He's really formative for this thesis; I've read him before, but not this much work. I also read Blaser's essay on him and his essay on dictation, and that has really informed my own practice-- wait for it, wait-- but his poetry is something else. After Lorca is really major, but I enjoyed Language and The Book of Magazine Verse-- as well as Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, of course. His poetics are playful-- no, serious-- but taking jabs at everything. He's crass and rude and whip-smart, and he's not like Duncan, who seems to be actually trying to get a point across and hopes that you keep up; Spicer is making about 50 points and undermining them all, and fuck you if you can't keep up.
After Lorca
(121)
A song
Which I shall never sing
Has fallen asleep on my lips.
A song
Which I shall never sing--
...At that time I'll imagine
The song
Which I shall never sing.
A song full of lips
And far-off washes
A song full of lost
Hours in the shadow
A song of a star that's alive
Above enduring day.
from the letters to Lorca:
(122)
A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. ...Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it. ...A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across time. [he continues to talk about correspondence, which seems to be a paraphrase of the rhizome idea, but also gets to Duncan's idea of reality-- language is a tool (a faulty one) to try to communicate, but a really perfect poem wouldn't use it, maybe; and nothing is connected, but everything's relatable.]
Billy the Kid:
(186)
no, it is not a collage. Hell flowers
Fall from the hands of heroes
fall from all of our hands
flat
As if we were not ever able quite to include them.
His gun
does not shoot real bullets
his death
Being done is unimportant.
Being done
In those flat colors
Not a collage
A binding together, a
Memory.
Spicer is very much concerned with artifice-- his poems show all their seams, and it's declared flat-out that these things aren't real (His gun/does not shoot real bullets). But he also uses the artifice (line break, for one) to make his point (Not a collage/A binding together, a/ Memory.) Binding together both preps us for Memory-- because his (BtK) death would be a sort of shared memory but also it contradicts collage. Brilliant.
From Heads of the Town:
(264) Magic
Strange, I had words for dinner
Stranger, I had words for dinner
Stranger, strange, do you believe me?
Honestly, I had your heart for supper
Honesty has had your heart for supper
Honesty honestly are your pain.
I burned the bones of it
And the letters of it
And the numbers of it
That go 1,2,3,4,5,6,7
And so far.
Stranger, I had bones for dinner
Stranger, I had bones for diner
Stranger, stranger, strange, did you believe me?
------
Orpheus was never really threatened by the Underworld during his visits there. In this poem they present him with a diplomatic note.
Honesty does not occur again in the poem.
The numbers do.
[There's a lot going on in this poem, and I feel that this is pretty quintessentially Spicerian. He's playing with sound and doing lots of wordplay, but also using repetition in an almost banal way-- but it isn't. It evokes spell-casting (and it is called "Magic") and gives the poem a creepy, I'm not catching something feel. A transaction of sorts occurs (I think there's also a pretty solid narrative here) and we're asked twice, do [or did] you believe me? Then the footnote pokes fun at the poem and forces us to look at it again-- so we do, looking for clues that this is about Orpheus. And the whole thing is creepier. Then we see a progression: words, heart, bones; they're used up, eaten up, burned up, but they're still there, because honesty isn't. Because they're in a poem, and you're supposed to believe this voice, but it's not telling the truth... so the claims get more outrageous, because why not?
from Language:
(373)
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
[This seems to speak to the reality/artifice conundrum again--the ocean, which declares nothing, is meaningless-- but listened to. Poetry can never be this, or isn't this, and no one's listening, because it's trying to be so meaningful.]
(Sporting Life)
The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios
don't develop scar tissue... The poet
Takes too many messages.
...The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
counterpunching radio.
Finally the messages penetrate
There is a corpse of an image--they penetrate
The corpse of a radio.
...In any case the messages penetrate the
radio and render it (and the radio) ultimately useless.
Prayer
Is exactly that.
...Their prayer its only connection.
from Book of Magazine Verse:
(423) (6)
The poem begins to mirror itself.
The identity of the poet gets more obvious.
Why can't we sing songs like nightingales? Because we're not
nightingales and can never become them. The poet has an
arid parch of his reality and the others.
Things desert him. I thought of you as a butterfly tonight with
clipped wings.
[First line= genius. We're limited by what we are-- it's not natural-- and hemmed in by our perception of reality (and insistence on it).]
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