Colin Morton's "The Cabbage of Paradise": and how to tell good Dada from bad

Colin Morton

Twenty years on, destruction and creation continue their dervish dance, and another generation is making some of the same discoveries again, "making it new" in part by recovering territory that has been lost and built over many times before. (from the "Afterword")

WE MUST PUT THE POEM IN OUR LIVES...(bpNichol)

I've accused experimental poets (poetries) of being prone to 'mimeticism', and with good reason. There's no way really for the creative imagination in the avant-garde to work except by looking to models & manifestos of almost a century ago. It's one of the criticisms against them I've made recently in regards to Ron Silliman and Christian Bök. On the other hand, I've also seen in the Internet collage work of Clifford Duffy a creative adaptation of conceptual deleuzianism more closely aligned to the anti-bourgeois spirit of the first language experimentalists, a virulently anti-Art & anti-tradition impulse that separates him from the more fashionable (mostly academic) 'appropriation' art industry of our day. Almost by virtue of that alone, Duffy is the sole member of the class of significant (even traditional) avant-gardism in Canada.

Duffy is also a thoroughgoing 'digital collagist'. But he's not the only Dadaist in town and nor can he claim to be the only poet with what amounts to be an almost lifelong commitment to the artistic vision of a single person.There's the curious case of Canadian poet Colin Morton and literary mentor Kurt Schwitters, & the work The Cabbage of Paradise: The Merzbook and Other Poems (Merzbook) based on the life and times of the great early twentieth-century German collagist, poet and painter. As it was perhaps Morton's intention to do, Merzbook tries be read as a piece of Dadaist invention itself, collage & concrete poetry & anecdotal materials almost evenly interspersed throughout the book's 92 pages. Since the work's advertised in the "Note on the Text" as a "poetic dramatization of scenes from the life of 20th century German artist Kurt Schwitters", it's perhaps more properly a literary biography.

But where do you draw the line between biography & art? Or is there even one to begin with, visible enough to tell the poet from his source, art from imitation? There are times when I can't tell the good from the purely 'imitative' (bad) Dada: destruction from creation (to use some of Morton's own terminology). Artist and model are so wrapped in each other's arms—I have a Honecker-Brezhnev kissing image in my mind— the reader faces a complete self-opposition of the text. A dissenting opinion can even seem out of place here since the reader is too bounded by the Schwitters tradition. In "Critic" (a poem adapted from Schwitters) the critics are made into the usual 'strawman', caricatured as sheepish, witless & just too qualified for their own good: all they're fit to do is destroy the very creativity they find lacking in themselves. "The difference between artist and critic is this:/the artist creates, the critic bleates."(44) But without some concession to ironic or playful distancing from Schwitters legend, a line like this amounts to just moralizing & embarrassing cliche. Surely, the experimentalist Morton must see that.

Or can he? The poet cannot create here anymore than Schwitters can pose for Morton's portrait. Poetry & reader reside in some shadowy ill-conceived outline for a project, torn between the work as narrative and poetry.The least Merzbook can do is to have some fun with the 'linearity' of narrative verse, but it doesn't, following a fairly predictable syllabus of origins, struggles and the subsequent vindications of the misprized artist. Language is subservient to biographical accuracy & consequently betrays the very complexity of 'assemblage' technique & the predominantly virulent anti-Art impetus of the man himself, with the result that we get a predictable textbook figure easily accessible & assimilable. A Schwitters for undergraduates. Here's the usual literary apprenticeship beginning with a child's formative Wordsworthian first impressions, and leading to abandonment of lyricism & all cultural authority.

When I was born, Picasso
had not yet entered his blue period
—I cried

As soon as I could stand
I stood under Picasso's influence
I pointed to the arch where
the road passes over the canal
and "Tom" I said, or "happening"

My lyric period was when I lived in Violet Street
—I never saw a violet
That was owing to Matisse
whose palette then was always red (from "Influence")

Delicate Mondrian and surrealist scraps & things found in a boy's garden and "Violet Street" will, of course, contrast strongly in this poem, & throughout the entire text, with harmful literary influences and the violence of "boys I ran with" who "tore up root and branch". The enemies of Art and the man have been scoped out early and given a name: traditional lyricism, contemporary bourgeois art, the Nazis. The child-poet's never to stop looking for the lost garden.

