Criticism

Volume 57 | Issue 3 Article 9

2015 Imagine This As Lyric Poetry Sarah Ruddy Wayne State University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Ruddy, Sarah. Imagine This as Lyric Poetry [Book Review]. Criticism, vol. 57, no. 3, 2015, pp. 503-509. doi: 10.13110/ criticism.57.3.0503 IMAGINE THIS AS For you I would build a whole new universe but LYRIC POETRY you obviously find it Sarah Ruddy cheaper to rent one. Eurydice did too. After Spicer: Critical Essays She went back to hell edited by John Emil Vincent. unsure of Middletown, CT: Wesleyan what other house Orpheus University Press, 2011. Pp. 240. would build. “I call it $80.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. death-in-life and life- in-death.” Shot In the back by an arrow President Kennedy seemed to stiffen for a moment before he assumed his place in history. Eros Do that. I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly ground. Jack Spicer, “Love Poems” (1963)1

“My vocabulary did this to me,” the oft-quoted “last words” of Jack Spicer, first reported by and certainly to some extent apocryphal, is an ending that is also usefully a beginning, posing the problem of defining a poetics after Spicer. Even as he wrote “The Practice of Outside” in and around 1975, Blaser seemed to recognize and anticipate the limiting pow- ers his essay would have on future Spicer criticism and named what

Criticism Summer 2015, Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 503–509. ISSN 0011-1589. 503 © 2016 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 504 Sarah Ruddy the dual and often contradictory Spicer’s language, through the strands of that criticism might look ’s self-erasure of lyric identity like: “At first this essay was short and systems of meaning, to the and simple—about Jack. But that ever-disappearing word. became a reduction which every Vincent’s introduction sets read- twist and turn of the work denied— ers on a path through the three a biography without the world the sections of text that make up this poet earned or a split between the collection of critical essays by untan- man and the work which drank gling some of Spicer’s more gnarly him up and left him behind” (3). personal and poetic knots and then Due in large part to the limited retying others for the reader to availability—and difficulty—of solve. The first part of the collec- Spicer’s body of work, criticism of tion is made up of essays that use the poet has been mired in lore, and newly available archival materials the phrase “my vocabulary did this to create a critical space wherein to me” has come to name that lore. readers can examine the “vexed What we have left behind is exactly and opaque” relationship between what Blaser recognized: “the world Spicer’s social and academic com- the poet earned.” mitments and his texts and poetic Recent collections like After practices (12). Vincent proposes this Spicer, edited by John Emil as the first necessary step toward a Vincent, have attempted to address Spicer criticism that attends to his the need for a new Spicer criticism. poetics in language, since this space The foregoing verse is quoted in opens up for readers a “distance Anita Sokolsky’s essay “Character between the poet and the poetry” Assassination in the Poetry of necessary “in order to let the poetry Jack Spicer,” which is included do its work” (12). After Spicer and which poses and Yet, this reading is still “deeply attempts to answer the truly cen- imbued with the biographical” tral, even inaugural, questions that until Vincent takes the important the volume seeks to address: “But next step of citing Spicer’s for- in the name of what is his work mal contrariness, his devotion to invested in destroying lyric iden- “uncomfortable music” (2). The tity? To what end does it appear second group of essays moves for- increasingly to foreground a notion ward within the space created by of language as a self-implementing the first to introduce relatively new system?” (195). Thus, the “new” critical practices to Spicer’s body era of Spicer criticism that Vincent of work as a whole, approaching proposes is the era of the runcible his poetics from the “impossible,” mountain—one in which readers “invisible,” and “difficult” orienta- and critics work backward from tions of, for example, recent queer ON AFTER SPICER 505 theory. Later, Vincent notes that “Runcible” is a nonsense word and the poems—the work that critics Spicer’s capitalization of it marks and readers are led back to—were it as a name that is attached to the often “read as explanatory” and mountain, a misheard “sense” that “transparent” (4), returning us to pulls the poetic landscape back what vocabulary did to Spicer. The into its own made-ness. The run- third grouping of essays investi- cible mountain is the site where gates works and practices at the language reclaims images and tra- inside of that vocabulary in order to dition, sweeping them back into a rethink authorship, agency, and the negativity that after all we still only complications of using a lyric iden- have language to tell about—hence, tity. Turning for support to a 1987 the widespread use of dis-closure as essay by Burton Hatlen, Vincent a way of narrating critical activity. then addresses the primary con- This is, of course, what makes writ- cern of the collection: “For a poet ing about Spicer so difficult: this whose greatest and strongest com- struggle to use the same language mentary was about how ‘language that undoes language to come back turns against those who use it,’ it is to language. Blaser was trying to strange that Spicer is so often and find a way to talk about every- so fervently taken as if his directives thing that disappears when both weren’t also, as Hatlen insists they poetry and the