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 Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism 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 of- fered 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.

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