Morton's work is at its most genuine only as a chronicle of the struggles of a literary movement in its infancy but that's a sense of strength nourished by my own sympathies for the traditional avant-garde. Particularly endearing to me is the account of Schwitters' devotion to Merz as artistic principle—"The will toward a new style" ("Hollandada",33)—even through the most terrible periods in his life: forced exile, personal ridicule, alienation from family and home. Schwitters' rejection by Richard Huelsenbeck, the founder of Berlin Dada, was the least of his troubles. He could easily dismiss the fake "Huelsendadas" of the art world, "husks of artists/after the kernel's winnowed out" ("Huelsendada", 29) but that, of course, was nothing compared to life in Nazi Germany ("Death Row: Cell 43"), the nation's "war/on abstract art" ("Great Moments in Modern Art", 63) and growing separation from wife and Hanover Merzbau and imprisonment in Scotland. His Dada contra mundum optimism was bound to give way to the growing shadows (as recorded in "How My Life Has Changed"):

Always I have gone on painting
as condemned men the night before the gallows
play poker in their cells.
At last I even had a show
at Jack Bilbo's, the art gangsgter's gallery
- nothing sold. And at the opening
I received a telegram - Helma was dead
and my Hanover home struck by bombs.
Helma, my best friend for life
along with my life's work, both gone (75)

But, of course, after all this it's metaphor more than reality of art that prevails at the end of Morton's account. To vindicate Schwitters against the personal attacks & confirm his place in literary history, he's had to lay out the cut-ups of Dada art (in the manner of Tzara's "simultaneous poem") and then reassemble them into an enduring Schwitters whole, as if the collage is alone the message.In the "Afterword" Morton speaks of "another generation [that's] making some of the same discoveries again". At Sheveningen beach with the van Doesburgs he exclaims the waves "are dada!" (34); his home at Number 5 Waldhausenstrasse (39) is a veritable scene of  dada euphoria"; he even stands "elbow deep in the market's fierce poetry" (51) among the discarded proofs at the Molling factory. The Merz principle with its refrain of "Any rags, any bones, any bottles today" ("Enemy Alien", 71), sung like the antiphony throughout his entire life, is lauded as a real legacy-maker.

Perhaps if I were Kurt
I would have given up—quickly aging
in the bombed out streets of London,
unable to go home for fear;
hearing months after of how his wife died,
how allied bombs struck his Hannover home
making rubble of his column and all
the beloved work of thirty year
—all Hitler hadn't already burned.

But inside, Kurt never grew old.
In the bleakest post war days
when foul German crimes
turned up in the ashes
he was starting over: a new love,
a new home in the mountains,
plans to rebuild the Merzbau, to print
a new magazine—right up to the end
Kurt was beginning— ("Hausmann Remembers", 88-89)

The son's own riposte in "Ernst Replies" (90) says pretty much the same thing, true to pretty much the same overarching metaphor. (The concluding "column of light" image suggests even the "heliocentric" metaphor that Derrida famously says is a sign of suspicious essentialist discourses.) Schwitters' life doesn't end (as it very well could have) with the desperate tone of Antonin Artaud, the dramatist driven to madness and disdain of the world at the same time. Schwitters' is not the aberrant vision of fame in which followers are pigs "who eat too much" and the writer a permanently broken 'schizo' figure who cannot eat at the same table "without spitting" (Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings,585). Of course, Schwitters is not Artaud, temperamentally & stylistically very different, but the life trajectories of the suffering artists do seem the same everywhere. Morton had every right to make the Schwitters story an open signifier, situating his poetic energies more in the textual than biographical with plenty of room for what Dom Sylvester Houédard called "borderblur".

Schwitters by temperament and practice would have warred instinctively against Morton's Merzbook, and not least because it records none of the more accidental (and more interestingly twisting) interweaves in Dada & life. Meaning, especially poetic meaning, can't lie in one official homogenous narrative. In fact, Morton never really advances beyond the opening Wordsworthian romanticism of "Influence". The biographer-poet is as strongly tied to hero-worship as the Lake Poet is to the deification of Nature & the noble rustic. When the poet idealizes the broken pathways of real art (of which there are many in Schwitters' life and any one of which had the potential to give a very different account), bad Dada always results.

Poetry, research bodies and more laughable arts funding, again

Adam Dickinson

Arts funding in Canada has taken a turn for the absurd or perhaps just the predictable. Brock University English teacher Adam Dickinson has just received a $60,000 "Research/Creation in the Fine Arts" grant in order "to write poetry about the impact of environmental chemicals and other invaders on his body". As he's routinely tested for the presence of harmful toxins, bacteria & viruses in his own body, such as mercury, lead, West Nile virus, etc., he'll record his own personal observations in verse. His literary investigations will eventually result in a book entitled Anatomic: Semiotic bodies, chemical environments for which an additional "standard research grant" of $13, 568 has been awarded.

