Jack Spicer on poetry: "Time to change spooks!"

I found this passage from Jack Spicer's Letters to James Alexander (1958-59) rather wonderful and wanted to share it:

"I don't like my poetry either. I read a new poem last Wednesday and nobody said much of anything and I asked why and Duncan said it was because it was a very good Jack Spicer poem and I threw the poem in the garbage sack not tearing the poem because it was a very good Jack Spicer poem. The watch was ticking on my wrist all the time and was not a Jack Spicer wristwatch and would never be a Jack Spicer wristwatch and that should be the way with the poems.

It's rather like a medium (a real medium) who gets a spirit, call her Little Eva, to control her. Pretty soon, after a few sessions, she'll get to know what Little Eva is going to say and start saying it for her. Then it's no longer a seance but fakery and time to change spooks.

That's what your watch tells me. TIME TO CHANGE SPOOKS!"

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: Collected Poems of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan UP, 2008), second selection

from A Birthday Poem for Jim (and James) Alexander (1959):


I can't describe good
But once tried to in a poem about a starfish
Or your watery eyes
Seeing nothing but what they told you.

*

Poetry seeks occasion. In a man's life
There is May, June, December, birthdays, nothing else really matters.
(I don't understand why I omitted October. Poetry seeks occasions.
        In a man's life
There are birthdays.)

*

You have hours
There are 
To use them. Choose your
Cake.


from within the same collection, a couple passages from "Imaginary Elegies V":


Another wrong turning
Another five years.

*

                                                     But the birds are real
     not only in feeding. I think
Their wings. Glittering in the black ab / sense. 


from Helen: A Revision (1960):


Nothing is known about Helen but her voice
Strange glittering sparks
Lighting no fires but what is reechoed
Rechorded, set on the icy sea.

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan UP, 2008), first selection

Below are some of my favourite passages from the first and third section of the book, "Berkeley Renaissance (1945-1950)" and "Berkeley/San Francisco (1952-1955)." Thanks to editors Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian for their splendid work.


We died prodigiously; it hurt awhile
But left a certain quiet in our eyes.

last lines of "Berkeley in a Time of Plague"

                                                                                The waves

Curved and unspent like cautious scythes, like evening harvesters.

*

                             Deep in my mind there is an ocean

I would fall within it, find my sources in it. Yield to tide

And find my sources in it. Aching fathoms fall

And rest within it.

from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Landscape"

 

 

 

Heart is so monstrous naked that the world recoils,

Shakes like a ladder,

Spits like a cat,

Disappears.

from "A Night in Four Parts"

When he first brought his music into hell

He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the shapeless fires

And the jukebox groaning of the damned

Some of them would hear him.

opening lines of "Orpheus in Hell"

The temporary tempts poetry

Tempts photographs, tempts eyes.

from "Imaginary Elegies"

Shouting song

Until the hunters came.

I was a singer once, bird-ignorant.

from "A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance"

The dummies in the empty funhouse watch

The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon

Shines through the rotten timbers every night.

This much is clear, they think, the men who made

Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats

Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.

*

Upon the old amusement pier I watch

The creeping darkness gather in the west.

Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts

I hear the seagulls call. They're going west

Toward some great Catalina of a dream

Out where the poem ends.

from "Imaginary Elegies"

I'm pleased to say Foyle's has both hardback and paperback editions of My Vocabulary Did This to Me available at a good discount.