Between the poem & the longpoem come several intermediate modes. One that interests me greatly, because it’s one with which I have a lot of personal affinity, is the booklength poem that might not (yet) be a longpoem in the true sense of taking a decade or more to compose. It can be – although not always is – really the poem as book (which, conversely, almost always means the book as poem also), calling up that curious zone in which the transpersonal elements of a text become deeply immersed with the qualities of embodiment that bookmaking represents.

Jack Spicer was a master at this level. After Lorca, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, Language & Book of Magazine Verse were all composed as much as books as they were poems. Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Orangery is another volume that comes immediately to mind as an exemplar of this mode – as are Charles Alexander’s arc of light / dark matter, Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, John Ashbery’s Three Poems, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Robert Creeley’s Pieces, Barrett Watten’s Progress, David Melnick’s Pcoet, Tom Mandel’s Prospect of Release, & more than a few books each by both Bernadette Mayer & Clark Coolidge.

At the heart of the poem as book is not just having a project that is sufficiently large enough to warrant capturing as a whole between two covers, but rather one that understands itself in precisely such terms, that takes its own free-standing nature as a given. Book design, of course, allows for a lot of fudging – the 64-page volume that was my own Paradise was a 35-page manuscript. Whatever its integrity as a poem or project might be, it was Rosmarie Waldrop who had the formal sense to see that work as book. Thus, not every poem (or poetic series) of size carries this sense of itself as a condition of the writing. Of the volumes listed in the previous paragraph, the one I sometimes wonder about in these terms is Berrigan’s Sonnets. As wonderful as they are – and they hold up to rereading after rereading over the decades, as rich & glittering as ever – Berrigan was such a young writer when he composed that sequence that it’s not clear to me that he was yet even thinking in terms of books at all.

What calls this to mind is a volume entitled bk of (h)rs by Pattie McCarthy. It’s a dense, rich, sometimes dark (& sometimes playful) volume clearly conceived & written precisely as a book. For a relatively young poet – I believe this is only her second volume – it’s a project of stunning ambition & self confidence. And, as readers of this blog will have figured out by now, these are qualities in poetry that I completely endorse. The title alone announces that this will not be an “easy” read – although, because this work is so well written, there are constant & continuing pleasures in doing so, making bk, if not an “easy” read, at the very least a delightful one.

McCarthy’s model of course is the medieval book of hours, which between the 13^th & 15^th centuries was the most popular of all book forms, but which today is remembered principally for the detailed illustrations that decorated these favored objects of the rich. As her use of abbreviations makes evident (& the Apogee Press design reinforces, especially in the dense prose of the third section), McCarthy is interested primarily in the intellectual / social / spiritual elements of the form, not its role in a history of design. The first section of the book does indeed follow the “hours” of medieval practice – matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers & compline – actually set times of day for traditional sets of prayer. The second section is, as one would expect in this form, is called “(p)salter,” & while the psalms or songs that follow are less polyvocalic that either the first or third sections of this book, one would be hard put to characterize them as lyrical.

I suspect that a reader who was more of a Christian than I would see more levels & depths of reference here than do I. It’s one thing for me to recognize the use of Julian dating in “(p)salter,” but quite another for me to understand quite what to do with it. At that level, I have to ask myself just how much I trust where the author is going, particularly one who, like McCarthy, actively invokes a broad a range of reference, especially in the 21 prose paragraphs of the volume’s third & final section, where the sense of density is accentuated by McCarthy’s resistance to upper case. Since at no point where I can follow does she ever once misstep, my gut feel is to trust completely the places where I simply have to acknowledge my own limits as a reader. A passage like the following demonstrates absolute ability in total control:

the second letters of the original seven

antiphons read backwards yield the acrostic :

I shall be with you tomorrow.

divinations to undertake – times

& purposes to be determined regionally.

I’m not one for a public shrove.

a green winter makes for a fat churchyard.

a long winter makes for a full ear. poke

            holes in eggshells to keep

            witches from going to sea. we look down into it.

bk of (h)rs will probably look like early work one day to McCarthy, precisely because she demonstrates herself taking on such a range & such steep challenges that you can almost palpably feel her growth as an artist in these pages – the literary equivalent of, say, a Beatles album like Rubber Soul, where the Fab Four just start to make the move from best-in-class of the genre they’ve inherited toward working on some whole other level that will transform not merely their own work, but that of everyone else around them. I don’t want to overstate the case here, but bk of (h)rs is a fascinating view of an artist right at the inflection point of her career.

