After seven inches of snow and a warm spell, the whole city steams wetly– a hot dish the waiter’s lifted the lid of clouds off of. I have a squash cooking in the oven. Maybe you’re like me, bored of thought in poetry…
“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, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.”
That’s the poet Jack Spicer, writing in 1957 in his volume After Lorca, in a letter addressed to his subject.
Lorca was dead: hard to satisfy, but very patient. Spicer didn’t mind. A self-dimming literary star of the late-50s/early-60s San Francisco Renaissance (who, 44 years after his 40-year life, has a new Collected Poetry), Spicer was a prolific and wise un-intellectual, one of the great anti-theory theorists of the last century of poetry. His muse was magic and Martians; he blushed if he couldn’t step out the back door before the end of his own poem; his writing was sublime, irritating and slippery. In his prose, he constantly tested and shucked his own terminology, like a man trying on coats and finding each of them soaked. In the second of his “Imaginary Elegies,” Spicer writes:
The poet builds a castle on the moon
Made of dead skin and glass. Here marvelous machines
Stamp Chinese fortune cookies full of love.
Tarot cards
Make love to other Tarot cards. Here agony
Is just imagination’s sister bitch.
This is the sun-tormented castle which
Reflects the sun. Da dada da.
The castle sings.
I read this and reams of his other poems today, and I too long to apply Spicer’s romance– to write to his wordless tangible– but the man is hard to pin down. In the same letter to Lorca quoted above, he slips from conditional to declarative. “The poem is a collage of the real.” So is the poem he longed for grasped now? Or is he speaking of the to-be-written Poem, no closer to his pen for its situational lower case? Who knows? In any case, Spicer asserts, though the lemon molds and the newspaper yellows, the real objects crowding your poem need not– do not– connect, but correspond. And strangely so: in translation or across time, “that lemon may become this lemon, or it may even become this piece of seaweed, or this particular color of gray in this ocean. One does not need to imagine that lemon; one needs to discover it.” (Spicer writes that, in translating unfamiliar words in Lorca, “I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right.”)
Before his necessarily-perfect intuition, his craving to let things speak by appearing, and his passion for collage over intellect, I think I feel it: I am bored of thought in poetry, the riding crop and noble countenance of the reasoning mind.
So, who practices the concrete slyness Spicer preaches? The poetry I love (the poetry I love this week) is squashed and shifty, trying impossibly to drag things in while pressing mind’s evidence out, asyntactic. These little poems by Chris Glomski (whom I have my friend Joanna to thank for discovering– and who has a chapbook called Eidolon) seem to. And, scrolling back thirty-five years, we find Louis Zukofky’s final sequence “80 Flowers,” in a beautiful new edition of his selected poems. The sequence opens–
Heart us invisibly thyme time
round rose bud fire downland
bird tread quagmire dry gill-over-the-ground
stem-square leaves-cordate earth race horsethyme
breath neighbors a mace nays
sorrow of harness pulses pent
thus fruit pod split four
one-fourth ripens unwithering gaping
–and its longing (for transparency, herbs sprouting beyond the burnoff of thought?) hurts my chest. You can dwell your whole life in a doomed endeavor– in a poem of objects not words, of things as unthought as thyme or a pinball or seagulls– or die in it. Tonight (the squash is probably done) the poem of the pointing finger seems the noblest one, the one closest at hand.