you to search me out. gious dying in the context of Spicer’s searing work. —Queen’s University 502 M. D. SNEDIKER

NOTES excellent Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the Berkeley Renaissance (Middle- town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1. Said volume being Jack Spicer’s One 1998). Night Stand & Other Poems, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey 4. Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman’s Blue Fox Press, 1980). The exclusion of Book: The 1860–61 “Leaves of Grass” these poems from the 1975 Black Containing His Manuscript Additions Sparrow edition intends to honor and Revisions, ed. Arthur Golden Spicer’s own renunciation of these (New York: New York Public Library, “single,” lyric poems in favor of his 1968), 197. later production of serial poems. 5. Cf. Michael Moon, Disseminating Spicer’s renunciation appears in his Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in poem, “For Robin,” in his 1957 book, “Leaves of Grass” (Cambridge, MA: Admonitions, reprinted in the volume Harvard University Press, 1991). under review (155–68, quotation on 163). (All subsequent references to 6. R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture: Spicer’s poetry cited parenthetically in Essays in Poetry (London: George the text are to this volume.) This Allen & Unwin, 1954), 3. renunciation has been the subject of 7. Ibid., 4. much critical discussion. Daniel Katz 8. The version reprinted in the book imagines that Spicer’s own declaration under review is taken from the Jack and concomitant serial practice is Spicer Papers MSS 2004/209, Bancroft “rightly seen” as “turning points in Library, University of California, Spicer’s poetics.” Again, one of the Berkeley. virtues of Gizzi and Killian’s edition is its complication of this “turning 9. Blackmur, Language as Gesture, 21. point,” implicitly arguing for a 10. The lectures, available in neither this coherence across a poetic career that volume nor the Black Sparrow from the outset was internally at odds edition, are gathered in The House with itself. The turning point, while That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures on some level formally or biographi- of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi cally signiﬁ cant, oversimpliﬁ es (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Spicer’s poetic trajectory (Katz, “Jack University Press, 1998), 2. Spicer’s After Lorca: Translation as Decomposition,” Textual Practice 18, 11. From Jack Spicer, “Baseball Predic- no. 1 [2004]: 83–103, quotations on tions, April 1, 1964,” in Language 84). For a different problematization (1965), which is reprinted in the book of Spicer’s renunciation, see my under review (375–81): reading of Spicer alongside Leo Finally the messages penetrate Bersani (Queer Optimism: Lyric There is a corpse of an image— Personhood and Other Felicitous they penetrate Persuasions [Minneapolis: University The corpse of a radio. Cocteau of Minnesota Press, 2008], 126–67). used a car radio on account of no speed limit. In any case 2. Jack Spicer, “The Poet and Poetry—A the messages penetrate the Symposium” (1949), in One Night radio and render it (and the Stand and Other Poems, with a radio) ultimately useless. preface by Robert Duncan, ed. Prayer Donald Allen (San Francisco: Is exactly that Grey Fox Press, 1980), 90–92, The kneeling radio down to the quotation on 92. tomb of some saint 3. For an account of Spicer’s relation to Uselessness sung and danced Berkeley and San Francisco, see Lewis (the radio dead but alive it can Ellingham and Kevin Killian’s connect things ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 503

Into sound. Their prayer . . . Dante Its only connection. Was the fi rst writer of science- fi ction. Beatrice (376) Shimmering in infi nite space. Spicer’s delight in baseball throws a (411) spanner in the presumed cathexes of gay poets. I don’t like baseball, but I, I 14. From Jack Spicer, “Chapter III/What think, like Spicer, am engrossed by the the Dead Letters Said” (in the book idea of a diamond around which The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether players play, for stakes at once [1962], reprinted in the volume under enormous and magnifi cently nugatory. review [249–313]): The honoring of a game’s rules as point “Dear X, of departure for watching what I love you more than anyone happens in the diamond’s limbo could ever do. suggests a version of Frost’s apocryphal signed tennis net. But different, if only Y” because Frost’s tennis imagines one-on-one, whereas Spicer’s baseball, in the manner of Charles Fourier, . . . “. . . Yes, Virginia, there is a welcomes not only a collectivity postoffi ce.” adherent to shared rules (and likewise . . . “. . . I’m going to go home wishing sneakily to break them), but and eat rose-petals.” an audience for those adherences and disjuncts, the baseball stadium as . . . “. . . It has all been antici pa- Greek theater. Home plate, for Spicer ted, there isn’t any more for and Marianne Moore alike (two poets you to do.” whose love of “the game” throws a curveball into any vocabulary of “Dearest Y,” poetic meticulousness), suggests for Moore more than Spicer a glee in (282) contingency. In Spicer, on the other hand, home plate suggests a glee in the As with Draper, we fi nd in Spicer inexorable (cf. Euripides) rendered both the channel and the channeler, both vernacular and mutably audience reduction of communication to friendly. The gorgeousness of men in variables (contingency of radio signal), tight white pants, compelled to occupy the absurdity of transcription rendered geometry, itself might further exculpable in the factitiousness of this is complicate our sense of Spicer’s someone else altogether. notion of poem-as-inhabitability, 15. See Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and John of the homer. Granger, “A Plan for a Book on Tarot,” 12. Ruth Draper, Ruth Draper and boundary 2 6, no. 1 (1977): 24–29. Her Company of Characters: 16. John Emil Vincent, Queer Lyrics: Selected Monologues, 2 vols., 4 CDs Diffi culty and Closure in American (Seattle, WA: Acme Content Poetry (New York: Palgrave Mac- Company, 2000), available at http://ssl. millan, 2002), esp. 89–120. adhost.com/drapermonologues/ store.html. 17. From the fi rst stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Prodigal” (in 13. From Jack Spicer, “Four Poems for Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, Ramparts,” in Book of Magazine Verse 1927–1979 [New York: Farrar, Straus, (1965), which is reprinted in the Giroux, 1980], 71): volume under review (“Four Poems,” 411–13; Book of Magazine Verse, The brown enormous odor he 403–26): lived by 504 M. D. SNEDIKER

was too close, with its breathing and thick hair, for him to judge. The ﬂ oor was rotten: the sty was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung. Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts, The pigs’ eyes followed him, a cheerful stare— even to the sow that always ate her young— till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head. But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts (he hid the pints behind a two- by-four), the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red; And then he thought he almost might endure his exile yet another year or more.