summoning the spirits: spicer’s lorca
by
Douglas Messerli
Jack
Spicer After Lorca (New York: New York Review Book, 2021)
Although
I had previously read around in Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, even “writing
through” one of the poems that he had “written through” Lorca for my 1998
collection of poetry After. But I had never read the entire work.
According to Peter Gizzi’s highly intelligent Preface, Spicer saw this work as part of his attempt to develop a “renewed and expanded sense of literary tradition, one that is closer to the dynamic transmission common in folk cultures than to the hierarchies of ‘who begat whom’ prized by the English departments of the period” (and one might add, and by many of the English departments of today).
Moreover, it is clear that Spice was also
deeply considering the flux between an author’s various genres of writing,
arguing—long before the remarkable study, My Emily Dickinson by Susan
Howe (1985)—that Dickinson’s poetry, prose, and even letter writing cannot
truly be separated:
“The
reason for the difficulty of drawing a line between the poetry and prose in
Emily Dickinson’s letters may be that she did not wish such a line to be drawn.
If large portions of her correspondence are considered not as mere letters—and,
indeed, the seldom communicate information, or have much to do with the person
to whom they were written—but as experiments in a heightened prose combined
with poetry, a new approach to both her letters and her poetry opens up.”
Only a year later, as Gizzi notes, Spicer
would explore this same “porous boundary” in After Lorca including
letters written to the dead poet which serve not only as a kind of summoning up
of the poet’s existence, to help him perhaps, move through the associative
“translations” of Lorca’s own work, but to explore his own poetics which helps
the interleaved letters throughout this collection to read, at moments, a bit
like manifestos.
These poems published in 1957, coming
after he had written seriously for more than ten years, but representing,
nonetheless, a new beginning for Spicer, should not be read, I’d argue, as
poems loosely based on Garcia Lorca’s work or even works written “in the
manner” of the poet, but rather the original Lorca works perceives as a kind of spur to compose what Gizzi
describes as “a community of poems that ‘echo and re-echo against each other’
to ‘create resonances,’” Spicer arguing that “Poems cannot live alone any more
than we can.”*
Spicer himself, in his fictional letter
from Lorca with which the book begins, quite humorously presenting us with a
slightly disgruntled poem having waken up form a twenty-some year nap to be
bothered by the young poet supposedly “translating” his work. Spicer as Lorca
makes clear that his relationship to the poems themselves is more of the mind
than of the literal text:
“It
must be made clear at the start that these poems are not translations. In even
the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or
substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the
meaning of the poem as I had written it. More often he takes one of my poems
and adjoins to half of it another half of his own, giving rather the effect of
an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal
is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not
write at all (one supposes they must be his) executed in a somewhat fanciful
imitation of my earlier style. The reader is given no indication which of the
poems belong to which category, and I have further complicated the problem
(with malice afterthought I must admit) by sending Mr. Spicer several poems
written after my death which he has also translated and included here.”
Accordingly, in my discussion of Spicer’s
works I will make utterly no attempt to point out links the Lorca or comment on
the relationship of Lorca’s poetry to Spicer’s works. I’ll leave that to
knowledgeable Lorca scholars. My reading of this work is as if all the pieces
were Spicer’s and should be read as new poems. Even though I have read through
most of Lorca’s work and might make obvious links, I will not do so.
I should add, before proceeding, however,
that Spicer’s choice of attempting to enter the mind of Lorca was not simply a
matter of poetic expression, but clearly derived from his sense of their shared
gay sexuality and Spicer’s own recognition that both would die early, Lorca, of
course, from guns of Franco’s fascist regime, while Spicer would be killed by
alcohol.
And finally, as Spicer hints in the works
first letter to Lorca—although he claims it is only one of several already
sent—he has focused on Lorca simply because his is dead, and the dead, as he
puts it, “are very patient,” unlike the friends he meets up with in the bars:
“Presently
I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them
and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other or even listen to
each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. I will
go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep—and my dreams will be prose. Even
the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.”
And although Lorca may be the centerpiece
of these poems, Spicer is not a loyal lover, writing, for example, about
another notoriously gay poem Rimbaud in the seeming puzzling “Ballad of Seven
Passages.” The seven passages, which the poet reminds us, is also the number of
letters in Rimbaud’s name, may refer to the several amazing periods of the
French poet’s short life sketched out something like this: his early childhood
(1854-1861), his school and teen years when he began writing some of his greatest
poems (1861-1871), his tempestuous life with Verlaine (1871-1875), his travels
when Verlaine was released from prison and Rimbaud had already given up his
writing career (1875-1880), his settling in Abyssinia where became a friend of
Governor of Harar, Ras Mekonnen Wolde Mikael Wolde Melekot, father of future
emperor Haile Selassie and briefly ran guns for Menelik II, then king of Shewa (1880-1888),
his later business man days running, rather unhappily a store in Harar
(1888-1890), and his illness and upon his return to France, his death at age 37
(1891)—a lifetime narrative that Spicer likens to the six vowels, “A E I O U Y
/ And that stony vowel called death.”