Of all the New American Poets, just two proceed as though the language of poetry were primarily a process of logic and not of speech: John Ashbery & Jack Spicer. I literally had this thought while taking a shower this morning, the cleanest thinking I’ve done on the subject.

I never join Spicer in my imagination to Ashbery. Their sense of what that logic might be or might mean is so very different. In Spicer’s case, it’s a process of perpetual, even compulsive, contradiction*, lines & ideas constantly undercutting one another until the final result cannot possibly be added up to a single idea, but rather a pulsing, resonating core of contrasting impulses:

Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart. If there isn’t

A God don’t believe in Him. “Credo

Quia absurdum,” creates wars and pointless loves and was even in Tertullian’s time a heresy. I see him like a tortoise creeping through a vast desert of unbelief.

“The shadows of love are not the shadows of God.”

This is the second heresy created by the first Piltdown man in Plato’s cave. Either

The fire casts a shadow or it doesn’t.

Red balloons, orange balloons, purple balloons all cast off together into a raining sky.

The sky where men weep for men. And above the sky a moon or an astronaut smiles on television. Love

For God or man transformed to distance.

This is the third heresy. Dante

Was the first writer of science fiction. Beatrice

Shimmering in infinite space.

Joining war to love is a typical Spicerian strategy. But look at the length of that third line or Spicer’s use, here as well as elsewhere, of starting a sentence with a single word on one line – the enjambment is felt, but for emphasis – with the remainder on the next. Plus Spicer capitalizes Him precisely at the point where the poet suggests that He might not exist.**

I’ve suggested elsewhere that Spicer’s formal training as a linguist is what inoculated him from the mystifications of speech that accompanied the most extreme Projectivist pronouncements. But virtually all of the New Americans bought into speech as a model for directness in their poetry – you can see it in people as diverse as Frank O’Hara, Paul Carroll or Lew Welch. & some, like Paul Blackburn, went to even greater lengths than Charles Olson to demonstrate how transcription might be utilized to represent various aural aspects of the spoken.

It is one thing to note that speech is not the model Ashbery relies on in the disruptive texts of The Tennis Court Oath such as “Europe” or “Leaving the Atocha Station”:

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness

And pulling us out of there experiencing it

he meanwhile . . .   And the fried bats they sell there

dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .

Other people . . .               flash

the garden you are boning

and defunct covering . . .***

That first line is virtually a linguist’s example of “impossible language.”+ But what about this text from that same volume, its famous title also the first line?

How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher

Of life, my great love? Do dolphins plunge bottomward

To find the light? Or is it rock

That is searched? Unrelentingly? Huh. And if some day

Men with orange shovels come to break open the rock

Which encases me, what about the light that comes in then?

What about  the smell of light?

What about the moss?

In pilgrim times he wounded me

Since then I only lie

My bed of light is a furnace choking me

With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).

I mean it – because I’m one of the few

To have held my breath under the house. I’ll trade

One red sucker for two blue ones. I’m

Named Tom. The

I’ll break here mid-sentence just to note use of the first-word-at-line’s-end tactic deployed here pointedly mocks the possibility of such positionality lending extra emphasis for the sake of meaning.

Because Spicer & Ashbery both use address – the language of the dramatic monolog – as the exoskeletal structure of their poems, we generally do feel spoken to as we read them. But neither ever uses line breaks to approximate any element of breathing, a la Olson, Creeley or even Ginsberg. And while Spicer’s logic is one of constant undercutting, Ashbery’s is more faceted. The next sentence is apt to take one term of the previous one and take it into a different direction, the way light & rock are used in the passage above. It is also apt to stop and go into an entirely different mode of address – Huh – such as the metalanguage that stops mid-thought to suggest an exchange of lollipops.

There are, of course, other New American Poets who show disinterest in fetishizing speech through poetic form – Jimmy Schuyler for one. But Schuyler is principally a poet of sublime description. It is only in Spicer & Ashbery that you find logic raised – though hardly as one might find it in a philosophy or rhetoric program – to function as the actual engine of verse. What amazes me is that, having read each of them for some 35 years, I’ve only just now noticed.

* The “Not this. / What then?” structure of Tjanting comes right out of my reading of Spicer.

** Spicer’s god might be terrible & terrifying, but any other than  a brand new reader of Spicer’s will realize that this poet was deeply a believer.

*** Ellipses in the original.

+ Although, thanks to the parsimony principle, perfectly readable.

