Jack Spicer (1925–1965)

What a beautiful, peculiar, creative little book. I feel blessed to have read it. The idea of poetic tradition as “generations of poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem” I find so vast and yet intimate and comforting. It has changed my conception of poetry. Many of these poems are breathtaking in their patience and originality, the way they move and open thought. I got the book from the library but I wish I owned it—I will try to find it in show more my city. show less

Spicer is a tragically overlooked poetic gem in the canon of American poetry, part of the crucial San Francisco Renaissance period that shaped the Beats coming along a decade later. It was Duncan, Rexroth, Spice, and Patchen to a lesser degree that influenced Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, McClure, DiPrima, etc., and somehow the general poetry reading public doesn't know this, they were simply left in the dust by the primacy of the Beats. To understand Beat writing, I would argue it's necessary show more to understand San Francisco Renaissance poets and writers, and Spicer is one of the better places to start. Strongly recommended. show less

i'm still learning how to read poetry and can have trouble getting into sometimes, this book made it easy though. cynical and gorgeous.

When I think of the vatic, I am thinking almost exclusively of a position that the poet takes between 1) the polis, the readers, the Platonic republic, and 2) the realm of pure Ideas, or knowledge, or oracular sight. I’m not trying to argue if a poet is a conduit (or vessel, as Josh puts it) or not—in fact, I don’t care (and that repeats something I said earlier, and it is honest on my part, but perhaps there is also some anxiety in my admitting this). I’ve said it before that its show more about the relationship between the poet and the reader. The concern for me is in how a poet rhetorically positions between points 1 and 2 above, readily assuming the mantle of the mediator. I don’t think it fits within the axiomatic map between the expressivist and constructivist (and would not agree with the idea of a “vatic constructivist”—be it me, or anyone else). Rather, vates, despite its effort to create the authentic aura of contact with the divine/sublime/other/alien/Plato’s “realm of thought (I’m beginning to think sheesh would be a good word for all of it!) is rhetorical, political, egotistical (without the derogatory implication), and hegemonic. The question is not if the poet expresses something “other or alien” or sheesh but if that expression is positioned with the intent of preaching, revealing, prophesying, teaching, moralizing on behalf of its reader. I can recognize the difference between a poetry that is the transcript of interiority inconclusively wrestling with the other/alien/sublime sheesh and the kind of poetry that reports a conclusive message for the reader, closing and interpreting, placing a big hermeneutic seal on that experience for all of us. A friend, Jared Stanley, brought up the term “immanence” in terms of this conversation. This term works well perhaps for both vessel-ing and making. But the vatic mode makes a conscious decision to control the message, thinking that this is what the reader, and moreover, what the polis both needs and wants. The poet steps into history and declares himself the seer. I find the term “vatic” must always take into consideration this position, and fails to address the concerns of from where the poem arrives, or once here, how it is made, or if it is made without having “arrived.” Another friend, Josh Corey, in relation to this conversation, brought up Spicer, and yes, in terms of “dictation,” my instinct is that Spicer believes he “makes” from what is “received.” Dictation means to simultaneously hear (here) and write (wright). So, if there must be a dichotomy, he’s at the intersection. Immanence happens there, we are to believe (and why not?). Jared brought up the paradox of both the earthiness and spaciness of Duncan. It seems to fit well into this idea of the received (space) that is made material (earth). I mean, what happens Josh when a poet wants to “represent something authentic within” but actualizes that authenticity through a poem that must never be more or less than “an object or social process.” Duncan’s poetry of archaisms may be anachronistic, and his radical sense of selfhood is unheralded, but not so much to convince me there is no construction there. Doesn’t the poem always remain an object in language and a social expression in language? An expressivist, going by your definition, would have to be a poet who is completely clueless to this fact, or chooses a delusional stance on it? The “authentic” still needs to be expressed through any number of levels of discourse(s), right? Now, whether or not, based on the above definition I would say Spicer or Duncan is a “vatic” poet is beside the point of how they write and from where a poem arrives. Duncan has many vatic tendencies, but he resists these tendencies openly. Spicer’s “Grail quest” also raises the possibility of the vatic but resists through parody and frustration of completion. I think the E vs. C dichotomy does more to help you define C., position C., and to create a dialectic encounter on behalf of C, but that’s for another discussion perhaps. show less