poet are unmoored must be read, in language” (9). by language from any origins in the In language is itself a difficult image, vision, or intention. demand, especially when language ’s “Spicer and the so actively resists the will of its Mattachine” begins to consider the users, the self-erasure of the run- question of how “we” have found cible mountain: ourselves in Spicer’s near-total tex- tualization. Using newly available We shall clear the trees documents from the Mattachine back, the lumber of our Society’s archive, Killian traces pasts and futures Spicer’s “counterintuitive” involve- back, because we are on a ment with direct political action diamond, because it is during the spring and summer of our diamond 1953 (16). In materials as quotidian Pushed forward from. as meeting minutes and memos, we And our city shall stand see Spicer recording the ways that as the lumber rots and self, community, and the politi- Runcible mountain cal being exist in language, first crumbles, and the ocean, by becoming language objects and eating all of the islands, then by being tied (Spicer would comes to meet us.2 later used the term fix here, and not 506 Sarah Ruddy happily) to opposing radical notions “No human being should have of gay identity (18–19). Killian also to be a lightning rod,” writes Maria addresses Spicer’s attempt to give Damon in her essay “Jack Spicer’s the group an alternative name; the Ghost Forms,” a piece that simi- work that the poet put into propos- larly addresses the complications ing “Tercellan” shows him engaged of a self that resides in language in the process of using language to by considering­ this existence in separate name from meaning, a ges- terms of the double consciousness ture that would later figure promi- of “gay identity,” both “empowered nently in his poetics, most notably by community and embarrassed to in major works like Heads of the be taking up space” (148). There Town Up to the Aether (1962): “We is here, as in Killian’s piece, no may read Tercellan as a name that simple one-to-one correspondence might signify nearly everything between Spicer’s sexuality and his (to the observant) or nothing (to poetics. Damon connects the way the police); it’s a name emblematic Spicer situates himself within his of its era, of bad faith, of slippery “historical circumstance” to “the cold-war second guessing” (20). notion of vestige, whose deriva- How Killian gently reorients read- tion from vestigium—footprint— ers from documents back to inten- implies a negative space which tional texts suggests that Spicer, in asserts an absent presence, some- his application of language to the thing or someone who has come Mattachine’s activities during his and gone, leaving a trace of writ- months of involvement, was look- ing” (138). Spicer designates the ing to this language not as a way coexistence of different ways of to represent “gay identity,” but as being through a series of present a way to reconstruct the category contingent linguistic disclosures of identity itself. So while it may at correspondent to the absence and first seem odd to leave the question vestigial reappearance of the lyric of the effect of Spicer’s involvement self in his poems. Damon revisits with the Mattachine on his poetry her own work on Spicer over the until the end of the essay, the result course of a decade to question the is that Killian requires the reader “problematic and ahistorical . . . to perform the most difficult work belief that it is noble or even possible of the essay herself. That is, we to escape into the freedom of pure must come face to face with the language” (147). All of this seems to knot Spicer tied around the lyric enact Michael Davidson’s thoughts self without recourse to the tempt- on the “ontology of absence” in ing abstraction of Spicer’s opposed Spicer’s poetics, and in the end notions of “nationalism” and “local- Damon’s essay brings us back to ism” or “regionalism” (31–32). its own, now ghostly and doubled, ON AFTER SPICER 507 uncanny, opening pages: “‘It’—the always first an act of faith, and it ghost, vestigial form, the evidence is in this profane illumination, this that has been dragged off the scene radically negative moment of insuf- leaving its tracks and lines in the ficiency, that we can begin to detect surface dirt of cultural history . . . the contours of Spicer’s “outside.” It [I]t is the body of already available is in this absence that the poet must poetry on which any poet’s work “be like God” and “consume him­ feeds—that is, it is The Tradition or self through poetry” in such a way Traditions—which both exist and that living true to poetry becomes a do not” (139). Catherine Imbroglio, kind of grace (163): “In our search in “‘Impossible Audiences’: for God, however, all we have is Camp, the Orphic, and Art as language” (166). The essay strives, Entertainment in Jack Spicer’s finally, to truly come after Spicer, Poetry,” calls this the “principal not trying to anticipate his tricks or Orphic paradox” in Spicer’s work: second guess the intentions of some “[T]hat it is through language that kind of hidden “I” within his lan- we represent the way the world guage. The intolerable act and the eludes us in language” (121). Camp insufficiency of language provide acts within the tyranny of systems only “a conclusion at which Spicer as an agent of negativity and “inces- could never arrive” (172). sant rearticulation” (102). Tradition is necessary and intol- The ontology of absence seems erable in Sokolsky’s essay, where also to haunt Norman Finkelstein’s we see Spicer establishing it in the essay, which directly follows “subtle violence” of character assas- Damon’s. In “Spicer’s Reason to sination (197). The essay urges read- ‘Be-/Leave,’” Finkelstein looks ers to look forward