Parroting Christian Bök, Dickinson's dubbed his work "a poetry of science". While not as outrageous as the goal to program bacteria to write poetry ( I wonder whether Bök's grant for 'Xenotext' fell under the same "Social Sciences and Humanities" funding rubric ), Anatomic is certainly another example of the fashionable arts and science mergers to be found these days in most Humanities departments. On its own merits the "poetry as science" idea is food for the imagination but as a source of funding it's certainly a intrusion of the arts into areas for which they're laughably unsuited. The language arts instructor as microbiologist seems to be a growing trend out there! Subsidized projects of this wildly implausible kind may be what's fuelling the recent anti-Arts funding sentiment everywhere: just this sense of a joke gone too far.

Now that poetry's to be recorded in DNA for posterity or used to gauge the impact of synthetic chemicals, arts funding can now be justified as "interdisciplinary": and not one but two grants are to be awarded in this case, one each for the work's "science" and "poetry writing" components. Government agencies can say they now distribute monies more equally among competing research proposals & avoid the accusation that they favour only scientific initiatives: a sad concession, of course, to the gross 'capitalization' of education. Again, as interesting (even avant-garde) creation in its own right the "science of poetry" genre will certainly have a long shelf life. Yes, long live creativity attuned to globalized forces!

But in a climate of applications & "literacy by bureaucracy", Dickinson can no more "explore how our bodies are impacted medically and culturally by the world we live in" than any poet or any book of verse. To my mind, it's more of the usual brash brand-labelling of poetic genres meant to attract a lucrative undergraduate market. The public shouldn't have to pay for something that by nature has always remained 'free' & potentially liberating: a lovely "strange manuscript found in a copper cyclinder" to be entrusted always to the gifted few and generously transmitted through a "collective recognition" (Antonio Negri) of poetry's own humanizing power. And the poet ought never to be a research 'body' in this ridiculously self-absorbed sense.

Graffiti haiku from Spain





Graffiti is a rightful appropriation of public spaces (similar in spirit to Schwitters' Merzbilden) that, in my view, can add a degree of artistic beauty to what will be an otherwise dreary cityscape. I recently saw graffiti art in Spain to equal, in energy & individuality, Joan Miró's art logo (such as the one at Barcelona's biggest bank, La Caixa) and public installations: in fact, compared to it even Miró may look bourgeois, perhaps even outdated (ironically, the very criticism he levelled against his rival Picasso). Portuguese street artist Odeith's wall murals are remarkably striking creations, and though his work's found in the slums of Lisbon, they seem as much a part of the urban aesthetics as the ports, cathedrals and glazed facades. This contemporary work by the new masters has the distinctive feel of both art and social protest.

Remarkable as the graffiti sketched and sprayed on walls, city barriers & highway overpasses is, there are also the hundreds of abandoned farm houses strewn along the countryside whose walls have been turned into a living canvas. The arid landscape, rather than being violated in any way, drew a vitality from the colourful lettering and designs that was remarkable to see. The real Prado resides here. Needless to say, the result proved to be particularly inspiring to me.

Despite the language difficulties, I've constructed a series of 'graffiti haiku' comprised of actual graffiti (in italics) and the more readable business adverts given in English & Spanish. Their juxtaposition everywhere was too tempting to overlook. Purists might object to their abject lack of authorial 'vision' as if language as I saw it displayed in a foreign country couldn't be trusted to speak for itself. Nonetheless, it's my hope that the 'break' (kireji) between graffiti and commerce signals a significant contrast between two very different language sets. To capture some of that prevailing 'social protest' mood is a prerequisite to what I've tried to do here.

sonar tzar—

pont du Diable

Olae!—

olae! olae! olae!

Tzar!—

Nitrato de Chile

spore—

prats de rei

Ibex—

torrente del Martí

Crux—

merci, gracias, thank you!

Hank—

la seu d'urgell

Koooors—

abierto dies y noches

Rabia trick—

Mc Auto

Game 1492—

hotel

AKA Topa—

zona de servicios

Poeas suck—

Cars & Cars

A poem for the rioters...

                                   What had I to plead
  When death stood o'er me with his threatening lance,
When reason left me in the time of need,
  And sense was lost in terror or in trance?
                                             (Christopher Smart)

"The worms of Youth"

To the topless, & the enraged who are high! toYou kicked down,
                I concede the worms,

 vomit in yr smile, a shirt & ascot opening on true slim-waistedness
  (the odd over-45 crookback, too)

               Whether you text or crew in the streets,
  the worms, worms! Give it bad as anything old school and his royal
historian have got—

               Don't ask, "What had I to plead?"

