A few words from Jack Spicer about poetry and politics.

 

It only took me 38 years, but I finally got to Jack Spicer’s talk on “Poetry and Politics” from the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965. The Conference was a series of seven talks and 14 readings held on the University of California campus over a two week period, between July 12 and 25 of 1965. Since, unemployed & basically doing the 18-year-old street person routine on Telegraph Avenue that summer, I did not possess the requisite $57* entrance fee for the entire event – over $465 in 2003 dollars – I was consigned to hanging out at parties, listening to clusters of poets as they wandered around the campus, and sneaking into readings. Also, I was as ignorant as a stick about who was who & what was what when it came to poetry in 1965. So when Jack Spicer gave his talk on July 14, I had no idea who he was or what might be special about that event. Of course, nobody, Jack included, realized at the time that he had only another five weeks to live.  In the audio tape of the event – which is how I got to attend all these years later -- Spicer has a smoker’s cough, but otherwise sounds fine.

 

July 14, 1965, was a propitious moment to be talking of poetry & politics. In Vietnam, General Westmoreland had just begun conducting “purely offensive” operations in areas outside of Saigon. The slippery slope from advising a corrupt regime through defensive battles had escalated now to a full engagement.

 

At Berkeley, the previous fall had seen the Free Speech Movement on the UC campus, as attempts by the Republican right – notably Senator Bill Knowland who owned the then-powerful Oakland Tribune – to shut down student organizing on campus for local civil rights protests triggered the first full-scale student revolt in the United States. When one student, Jack Weinberg, agreed to set himself up for a “test-case” arrest by setting up a card table at the Telegraph & Bancroft entrance to the campus, he did not anticipate what then ensued: 3,000 students surrounding the police car refusing to let the cops take him away – a standoff that lasted for over 30 hours. The strike that followed brought new phenomena to American colleges – sit-ins and mass arrests – before finally establishing the right of students to use public campus facilities for organizing.

 

Earlier in the spring of 1965, the Free Speech Movement was followed by the Filthy Speech Movement, as John Thompson, a local street poet, sat on the steps of the Sproul Hall and held up a sheet of paper with the F word penned across it. When the campus cops busted Thompson, other students spontaneously proceeded to follow suit. The media predictably played the issue for laughs.

 

These are the immediate political phenomena that Jack Spicer and his audience were thinking about** as he began his talk. Lurking further behind the talk was a political event from Spicer’s own days as a student, the imposition of a California state loyalty oath in 1949. Several professors had refused to sign the oath on civil liberty grounds and were summarily dismissed, the dismissal of some (not all) later being overturned. On January 18, 1961, one of those professors, Tom Parkinson, a Yeats scholar & sometime poet as well as the son of a major San Francisco radical union leader, was shot in his office by a former student bent on saving the university from Communism. Parkinson’s teaching assistant that term, Stephen Thomas, was killed.*** Parkinson bore the scars of the shooting – some sixty pellets remained lodged in his skull. At the Berkeley Poetry Conference, it is Parkinson who introduces Jack Spicer.

 

Jack Spicer is dealing with all of these events & forces and he is, in July of 1965, deeply pessimistic about the possibility of poetry and politics. He sees, for example, no hope for either poets nor the then burgeoning student movement to impact the outcome of the Vietnam debacle at all. Thus Spicer announces that his talk’s purposed is aimed in a very different direction. His intent is to persuade “you people who are poets” to not “sell out,” by which he means literally to not publish poetry where people other than your closest compatriots can find it.

 

That may sound like an extreme version of coterie poetics, but Spicer – to the discomfort of several people in the audience – makes it sound all very reasonable. At the heart of his argument is a presumption as to whom the poem is for – the poet who writes it. The purpose of the poem is not to be read. Indeed, Spicer says

 

I don’t know what a non poet can get out of poetry, I’ve never been able to figure it out…. I fundamentally don’t think that nonpoets ought to read poetry.

 

Even Spicer concedes that this is overreaching on his part, as some of these very same nonpoets tell him interesting and useful things about his own writing as well as that of others. But still, he argues, the relationship of the poem to a broader audience is “futile.” “Not to the poets – they get messages from the poems.”

 

It is because for Spicer there is a radical separation between poet & poem – Spicer claims there is an audience for the former, but not the latter – that the poem can achieve its status of an object of divination for the writer. Selling out, as he puts it, thus becomes anything which directs the poem toward another end.

 

“Your enemy is simply something which tries to stop you from writing poetry,” Spicer says, but he makes it clear that “if you violate something that was deep inside you … you’re lost….You don’t write or you write bad poetry or you write for the market.” It’s a value system in which writing for publication and not writing are equivalent.

