Lurking behind my last post, on plusquamperfekt German poets, was a hasty, and none-too-Swift judgment of a lovely little list at the Lilliput Review: 100 Near Perfect Books of Poetry. Generously, readers are encouraged to modestly propose new titles in exchange for two free issues of the Review.
My less generous reaction to the enterprise was conditioned, I guess, by a resistance to imprecision: whereas the German list targeted individual collections with distinct criteria, I balked at what seemed, after a glance at the Lilliput list, a generic top 100. To wit: Neruda’a 100 Love Sonnets and Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese? If a list includes translations, why only Lorca (in New York!) and Rilke to represent the richness of the European continent (not a single French poet)? An anthology here, a Selected there, Oppen’s Primitive (why not his Collected?)…
All this, of course, misses the content for the form. Any list, however numerous (in contributions and contributors), however numinous (in content and contentions) is necessarily idiosyncratic. As Jack Spicer wrote in Language: “Certainly the collection and analysis of dialect vocabulary in California has revealed to the present writers a situation even more varied than that of northwestern Ohio.”
Language, that is, the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America?, not Language (White Rabbit Press, 1965 :: which surely belongs on someone’s list of perfect books.)
In the Spring of 2005, when Kenyon was graced with Fanny Howe, she brought Peter Gizzi to read. While he was in town, he took the time to give an (idio)lecture on Spicer, syncretizing Spicer’s poems with Bruce Connor’s “A Film.” It was magic: I wasn’t the only student in attendance that night to later lay in The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (1998) edited by Gizzi, which forms a cumulative tale with that year’s Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, edited by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian.
Unlike Spicer’s own, both books are still in print: from Wesleyan University Press, which, perfectly, published Silence and The Tennis Court Oath back to back in 1961 and 2, and which, on September 30, will impress the colophon on a decade of service to Spicer studies with My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (edited by Gizzi and Killian).
Writing of Dictation and “A Textbook of Poetry,” the first of the four recorded lectures Spicer gave in the months before his untimely death, Gizzi notes that “instead of focusing on poetic invention, Spicer introduces an idiosyncratic genealogy of poetic reception.” Spicer’s genealogy is idiosyncratic (the Yeats of A Vision rather than The Tower) or was, but it is also always idiosyncretic, by which I mean it unites (Blake Blaser) rather than unties (yours ?? mine).
Lilliput, well put. Let there be near perfect lists upon lists.
? David W. Reed and John L. (=Jack) Spicer, “Correlation Methods of Comparing Idiolects in a Transition Area.” (Volume 25, Number 3, Part 1: 348-359.)