In a footnote on Halloween, I wrote that “it seems unlikely” that Jack Spicer “would have heard of” the fictive literary figure Ern Malley. This brought the following note from Kevin Killian:

---------------------------------------

Hi Ron,

I'm not sure this changes your point much, but I know you'll be glad to know that further research indicates that Jack Spicer was indeed aware of the Ern Malley/"Angry Penguins" affair, and that indeed he came up with a plan to imitate the hoaxers in a variety of US magazines some 20 years before the Book of Magazine Verse. I don't want to blow all the surprises, but the next issue of the new Bay Area magazine 26 will publish an article by me and Lew (Ellingham) which grows out of our recent interview with Barbara Nicholls, a woman who now lives in Eugene (Oregon) but who once was part of the so-called "Berkeley Renaissance." She got in touch with us some time after our biography was published and offered to fill in some of the gaps. Last year she came to the Bay Area where we met her and got the entire scoop. It's a pretty good article and well, to make a long story short, Spicer's post Ern-Malley hoax involved an ambitious scheme to spoof New Critical practice by elevating the works of Gene Stratton Porter to canonical status.* Largely forgotten today, Gene Stratton Porter was a photographer, naturalist, novelist and mini-mogul . . . her novels were romantic fantasies of mankind versus Mother Nature and included Freckles and The Girl of the Limberlost. She died in a tragic Frida-Kahlo-like trolley accident in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Hope you find this of some use. xxx

Kevin K.

* Some Gene Stratton Porter links:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>http://www.strattonporter.com/index.html

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>http://www.genestrattonporter.net/

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Stratton-Porter%2C%20Gene

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>http://www.ebookmall.com/alpha-authors/s-authors/Gene-Stratton-Porter.htm

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/stratton.htm

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>http://www.indianahistory.org/heritage/birdwo.html

The death of Darrell Gray ensured that Actualism could only meet a very different fate than Objectivism. Death enters the equation as well with the disappearance of another literary tendency of the past sixty years: the Spicer Circle. If ever there was a phenomenon that cried out for a large, well researched anthology, this is it.

The Spicer Circle had a significant impact on poetry, both in the U.S. and Canada, but characterizing or analyzing that impact is difficult because so little is adequately understood about the phenomenon by anybody other than those who were there. I wasn’t – I first heard of Spicer at a memorial reading held at Shakespeare & Company books (it may still have called the Rambam in those days) in Berkeley that was held, as best I can recall, around what must have been his birthday in early 1966.

Soon, three key associates of Spicer’s – Robin Blaser, George Stanley & Stan Persky – would move to British Columbia. In the ten year hiatus between Spicer’s death and two events that were to transform his place in literary history, the publication of his Collected Books by Black Sparrow press and the special issue of Paul Mariah’s Manroot magazine that was to place Spicer alongside Whitman & a handful of others as a founder of a gay aesthetic, only Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar 12 was to focus in any serious fashion on the Spicer’s work. While Caterpillar published over 150 pages of Spicer’s early poems, correspondence, a chapter from his detective novel and the first Vancouver lecture, it also positioned Blaser’s own poetry first, with the sole other contribution a four page essay on the pair from the issue’s guest editor, Persky.

In addition to that long silence & Spicer’s own dogged reluctance to permit his work and that of his friends out of the immediate physical confines of San Francisco (refusing, for example, to send his short-lived magazine J by mail), the period between 1965 and ’75 was one of extraordinary transformations in American culture and politics could not help but to reverberate throughout poetry. Spicer, who wrote about the war in Vietnam and the Beatles, was actually one of the first to sense these changes. But others that were to come soon, from Stonewall to Watergate, might have proven more difficult for him to digest and it is not hard to envision a later Spicer in the sort of reactionary alcoholic stupor that befuddled Kerouac before his death just a few years hence.

But the Spicer Circle was something more than just the poetry of Jack Spicer & something other than a Mattachine Society of verse*. Poets as diverse as Joanne Kyger, Larry Fagin and Jack Gilbert actively participated in events that were central to the Spice kreis. Poets who were not primarily San Franciscan, including Steve Jonas & John Wieners, could also be said to have played roles as well. An anthology such as the one I imagine would have to develop a serious & critically defensible definition of what the Spicer Circle actually was before it could go about the task to tracking down and collecting the poetry.