But the seven passages may as well call
up Rimbaud’s poem, “Poets at Seven,” or “Poets at Seven Years of Age,” the age
where the future poet was evidently already dreaming of a desert life:
At
seven he was making novels about life
In the great desert, where
ravished Freedom shines,
Forests, suns, riverbanks,
savannahs! – He used
Illustrated weeklies where he
saw, blushing,
Smiling Italian girls, and
Spanish women.
Which
explains perhaps Spicer’s invocation throughout the poem that Rimbaud was
“older than you are when he was dead,” or the poet’s slightly campy line “I
tell you, darling, beauty was never as old as he was....”
Fascinatingly, Lorca, who was born in
June 1898, was shot and killed around August 19, 1936, living a life just a
couple of months longer than Rimbaud. And amazingly—something the poet could
not have imagined—is that Spicer himself would die on August 17 at 40, two days
before the same date as García Lorcas’ death and only a few years older than
both of these figures—another gay poet who died too young.
But the major refrain in this poem—written
“for Ebbe Borregaard,” another North Beach poet also published, like Spicer and
Robert Duncan, by Joe Dunn’s White Rabbit Press—“Your heart will never break at
what you are hearing,” suggesting perhaps that as a straight man (the beautiful
blond-haired Borregaard and his wife Joy, together ran Borregaard’s Museum and
Art Gallery, a venue for Helen Adams’ plays and lectures by Robert Duncan and
Jess) as not being as sensitive to Rimbaud’s sad story, or perhaps just hinting
that hearing about such a tragic life can never the same as living it.
Spicer’s poem titled “Verlaine,” speaks of
the poet’s “song which I shall never sing,” repeating over and over his seeming
recognition that the greatest song he has heard came from the lips of his
younger lover not from his own. And, of course, one must remember that like
Spicer, Verlaine, particularly after Rimbaud disappeared from his life, was in
regular attendance at bars, where, although he wrote some creditable works of
poetry, he spent “Hours in the shadow” of “A song of a star that’s alive /
Above enduring day,” writing his famed Les Poètes maudits (The Cursed
Poets)** of 1888 which documented the work of Rimbaud, Mallermé, and others
of his friends.
Indeed, despite some lovely comical
moments such as the two entertaining scenarios for Buster Keaton, “Buster
Keaton’s Ride” and “Buster Keaton Rides Again: A Sequel” and a few other such
poems, Spicer’s work, despite being his first published book, might be
described as autumnal in tone, a book about the dying and dead.
In “Ode for Walt Whitman,” for example
Spicer calls up yet another gay poet from the dead, describing his vast
depictions of life, kids singing “showing off their bodies,” workers at the
“wheel, at oil, the rawhide, and the hammer,” “Ninety thousand miners...drawing
silver out of boulders,” an almost madly energetic world where “no one went to
sleep” and people didn’t confuse themselves with metaphor: “No one wanted to be
a river / No one loved the big leaves, no one....” Yet Whitman’s grand projections of the pure and
innocent American cannot seem to save the people themselves from time and
death.
Agony, agony, dream, leaven,
and dream.
This is the world, my
friend, agony, agony.
The dead decompose
themselves under the clock of the cities.
War enters weeping, with a
million gray rats.
The rich give to their
girlfriends
Tiny illuminated dyings
And life is not noble, or
good, or sacred.
Whitman’s
vision of America, alas, does not include the reality of his own or perhaps
anyone’s own time, does not allow for the fact that “Tomorrow his loves will be
rock and Time....”
That is why, the poet argues, he does not
cry out, in praise, of “old Walt Whitman,
Against the little boy who
writes
A girl’s name on his pillow,
Or the kid who puts on a
wedding dress
In the darkness of a closet
Or the lonely men in bars
Who
drink with sickness the waters of prostitution
Or
the men with green eyelids
Who
love men and scald their lips in silence,
Switching
the standard epithets by which queers are usually described, Spicer calls down
his wrath on the true spoilers of the society, the patriarchal heterosexual males:
Against the rest of you
always, who give the kids
Drippings of sucked-off death
with sour poison.
Against the rest of you always
Fairies of North America,
Pajaros of Havana
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cadiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Adelaidas of Portugal,
Cocksuckers of all the world,
assassins of doves,
Slaves of women, lapdogs of
their dressing tables,
Opening their flys in pants
with a fever of fans
Or ambushed in the rigid
landscapes of poison.
Let there be no mercy. Death
Trickles from all of your
eyes....
Rather, he calls for his “beautiful Walt
Whitman” asleep on the banks of the Hudson to continue to “Sleep, there is
nothing left here.”