 

To this, Spicer offers what amounts to a utopian alternative.

 

A magazine is a society. I think Open Space proved that. You have to behave within the rules of the society.

 

Open Space was printed monthly in issues of 150 copies maximum over the course of one year. It had a set & very limited number of contributors – and you were required to contribute each month. “You couldn’t postpone your poem.” The magazine was handed out for free & distributed from Gino & Carlo’s, a tavern in North Beach, and Cody’s Books in Berkeley. Issues were not supposed to be sent out of the Bay Area, although Spicer remarks that some were sent to New York apparently without his knowledge & against his objection. Stan Persky made a point of giving copies out in such a way as to prevent individuals from obtaining complete sets, although Lew Ellingham got the University of California library to buy one set for $100. In the talk, there is some banter back & forth between Spicer & Parkinson over the difficulty of getting $100 out of the university procurement system.

 

Thus from Spicer’s perspective poets create a community – a term that Spicer uses in deliberate opposition to society, which he sees as negative – a community in which the poets included can read one another. This is a vision of the journal not as a record nor as a making public, but rather as lab notes being shared by researchers involved in a common investigation.

 

So, in Spicer’s argument, the poet’s next task, after the writing of the poem, must be to limit that discussion, to keep the poem from becoming truly public. Spicer recognizes the irony of making this argument at a place like the Berkeley Poetry Conference, professing to be doing so strictly for the money. He makes the point, further, that all poets will sell out – “You have to, for economic reasons” – but that if you do you should at least understand what you’re doing. Spicer uses the analogy of peach farmers who produce vast quantities of product without a sense of what the market demand for peaches might be, so that overproduction reduces the value of the individual peach to near zero – the implication for poetry is obvious enough – the idea behind his talk, Spicer says, is to convince young poets that “When you sell out, know exactly what your peaches cost.” That is, know what you are sacrificing in the way of the poem as an investigative tool if & when you transition into the role of being a poet in public.

 

Hearing Spicer make this argument & countering the barrage of objections from members of the audience – aren’t poets the “unacknowledged legislators?” wasn’t Yeats an actual senator? isn’t Spicer just revisiting Auden’s position that poetry makes nothing happen? aren’t the folk songs of the civil rights movement an example of verse creating political change? – is fascinating, almost a form of voyeurism. The one point Spicer is willing to actually entertain is the question of song. Expressing admiration for Johnny Mercer, Spicer admits that “if I could write popular songs, I’d do it.”

 

Spicer’s talk on the 16^th of July comes just five days ahead of Ginsberg’s reading of Kral Majales, a poem that seems to have infuriated Spicer, who writes a poem in response that turns out to be the last work he will ever write. Five weeks later, Spicer is dead. He will never get to see all the ways in which the student movement impacted the Vietnam War, leading directly to the end of the Johnson administration and preventing Nixon & Kissinger from ever feeling free enough to actually commit the resources needed to have “won.” If Spicer thought Ginsberg was obnoxious with his King of the May poem at Berkeley, one can only imagine what he would have thought over the next few years as Allen proved to be the father figure of the hippie Be-In.

 

While Spicer’s conception of the poem as an object of divination may reek of ectoplasm & spoon-bending, the idea behind it of the poem as a device for investigation is something we see reappearing in several guises – it’s the aspect of Spicer that one sees, say, in the work of Robert Grenier or Barrett Watten. & it’s what Spicer shared with Olson, who, at one point in this talk, Spicer calls “probably the best poet we have in the country.”+ It’s what I find in the exploratory media work that several younger poets are now doing. And it’s clearly the impulse behind talks & behind blogs like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Before Rachel Loden writes to correct me  & say that tickets only cost $45, I would advise her to check her ticket – which she acquired on the 16^th, and which was discounted accordingly. A $45 ticket in 1965 is only worth $367 in today’s dollars. That would have made zero difference to me in 1965.

 

** In Spicer’s talk, the civil rights movement is discussed in connection with its use of music & song, but no mention at all is made of the assassination of Malcolm X earlier that year.

 

*** Parkinson’s TA from the previous year, Burt Hatlen, was fortunate to be studying abroad in ’61.

 

+ Given their differences, both as writers & as people, that’s a significant statement. One could read all of Language, at the time Spicer’s most recent publication, as an extended disproof of Olson’s Projectivism. Spicer’s endorsement is not without its ambivalence, however. Ebbe Borregaard in the audience asks why Spicer compares Olson to Lyndon Johnson, a deliberately provocative query since Spicer hasn’t done so here, although he has said that “There are bosses in poetry as well as in the industrial empire.” Spicer doesn’t dodge the issue: “I meant that he was in the same position in poetry that Johnson is in politics.”