JACK SPICER’S NAKED DIGNITY
David Hackbridge Johnson
(scroll to the bottom of the page to find older posts about
Lee Harwood, Frances Cornford, Iain Sinclair, etc.)
As many
as half the collected poems of Jack Spicer can be struck through. Anything that mentions the phrase ‘my poems',
or talks about the poet as some kind of self-appointed exalted being, or stares
at its own poetic navel, is out.
Anything that smells of faux-visionary alcoholic rambling can also go,
on grounds that any appeals to poetic technique disappeared at the bottom of
the first bottle of brandy. People who
claim otherwise are as deluded as those who think Charlie Parker was at his
best when drooling on dope. Jack Spicer
as outsider poet recognizes that no one gives a flying fig for his poetry, yet
he does so with such a pleading, almost wheedling victimhood, that methinks the
poet protests too much. His disdain for
his audience is palpable, as if he would rather hurl poems as insults rather
than as invitations. I have a sneaking admiration for this last
aspect of his persona – the equivalent of Miles Davis turning up an hour late,
playing with his back to the audience and getting his trumpet caught in the
tassels of his cowboy jacket. Spicer didn't
need the apparel of a cowhand – his most effective and contemptuous performative
gambit was to fumble his way through poems whilst trying to light a cigarette
in the dark. This is willed incompetence
– a disingenuous appeal is being made to a patient audience that laughs nervously
or hides its irritation out of respect to whoever holds the conch. There is an inward regard in Spicer whose
only audience is the self – it is as if Spicer never reached that state where,
in the words of Robin Blaser, his friend and one-time mentor, ‘the I consumes
itself’.[1] Spicer’s ‘I’ is sickeningly healthy. Out to, go poems of a lukewarm surrealism that
merely add a veneer of silliness to that already tenuous project, a project in
any case done and dusted whilst Jack Spicer was still in diapers.
The
much-vaunted theory, concocted by Robert Duncan, that poems are not separate
entities but form parts of a vast continuum, or what Blaser calls a carmen perpetuum,[2]
are only borne out by the fact of saying so – I find very little in the late
sequences of Spicer that would constitute them being taken as one large
poem. In making such a claim, Spicer
devalues the perfect lyricism of many individual poems. The alarmingly beautiful eclat of his lyric mode is often swamped by other poems that seem
thrown off like the discarding of a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. He didn't know it at the time but he was
giving birth to Charles Bukowski. In his
best work, Spicer veers between the pellucid imagery of Lorine Niedecker and
the pithy triads of William Carlos Williams.
He thinks, not without at least some justification, that he is an heir
to Rimbaud and Lorca. He is able to
sound an appeal to the Ancient that reminds one of Hilda Doolittle.
In several ways Jack Spicer the man would appear to have been a figure as much tormentor as tormented – there is at least one poem of a grievous misogyny – the one that begins, ‘People who don't like the smell of faggot vomit / Will never understand why men don't like women’[3] – that offended Denise Levertov and spurred her to a spirited riposte, and a similar prejudice can be found in his letters. Likewise with Jews – they get a mention as types rather than persons. It could be argued that Spicer wishes to deny his own individuality by classifying himself by type, as an homosexual. In an important passage he denies humanity to such groups on the basis that they are made to feel inhuman by society: ‘Somebody tells me that these people are human. That's silly. They are not human they are homosexual. Jews are not human either, nor Negroes, nor cripples. No one is human that doesn't feel human. None of us here feel human.’[4] While it is easy to see the validity of this statement, it is hardly a get-out clause for his prejudices.
Spicer didn't appear to be able to hold down a job for very long. Was he perpetually drunk? Were his students treated to incoherent ramblings in the manner of Charles Olson, ramblings now taken as prophetic utterings from a warped gospel? There is certainly a ‘poetry of incoherence’ and whilst it is far too easy to wrap this type of writing up in the catch-all of a feebly-politicized anarchy, what it does tell of is the genuine torment of individuals in the prison of their experiences and in the misfiring synapses of their brains.
If Jack Spicer lacks the technical and incisive surety of Robert Creeley, has none of the charm of Allen Ginsberg or Frank O'Hara, and none of the consolidated political message of Levertov, he can't be easily dismissed as a Sunday afternoon William Blake, singing off-key with San Francisco angels. Any anthologist of American poetry of the last 70 years must surely be compelled to include a dozen of Jack Spicer’s finest lyrics – those in which he draws on the power of his true predecessor, Hart Crane. We can't really live without lines such as, ‘In the White endlessness / Snow, seaweed, and salt / He lost his imagination’.[5] Or, ‘My shadow moves silently / Upon the water in the ditch’.[6] Or, ‘Oh there are waves where the heart beats fully / Where the blood wanders / Alive like some black sea fish’.[7] Or this quotation from a poem that is beautiful despite mentioning poems and poets, ‘Dignity is a part of a man being naked before / everybody. The part where the heart separates itself / from the loins. / The poet is stepping out of the airplane. / Dignity is a part of a rose in a broken / vase. The part where the thorns separate / themselves from the flower / The poet is stepping out of the airplane / Dignity is part of not being asked.’[8]
Jack Spicer only published a few slim
volumes in his lifetime. I don't know
whether he expected his entire oeuvre to be corralled into the huge volumes
produced so beautifully by the Wesleyan University Press. As befits his character, he seemed to want
nothing to do with major publishing houses or the exigencies of contracts and
copyright. He wasn't interested in
safeguarding the tribulations of his Muse against financial or mental
hardship. There is an emergent fragility
to his work that for this reader has a strength by default – an armouring of
the soul against a disintegrating personality at odds with the world and
itself. Spicer is indeed stripped naked
as a poet but his confessionalism is somehow not quite designed to elicit the
sympathy of bleeding hearts – he repels as he attracts – it is rather the
emblem of his existence. Poets shouldn't
stand or fall on their weaker works – this is not to discredit the editors of
the collected poetry who have felt the necessity to include nearly everything, it
is rather that in giving the fullest picture of the man, we can find a context for
his greatest works, where the poetic inspiration is undimmed by the tragedies
assailing it.
[1]
Robin Blaser, The Holy Forest, ed. Miriam Nichols, University of California Press, p. 89.
[2]
Ibid. p. xx.
[3]
Jack Spicer, The Collected Poetry of Jack
Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, Wesleyan University Press, p. 164.
[4]
Ibid. p. xix
[5]
Ibid. p. 109.
[6]
Ibid. p.112.
[7]
Ibid. p. 158.
[8]
Ibid. p. 233.