Yesterday I posed the question of time on literary formation in terms of how individuals inevitably position themselves differently as external circumstances change. Today I want to turn that question around. As I suggested in an email recently, maybe the question shouldn’t be what the role is of Jack Spicer as an influence on, say, Brian Kim Stefans, but what is the role of Stefans as an influence on Jack Spicer? Influencing the dead is just the sort of topic I’d expect Spicer to get jiggy with.

 

Let’s look again at Spicer’s 1958 constellation, with it’s inner quadrant of “Robin/Duncan/X/To be found,” surrounded left & right by six intermediary boxes: Pound, Cocteau, Dada, Vachael (sic) Lindsay, Yeats & Lorca, then an outer ring containing (Josephine) “Miles, Untermeyer’s Anthology, The English Dept., The Place.” Since 1958, the gay rights movement – a phenomenon traced by many back to the Stonewall riots of 1969, four years after Spicer’s death* -- has recast the reception & reputation of many artists, Cocteau & Lorca among them. Pound was released from St. Elizabeth’s & returned to Italy where the Cantos finally drizzled to an end as he did. Subsequently, his reputation has seen more downs than ups as scholars finally began to discuss the implication of his fascism more openly. Dada’s edginess has become far less edgy after 44 years of happenings, Fluxus, conceptual art, Burning Man festivals & the like. Many of Untermeyer’s anthologies are out of print – the most recent edition I can find of Modern American Poetry, first published in 1919, dates from 1962. Most of the Untermeyer books that remain in print appear to be the “gift edition” variety with the exception of his work as a Frost scholar.

 

The reputations of both Lindsay & Miles have also receded in the past four decades, though not necessarily for good reason. It’s worth noting that Spicer doesn’t place either in that special version of Hades he dubs the “English Dept.,“ although in Miles’ case that is literally where Spicer found her, the first tenured woman in the University of California English Department.

 

Conversely, the one box in Spicer’s constellation that has increased in reputation since 1958 is the furthest pole from the English Dept., The Place, a North Beach tavern frequented by the Beats. But what we understand today by & as “the Beats” is itself a far cry from its public face four-plus decades ago.

 

In sum, Yeats might be the sole star in Spicer’s figurative heaven not to have undergone some form of radical redefinition in 44 years. As with Dada, much of it has to do with what else is there around to read & compare. New works appear, others go out of print, some old works & writers (viz. the Objectivists) suddenly turn up in print all over again, but this time around to critical applause. Or not.

 

This is where Brian Kim Stefans comes in. Stefans’ détournements – literally “recyclings” – of the New York Times, in which language from French Situationist Raoul Vaneigem is inserted into pieces that otherwise appear to be straightforward New York Times articles on international affairs plays with the social context of America’s “paper of record”** in ways not unrelated to Spicer’s playing with Tish or The St. Louis Sporting News in Book of Magazine Verse. In a close, though not entirely parallel, manner, Spicer’s correspondence with Lorca (and translation of imagined Lorca poems) in the earlier After Lorca plays with questions of authorship in ways that foretell Kent Johnson’s translations of his imaginary friend, Araki Yasusada.***

 

Projects like those by Stefans & Johnson can be said to reread Spicer. In the larger terms of literary history, both of the later projects are more extreme. Spicer merely suggests a relationship between his texts and certain journals in Magazine Verse, his translations may include imagined poems, but Spicer situates them in response to a real poet. Johnson, by comparison, transgressed all kinds of boundaries by giving his creation a different ethnicity & placing him into the context of 1945 Hiroshima. Spicer would have appreciated the tsuris Johnson got for his political incorrectness.

 

That sense of transgressiveness, of risk & danger, that were closely associated with Spicer during his life and immediately following his death in 1965, seems now frankly a little stodgy when placed alongside such projects. In the years between Spicer’s death by alcohol & the publication of his Collected Books in 1975, the general difficulty of getting his books+, his reputation for contrariness, the nature of his poems & theories of Martian dictation elevated Spicer’s street cred as the mystery bad boy of the New American Poetry to a level of romantic mystification that would soon prove familiar to any Jim Morrison fan. Today it is impossible to reconstruct that energy behind the original Spicer mystique, and that over time will change Spicer & how we read him.  

 

 

 

 

* Robin Blaser tells me that it was Spicer who brought around literature from the Mattachine Society, the 1950s “homophile rights” organization founded by former Communist Party member Harry Hay.

 

** Unsurprisingly, the Times, a newspaper that thinks Thomas Friedman represents political analysis, proves unable to read Stefans’ whimsical interventions and has served him with a cease & desist letter. The détournements will be taken off www.arras.net this weekend. While there have been comments on the listservs that these works, which Stefans himself likens to graffiti, could be looked as literary parallels to collage, what really freaks the Times lawyers is its tromp l’oiel effect – it looks like the New York Times except that it’s interesting. In this sense, a closer parallel would be the way Kodak’s lawyers went after Blaise Cendrars after Librarie Stock published his Kodak (Documentaires) in 1924, although I don’t know if a later generation of Kodak lawyers also went after Ron Padgett’s translations published by Adventures in Poetry in 1976.

 

*** Spicer & Johnson both seem genuinely concerned with the literary quality of their imagined poems, a stance that places them closer to Pessoa & further from such literary hoaxes as the Spectra movement during World War I or the Australian Ern Malley in the 1940s. Pessoa was virtually unknown in the United States during Spicer’s lifetime, and it seems unlikely that he would have heard of Malley either. The Spectra hoax, an imaginary literary movement created by Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke and Marjorie Allen Seiffert, was the subject of books that were generally available during Spicer’s lifetime.

 

+ After Magazine Verse was published in 1966, only one other volume, Book of Music, would be published before Caterpillar 12 in July 1970 began to spark broader interest. During this period, Language seems to have gone out of print. Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, published in 1962 with just 750 copies, and After Lorca, published in 1957 in an edition of 500 copies, were already impossible to find. While Lorca & Magazine Verse were reprinted in 1970, the next few years saw a slow trickle of Spicer’s secondary sequences – The Holy Grail (1970), Lament for the Maker (1971) & Red Wheelbarrow (1971 & again in 1973) – before the explosion in 1974, one year ahead of the Collected Books, when Ode & Arcadia, Admonitions & 15 False Propositions About God all appeared & Paul Mariah published Manroot 10. Rumor has it that a new, more complete edition of Spicer’s poetry is soon to appear.