  Interface between mouth and a crying boy's sleeve still sticks!

Invariably wrong to say it til after dark: which is a knock 'gainst blacks
  & flashing! and the young!

  Way it's been & things that never change

  Walking holding beers by the neck (for example) won't change, too
nor tattoos nor red-faced marxists:

                      ectasy captured by the gestapo who don't get
pissed off anymore but live to write the story

                       (who do it running!)

Towards a poetry of rioting...

Me, I hate the crowd, the herd. It always seems to me stupid or guilty of vile atrocities...I have never liked the crowd except on days of riot, if even then!...On those days there is a great breath in the air—one feels intoxicated by a human poetry as large as that of nature, but more ardent. (Gustave Flaubert, cited in Hardt & Negri's Commonwealth)

Creating is...a hugeness, an excedence, something which unleashes a surplus of productivity. Now, precisely at a time when labour power is cognitive, the desire for artistic expression presents itself in all places; when the mass of workers transforms itself into a multitude of of singular workers, the artistic act invests the forms of life, and these forms of life become the flesh of the world (Antonio Negri, Art & Multitude)

I would never try to romanticize the recent London riots nor use the term 'poetry' as a radically new aestheticization of mob violence. Yet it is strangely tempting to do so. Marxist thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Commonwealth make the usual sort of case for 'violent overthrow' & reorganization of society along the lines of a utopian notion of the 'common', even going so far as to say that violent acts of resistance, such as we've seen in urban uprisings everywhere, can be seen as a legitimate form of expression against the hierarchies of world capitalism. Mob violence springing almost spontaneously from a base of indignation (in the tradition of 'jacquerie revolts') can even be envisaged as a new sort of poetry of the future: "We might say, then...that we hate the crowd except in its days of rebellion, when it achieves a kind of human poetry." (245)

I like the forward-looking character of this new "human poetry". It's this notion of poetry of rebellion, while interesting as a contemporary poetics & even more interesting as a new, more significant 'avant-garde', that deserves attention. Not the traditional workbench materials of art but the streets have been turned into a collage of images of revolt and threatening mob rule. New media artist David Lewis-Baker, seeing the recent violence as "a surface reflection of a much deeper series of interrelated social and economic problems", has given artistic form to these deeper eruptive forces in his digital conceptual series entitled "London Riots" collages. Though the 'conceptual art' terminology's traditional (sounding even a little outdated), Lewis-Baker constructs from a uniquely new "geography of rebellion" (Hardt & Negri): the most spontaneous & violent type of art imaginable. YouTube has lately posted a video collage (comprising of BBC interviewer, West Indian writer & broadcaster Darcus Howe and background images of post-rioting Croydon) that's much closer to a sense of the "interrelated social and economic problems" than Lewis-Baker's.

I, too, like Flaubert, hate the crowd at its most stupidly violent and moronic but like Marxist critics I also fear & respect it. And ambivalence like mine about a poetry of rioting seems to have been exploited by media already.The Sun's infamous Wednesday, August 10 "Shop a Moron" headline is just as much new media art as a call to "name and shame rioters". As Jacques Rancière theorizes in The Emancipated Spectator, there is perhaps a "dialectic inherent in the political montage of images" like this one, with the potential to cause an  "inversion of life". The Sun's front-page presentation of the London rioters is, on the face of it, artistic 'collage' and a vehicle also for political debate about causes and consequences. But as art, and as art only, it links the outsider like me to a system that both causes revolt and yet is brazen enough to use public media to denounce it. In this new artistic regime you're guilty by viewing, but it is a first step towards the emancipation (or 'subtraction') of the spectator from complicity & oppression. Here's a new revolutionary sense of literary 'making' from which we'll be excluded if viewing eyes remain clouded by hatred, neoliberal prejudices and even a traditional poetics.

As a poet with eye on world events I have to see poetry even in places where the old familiar grounds are being wildly deterritorialized. Both the subject & means of artistic expression have been profoundly altered. Perhaps the traditional language of poetry itself, faced with the realities of aggressive new urban codes, infrastructures of inner city poverty, and handheld technologies (like the BlackBerry) wielded as instruments of mobilization & violence, is moribund. After all, language per se now shares the stage with competing images, feelings and practices of globalized life. Perhaps what the new media art reveal is the very image of the decline of language's cultural hegemony. Again, Rancière, in a discussion of the "intolerable image": "we need images of action, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator... is a bad thing." (87) As a poet I have to be particularly attuned to the "intolerable image"of street rioting, and see the attempt to describe it just as spectator (namely, via traditional verse) as a "bad thing": something that amounts to a paradox.