The Manroot issue remains the only hint of what such an anthology might look like**, containing as it does work by Harold Dull, Lew Ellingham, James Herndon, Jonas, Persky, Stanley, Wieners & Spicer, as well as a collaboration by Spicer & Stanley with Ronnie Primack and Bruce Boyd.***

Dull is a good example of what we are missing in not having a far better sense of the Spicer Circle. He published several small books in the 1950s and ‘60s, including The Star Year, The Door, Bird Poems, and The Wood Climb Down Out Of. Then in 1975 he published A Selection of Poems for Jack Spicer on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death. Since then, Dull has only published texts about Watsu, his aquatic bodywork practice that evolved out of Zen shiatsu. Herndon, Primack, James Alexander and Joe Dunn are other members of the Circle whose writing is even more difficult to find.

In 1967, I heard Jack Gilbert introduce George Stanley as “the finest poet now writing.” Today, their work seems worlds apart. A good anthology would in fact demonstrate a world in which that contradiction might not occur. It would have to sort through some infinitely thorny issues, including Robert Duncan’s relationship to the circle (not to mention Blaser’s). I’m not the person to mount that effort, although perhaps someone like Kevin Killian, who helped to shape Lew Ellingham’s drafts into the masterful biography that is Poet Be Like God, is.

* The Mattachine Society was an early gay rights organization, contemporary with Spicer & likewise headquartered in San Francisco.

***Abebooks, the rare books network, lists at least dozen copies of the Spicer issue of Manroot as well as a couple of complete runs of the journal available for sale.

*** Boyd is himself noteworthy as the participant in the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, who disappeared from the scene completely.

Patrick Herron writes to ask about my comment that “irresolvable conflict is the primary Spicerian theme.” It seemed to me, as I wrote that comment a week ago, thumbing through my dog-eared (indeed, nearly dissolving with use) copy of the Collected Books obvious enough – it hadn’t occurred to me that the observation might be in any way unusual. I had been skimming through the baseball poems from Book of Magazine Verse, especially the second one – they’re love poems, of course, but love poems that presume the impossibility of any successful relationship. It’s a position that Spicer held with remarkable consistency throughout his life. About god: “If there isn’t / A God don’t believe in Him.” About human relations:

They say “he need (present) enemy (plural)”

I am not them. This is the first transformation.

About poetry: “No / One listens to poetry.”

Spicer is quintessentially a poet of emotion precisely because that is the surfeit left unassimilated whenever impossible forces meet.

Not that Spicer is necessarily all that different in this – think of the underlying bitterness and anger implicit in so many of Creeley’s early love poems, as in The Warning:

For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

Indeed, one of the secrets of Creeley’s early poems is the association it consistently makes between rhyme and violence, as though rhyme itself were an expression of force.

Conflict is the fundamental narrative engine – it is the element that insists, even in a still life, that something will have to give & that change is inevitable.* In his excellent ethnography, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (University of California, 1990), Steven Caton repeatedly notes how many ways in which poetry functions among the al-Yamāniyatēn of Khawlān at-Tiyāl as a ritualized surrogate for combat. Our own earliest texts, such as Beowulf, are replete with blood and gore.

I think about Caton’s book, which suggests without ever quite saying so that poetry itself is a kind of blood sport, whenever one of the several poetry listserv discussion groups dissolves into petty verbal warfare. If nothing else, Caton’s thesis suggests the normalcy of the problem. Indeed, it implies that if there were not combative “camps” in contemporary poetry, we might be forced to invent them.

This of course is not an optimistic view of human behavior or its potential. Right now with the political situation being what it is – as an illegitimate President crawfishes over from an unavoidable war against al-Qaeda into a nebulous “war on terrorism,” a metaphor that can & does extend outward in all directions, enabling the Administration to simply sweep away Constitutional protections of individual liberty, & also to an unrelated threatened assault on Iraq aimed at instilling a Pax Americana on the entire Middle East – the question of conflict is in no way abstract.

While it is not evident what Spicer would have made of all this, it seems likely that he would not have been surprised. I imagine that there might have been a serial poem about the crusades. If ever we had a poet in touch with the infinite sense of hurt that accompanies people who believe they are still suffering from battles waged hundreds or even thousands of years ago, for whom the logic of Kosovo, Chechnya, Kurdistan and the Left Bank exposes its lethal gears as if to a watchmaker, it was this cantankerous alcoholic linguist who once identified himself as a member of the “California Republican Army.”

* Think of Edward Hopper’s paintings, for example. This is why figurative paintings are often characterized as narrative.

Against the orgy of unrelievably bad public poetry commemorating the first anniversary of the September 11^th 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.