Faces: Jack Spicer

If I am old when you read this,
If I am dead when you read this,
Darling, darling, darling,
It was last night
When I wrestled with you.
I am wrestling with you. (Jack Spicer)

If there were any poet, dead or alive, to whom I'd be likely to tell my own story & feel confident he alone would understand, it'd probably be Jack Spicer. To begin with, to make a poetic career out of wrestling with ghosts, as the West Coast poet active at the crossroads of significant American literary movements felt compelled to do in his verses, is a move in the right direction: certainly something that appeals to me personally. Making the envisioned reader as the angel "darling" to his Jacob is quite inviting. It's perhaps a way for the both of us to castigate the present, (& particularly the sordid mania for literary fame in one's own lifetime that must have sickened Spicer as it sickens me); perhaps align our sympathies with an idea of reader who's as dead to the present as we both happen to be at the moment. Dead is dead, whether you're reading Spicer now, and wish poetry existed in an eternally apoetical present, or will in future.

And we don't look to the dead or future readerships only faute de mieux: it's all there is. Spicer can be read only apoetically, which is a form of living death. And friendship is its basis, strangely enough. A friendship's been established between us to be honoured as anything's to be honoured that begins with the dreaded "If I am dead when you read this" & can appeal to anyone who's just happily enough self-alienated in his own time to appreciate it. I can describe the affinity between the dead and living poet no better than by comparing it to the strange closeness I presently feel to a dead childhood friend whenever I revisit the very places he'd walked with me long ago, looking for phantom footprints along a thorny stip of beach or familiar neighbourhood sidewalks. Spicer leaves in his poetry signifiers of just the same type since friends, dead or living, are interchangeable only in this way. As he says in After Lorca,

I yell 'Shit' down a cliff at an ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as 'Alas.' But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the world 'Shit' will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear."

But phantom footsteps (like phantom limbs) or ocean echoes are not just tropes: friends of Jack Spicer don't trope but troop through a landscape of ghosts. And what caused the break with the living is, of course, language ("my vocabulary did this to me"). The poetry of Billy The Kid  (that a "cold, cold" Canadian stole years later), and After Lorca, for example, on one level serve as primers for translation & epic, the Juan Ramón Jiménez and Debussy pieces in particular being unsurprisingly haunted by the real dreams and shadows of the poet from Granada. But at another they are just funerary offerings: one to the lyrical sympathizer of the peasants' "black pain" and the other to a mid-western American renegade figure whose story (like Lorca's, perhaps) can only be told in terms of the poet's own personal "hell flowers". It's precisely at that language as "hell flowers" and American folklore rupture that ghosts appear. For the sake of generations of future ghostly readers, the story even has to be 'faked out' in order to keep the legend within the realm of the barely perceptible:  

   Let us fake out a frontier—a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff's posse after him—a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles—a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.

The 'barely perceptible' field of poetry and readership is exactly where two kindred ghosts like us can meet. And I believe we always will. Poetry is a shadowy thing, obtainable only in the garish moment. To live perpetually defeated or awkwardly misaligned with the times & express the nonreality of it all in language that instead of warm bodies just yearns for things "with no hard corners", like Lorca poems & half-expressed bad boy myths—that's the essence of the ghost, of Jack Spicer fellowship, of the poem. In the absence of reassuring interiors poets live, walk, & write on a perpetual "outside", an ideal circle of Truth that's usually been stated enough times to turn it into a mass grave: "On the outside of it is what everybody talks about. On the outside of it are the dead that try to talk." ("A Textbook of Poetry") Or rather the poem, its form or whatever meaning Spicer may have intended, is something lying enigmatically between a corpse and a ghost, always amounting to a perpetual "defeat" (See the poem "Who Are You"?).

But why necessarily a "defeat"? Spicer's friendship, like his poetry since both are of a piece, can sound at once faithful & temperamentally resistant to a contemporary's approbation, always to be found somewhere between the living and the dead. Qualities that make him desirable but at the same time tragically enigmatical. Am I drawn to the tragedy or elusiveness of the man? The poet's interest in readers he's envisaged as old or dead to begin with (like me) isn't a rhetorical pose. This invocation, like everything else that's potentially fatal in friendship with a great poet, only seems haphazard, unsteady, and yet it makes the passage to the other side possible: he may have said to me what he said to Jim Alexander, "...do not become too curious about/your poetry/Let it speed into the tunnel by itself/Do not follow it, do not try to ride it" ("Imaginary Elegies"), sagaciously anticipating the tendency (always in the overimpressionable) to mistake the impetus for the man himself.

My original allegiance to the man still stands, though. These days I'm not feeling like a Canadian ghost for nothing, & I don't choose my dead poets lightly. Cid Corman's "Dead or alive/I'm in it for the poetry" could have been inscribed over the passageway to Spicer's hell. It was Spicer's genius, however, to have softened it (maybe just for my sake) by making friendship the cost of entry.