A dance of walls shakes across
the prairies
And America drowns itself with
machines and weeping.
Let the hard air of midnight
Sweep away all the flowers and
letters from the arch in
which you sleep
And a little black boy
announce to the white men in gold
The arrival of the reign of
the ear of wheat.
In one of the most powerful poems Spicer
ever wrote, he invokes his wrath, in a very Whitmanian manner, against the
failure of Whitman’s own vision, warning perhaps of the dangers that generally
befall such visionaries— just like Rimbaud and Lorca himself.
But the reality of words, the notion that
life should be expressed not in connections, metaphors, similes, or symbols as
Whitman realized becomes the very topic of Spicer’s next poem to Lorca:
“I
would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the
reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage
is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one
which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the
poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I
would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound
in it but the pointing of a finger.”
By letter’s end Spicer comes back to his
idea of “correspondences” instead of “connections.”
“Things
do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to
translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring
them across time.... Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you
have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece
of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds
to them. That is how we dead men write to each other. Love, Jack”
Indeed, for Spicer the animated energy of
life around us keeps interrupting the abstract images of our own making. Even
“Poor Narcissus” peering into “the dim heart of the river” in this volume’s
poem “Narcissus” has his intense vision interrupted by the “Ripples and
sleeping fish,” along with the “Songbird and butterflies” that cross his
(Narcissus’) white eyes. Almost absurdly looking over the shoulder of standard
figure of gay love, the poet writes:
I so tall beside
you
Flower of love
Poor Narcissus
How wide-awake the
frogs are
They won’t stay out
of the surface
In which your
madness and my madness
Mirrors itself
Poor Narcissus
My sorrow
Self of my sorrow.
So engaged does the reader become in
Spicer’s tour of the inspirations provided by his beloved brother poet Lorca,
that we become almost tearful, surely saddened when he confesses in his last
letter to Lorca that “The connection between us, which had been fading away
with the summer, is now finally broken. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to
the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious spirit, to
the printed page. It is over, this intimate communion with the ghost of García
Lorca, and I wonder now how it was ever able to happen.
Like all magic visions which bring poets
into creation, Spicer’s inevitably comes to an end. The image of his own vision
of his imagined face that he found in Lorca’s, like Narcissus’s broken by the
active world around him:
I crawled into bed
with sorrow that night
Couldn’t touch his
fingers. See the splash
Of the water
The noisy movement
of cloud
The push of the
humpbacked mountains
Deep at the sand’s
edge.
*I
cannot resist an aside since I have attempted in many instances to do precisely
in my own work what Spicer does in this collection. In After I actually
did attempt to “translate” the work of the chosen poets of other languages,
while speaking in a voice that was more my own than theirs, an issue that, I
should imagine, plagues many a “true” translator, but which I simply rejected
out of hand, not knowing any of the language which I was translating from well
enough to be sensitive to tone. Yet in some cases, I feel I perhaps closer in
sensibility, if not in tone, diction, and cadence to the originals than more
constrained translations. But in the work written in 2001-2002, Between,
which remains unpublished, I attempted to do something much closer to what
Spicer is describing, in choosing single words and short phrases that called
out to me in my friend’s works that echoed their writing and our relationship,
that took a few of their words into myself to resonate, echo, and reappear in
new contexts of narrative and syntax. By working through their poetry I almost
felt as if I were rummaging through my friend’s closets, trying on some of
their clothes randomly, wandering about their rooms to glimpse bits and pieces
of their lives. Not their everyday lives, obviously, but their intellectual
lives. And, just as Spicer describes near the end of his work, I felt almost in
the experience of “writing” as if I were telepathically communicating with
poets themselves, some of with whom I came in close contact while with others I
remained at a distance. I then offered the poets to attempt the same by writing
back through the poems or through other of my works.
In the end, the experiment failed,
either because I could not at that time express my methods clearly enough or
simply they were not sympathetic to working in the same manner. Some used
formal devices, some simply pulling in phrases from my past work and plopping
them down into their own poetic units. But a few, notably Robert Creeley,
Robert Kelly, Charles Bernstein, Henri Deluy, Joe Ross (with whom I had often
collaborated previously), and Fanny Howe among others. Some wrote wonderful new
poems that nothing whatever to do with “correspondence,” and others simply
didn’t no how to begin. In any event, it taught me about my own process, and
that I had long been using this very method, without quite knowing it, to
communicate with my peers, along with my essays, memoirs, and reviews.
If, finally I would have to say, that
through this activity I have discovered William Carlos Williams and Getrude
Stein (a very odd pairing) to be my grandparents, I’d have to say that Spicer
is at least an uncle if the family of voices inside my head.
**My
own Green Integer press has published that title in English, translated by
Chase Madar.
Los
Angeles, February 13, 2022
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