from Spicer’s to Spicer’s antinomianism as the knotty relationships with both pres- expression of “the dialectical ten- ent and absent figures toward the sion between poetry and religious designation as a progenitor of lan- faith that unfolds in his writ- guage poetry that would come after. ing” (157). At the same time that In this context, Sokolsky sets out to Spicer’s antinomianism places him trace the “vicissitudes of the figu- in a tradition of American poetics rative structure of character assas- that privileges the immediacy of sination” (196), a course through revelation, his commitment to the the integrity and treachery of “the irredeemable fallenness of a world evacuation of meaning” (200), to created by language makes every the initiation of the “dissolution poetic act “an intolerable act of bad of the ‘thingness’ of . . . political faith” (160). Finkelstein seems to crisis, a process on which the state lead readers ever back to the contra- of poetry seems to depend” (203). diction that an act of bad faith is still The essay is as illuminating as any 508 Sarah Ruddy written to date on Spicer’s poetic Michael Snediker, in his essay practice and the subtle violence of “Jack Spicer’s Billy the Kid: Beyond his creation of tradition through the Singular Personal,” reads the erasure; the scope of the argument serial poem as “the pleasures and extends from the level of language’s aggressions (and consolations) of own self-erasure on the very page in love, stretched across time” (182). the “odd verb form that makes the Does seriality, as Vincent poses in line ‘Eros/Do that’ an imperative,” his introduction, evacuate or recu- through to the total destruction of perate the lyric subject? Or is the the poetic personality (206). “For opposition not quite that simple? Spicer,” Sokolsky writes, “political Snediker resituates the serial poem, cataclysm leads to a recalibration of by way of its affective resonances, syntax which registers as a renewed in negative relation to the city we mobility of meanings that is itself a create in our bar talk: “Not a sin- mode of tactical aggression” (204). gle one-night stand, nor a prolif- This is assassination in the service eration of one-night stands, but the of lyric catachresis or otherwise proliferation of nights (and days) “unimaginable continuance” (11): held together by the resonances the imperative “Eros/Do that” that between them: which is also to say, at once falls apart and is also the held together by the angers and love that will let you go on. Now, frustrations unique to those par- imagine this as language poetry. ticular resonances” (183). Vincent’s Where the essays in this col- own contribution, “Pinnacle of No lection occasionally stumble is by Explanation,” interrogates Spicer’s trying to overcome Spicer’s nega- allegedly unfinished detective novel tivity. In Kelly Holt’s “Spicer’s as materializations of what Spicer Poetic Correspondence: ‘A Pun famously called “our fuss and fury the Letter Reflects,’” for example, at each other.” The novel’s mys- I parted ways with the author over tery, Vincent proposes, and in so her positivization of the idea of doing provides readers with a fresh tradition, as expressed in Spicer’s critical approach to the poetry that first letter to Lorca, as “never really came after, “is this: that a monadic losing anything” (50). I found her substance—fictionality, story—can essay tightly thought and insight- split like a blob or mercury, do vio- ful, yet when Spicer states “tradi- lence to itself, the settle back into a tion means much more than that,” single substance” (83). he is not offering a corrective, or a What does it mean, finally, after vision of what tradition should be. all this, for criticism to come After He is recognizing the enormous Spicer? Vincent proposes a Spicer scope of the dead forms that have criticism freed from the lore of managed to redefine “invention.” the deathbed and the bars: “His ON AFTER SPICER 509 last words must shed the simple make-believe bed.” As Finkelstein ­deictics of a death narrative . . . ‘My reminds readers, Spicer’s “under- vocabulary did this to me’—and standing that ‘The real poetry is led you, reader, after his death, to beyond us’ . . . can never be put his poems” (12). Yet here, Vincent aside or unlearned” (168). It is our denies Spicer’s existence in lan­ own struggle with living in lan- guage when he ignores the poet’s guage to which we have gone on. final directive in favor of a more facile transparency, indeed the Sarah Ruddy received her doctorate from simple deictics of a death narrative, Wayne State University in 2012. Her dissertation focused on the literary fact as to describe Spicer’s poetic practice. the intersection of documentary evidence Jack Spicer’s actual last words, and experimental forms. Sarah lives in according to Blaser’s account, were Limestone, Maine, where she teaches at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, “Your love will let you go on.” part time at the University of Maine, and The collection closes with works as a consulting producer on documen­ Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s tary film and media projects. collaboratively authored “Spiced Language,” a multivocal but also crucially metapoetic occupation of NOTES the runcible mountain. Perhaps 1. Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to what is truly After Spicer, what Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. we go on to, through the knots and Kevin Killian, Wesleyan and double crosses and the run- Poetry Series (Middletown, CT: cible mountain and the Broadway Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 386. Tunnel, with our love is the irre- 2. Ibid., 417. sistibly unknowable (8)—what Ted Berrigan called “the grace of the