Against the orgy of
unrelievably bad public poetry commemorating the first anniversary of the
September 11th attacks, I had the occasion to read Allen Curnow’s “A
Framed Photograph” from his 1972 serial poem Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, in which the assassinations of the
brothers Kennedy is posed against the consequences of their own actions
elsewhere in the world, as in this stanza:
Act
one, scene one
of
the bloody melodrama. Everyone listened
while
everyone read their poems. BANG! BANG!
and
we cried all the way to My Lai.
Which in turn brought me
back to the poems concerning JFK’s assassination that were written by Jack
Spicer and Louis Zukofsky and beyond that, the anti-Vietnam War poems by Robert
Duncan and Allen Ginsberg. While none of these were explicitly written for
“command performance” occasions, all show the range of what might be possible
within this genre that I might characterize as shared public emotion – from the
most personal (Zukofsky’s “A”-23) to the most declamatory (Ginsberg’s “Wichita
Vortex Sutra, Part II” or Duncan’s “The Fire, Passages 13”).
Spicer’s JFK poem appears in
Language:
Smoke signals
Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the
earthquake hit
Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them
On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be
insane.
This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.
Spicer’s poem replicates the
process of grieving in the way that grief turns everything, no matter how
remote – here a description of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake – into a commentary
on its obsessive object. It’s no coincidence that two phrases – “Smoke signals”
and “Bang, snap, crack” – apply equally to the devastation in Anchorage &
the shots ringing out over Elm Street in Dallas.
Spicer’s ambivalence over
public language is on record. His very last poem, concluding Book of Magazine Verse, takes an unnamed
Ginsberg to task for allowing himself to be chosen Kraj Majales in a Prague May Day celebration. One poem earlier,
Spicer makes the claim that
They’ve (the leaders of our country) have become
involved in a network of lies.
We (the poets) have also become in network of lies by
opposing them.*
It’s a position that Spicer
knows is untenable. Indeed, irresolvable conflict is the primary Spicerian
theme. Spicer himself wrote obliquely about the Vietnam War earlier in that same
book. And the final poem to Ginsberg concedes that “we both know how shitty the
world is,” refusing to place Spicer above the very same behavior he is about to
criticize. Yet, while it is possible to argue that, at least in Magazine Verse, Spicer chooses
individual human relations over social ones (which thus would be the point of
his announced solidarity with the Prague police rather than the
counter-cultural demonstrators with whom Ginsberg was parading), the JFK poem
clearly places Spicer on the other side of that line. This is ambivalence in
the most literal sense.
All of this harkens back to
Wordsworthian homilies concerning emotion recollected in tranquility when
tranquility is precisely what is lacking if the poem is to be taken as a
possible transcript of consciousness (as Wordsworth himself does in the
Crossing the Alps section of The Prelude),
a category that is as inclusive of emotion as it is of thought. Add to this the
impulse to “even out” rough edges until the product shines with that glazed
state of crockery called the well-wrought urn** and you have a prescription for
literary disaster of titanic – and Titanic
– proportions.
*I have
always wondered whether to assign the “missing” words in that second line to
Spicer’s alcoholism, which would kill him only weeks after this was written, or
if in fact the absence of “involved” in particular signaled a deeper level of
meaning.
** See my
comments for September 5.