But the paradox (as the new revolutionary poetics goes) can be resolved in action itself. Only a poetry  codified in tradition is capable of sitting still long enough to watch the rioting: a position that, as we know, serves only to implicate its defenders & practitioners.The poet who preaches or theorizes only is, in other words, the most onerous, shamelessly removed from the rhythms of the suburbs, banlieue, & favelas, the storefronts and life in the metropolis, cowardly engaged in abstract experimentation only (too spiritless to change poetry from academic to real activity). Academic poetry keeps alive the oppressive hierarchies of language, thought & reality through its failure to engage with the lyrical forces of the common.To write is to dare to invert the conditions of life itself (Rancière), & always live immersed in the "poverty and precariousness" of the multitude (Hardt & Negri). In my previous post on John Berryman I've referred to this materialist dynamics of creativity as 'biolyrical'.

From the viewpoint of the spectator, the biolyrical can't help but offer up to the literary imagination only the "intolerable" either-ors: street protesters as front-page gangsters or cultural heroes, morons with a taste for gratuitous violence or the new avant-garde who use the streets, the technology of handhelds and the porous grid work of suburban London 'space' as the arena of a new poetics. It's a sort of 'bad faith' encounter with significant socio-cultural events that's to be overcome only through direct participation. As Antonio Negri says in a work devoted to examining in more depth the role of art in a new communist order, "the artist is...the symbol of realized subversion and of liberated freedom." (Negri, Art & Multitude, 52) It's a hope (both Negri and I share) that doesn't come without commitment to the democratic processes at work in cultural production & overthrow of the pernicious solitude of all academic theorizing (which Negri calls an "aesthetic illusion"). True art can only be done in communities, even when they occasionaly have to erupt into street violence.

John Berryman: and lyricism to die for

I've mentioned the name John Berryman at only one place here but choosing the most opportune occasion to do it: referring to him in a discussion of my own poetry beginnings as the one poet to whom a true contemporary lyric is most beholden, even going so far as to make him (certainly the Henry persona) into a 'body without organs'. It's a poetry that's found in a clear identity & position of the lyrical voice: in fact, so closely tied to the bloodied body of its subject is Berryman's lyric in general I'd be tempted to call it 'biolyrical'. But the biolyrical, of course, can never be torn from its host body: whatever the torture being inflicted.

Berryman's "The Song of the Tortured Girls" on YouTube isn't just the best poem I've ever heard read anywhere by anyone (compare it to Yeats's awful lilt): it's quite possibly the only way to read a poem. The poet's anguished narrative, told in Berryman's own hoarse, scarcely sober rhythms, cannot be separated in intensity and truth from that of the young girl ("heroine of the French resistance") who's being tortured by the Nazis as we read. There are possibly two places in the poem where pain's at its most unendurable. The rending of a spirit & body is to be identified in the poet's (the poetic) voice alone.

Berryman's is not the lyrical voice poised outside of life (as how can the lyric tied intransigently to the body every be); in fact, so much fashionable 'intellectual' poetry, having cast off the word's true flesh, is often coldly indifferent to social relevance. The poem's heart—and there are as many hearts as girls who fought for liberation, the French heroine of Berryman's poem metonymic for an entire movement—is to be accessed, even as we read, through the movements of torture & resistance themselves: it's the very life world that's indistinguishable from Berryman's verses, and not just a narrative. What an artistic achievement!

Anything as powerful as this (both a poem & a reading) has the potential to help the reader find a way out of the 'heartless' hegemony of pastiche, installation and language poetry today, towards a lyricism to die for. When language has the force of resistance & physical pain inscribed within it, poetry writing in Berryman must necessarily be conceived as both corporeal and lyrical activity, i.e. 'biolyrical'. Here's a poetry with the power to restore to a position of centrality the subject of verse all but submerged in too abstract post-avant theory.

Hear and feel for yourself.

"The Song of the Tortured Girls"

After a little I could not have told -
But no one asked me this – why I was there.
I asked. The ceiling of that place was high.
And there were sudden noises, which I made.
I must have stayed there a long time today:
My cup of soup was gone when they brought me back.
-
Often ‘Nothing worse can now come to us’
I thought, the winter the young men stayed away,
My uncle died and mother broke her crutch.
And then the strange room where the brightest light
Does not shine on the strange men: shines on me.
I feel them stretch my youth and throw a switch.
-
Through leafless branches the sweet wind blows
Making a mild sound, softer than a moan;
High in a pass once where we put our tent,
Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.
- I no longer remember what they want. -
Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.
                                   (from Collected Poems 1937-1971, 1989)

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.