Prodigal Son (Midway Along the Pathway)

17 Pages·2014·0.1 MB·English

by  M. D. Snediker

Criticism
Volume 51|Issue 3 Article 7
2009
Prodigal Son (Midway Along the Pathway)
M. D. Snediker
Queen's University
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Recommended Citation
Snediker, M. D. (2009) "Prodigal Son (Midway Along the Pathway),"Criticism: Vol. 51: Iss. 3, Article 7.
Available at:http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol51/iss3/7
PRODIGAL SON For you I would build a whole
(MIDWAY ALONG new universe around myself.
This isn’t shit it is poetry.
THE PATHWAY)
Shit
M. D. Snediker
Enters into it only as an
image. . . .
(“Love Poems”)
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The
Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer by
In 1975, Black Sparrow Press pub-
Jack Spicer. Edited by Peter Gizzi
lished The Collected Books of Jack
and Kevin Killian. Wesleyan
Spicer, edited by Spicer’s longtime
Poetry Series. Middletown,
friend and fellow poet, Robin Bla-
CT: Wesleyan University Press,
ser. The Black Sparrow Spicer, as
2008. Pp. 508, 10 illustrations.
an object, communicates a certain
$35.00 cloth.
version of Spicer that is as neces-
sary as it is incomplete. The cover
illustration depicts the tarot deck’s
Four of Cups—a pensive-seeming
man under a tree, with three
chalices in front of him, and a
fourth chalice ostensibly being of-
fered by a hand reaching out from
a cloud. Are we to imagine Spicer
as the pensive man in his cups, or
is Spicer the hand extending a
fourth chalice (in which the pen-
sive man qua reader shows little
evident i nterest)? Of course there
are many ways to interpret any
tarot. In the context of literary his-
tory, Spicer has existed—despite
the efforts of Black Sparrow Press
and coterminous critical attempts
at resuscitation—as the neglected
chalice, the unaccepted and/or un-
acceptable gift.
Spicer’s unacceptability, his sta-
ked position outside of poetic con-
vention or establishment, is duly
noted by Spicer’s admirers. His
poetry, however, is not simply that
Criticism, Summer 2009, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 489–504. ISSN: 0011-1589. 489
© 2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309.
490 M. D. SNEDIKER
of a rabble-rouser, despite Spicer’s Vocabulary Did This to Me does not
deep interest in the imbrication of displace Blaser’s 1975 edition, so
rabble and arousal. Poetry, like a much as honors it as crucial part of
slipknot, only rarely understands the ever-growing Spicer archive—
who or what within it, at any given ever-growing, thanks to the efforts
moment, is central. Indeed, the of Gizzi, Killian, Michael David-
aggressive, sometimes bullying, son, John Emil Vincent, and oth-
playfulness of Spicer’s poetics— ers. To say that the new edition is
eccentricity that in part explains grand—looks grand, feels expen-
his exclusion from a poetry world sive in all the ways in which the
beyond that of Berkeley, Cali- Black Sparrow perhaps utopically
fornia—has in past decades actu- does not—is not to say that Spicer
ally cozened Spicer’s adoption by has arrived. He was already here,
l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets, from but never so lucidly. Gizzi and Kil-
Buffalo to San Francisco. To be lian’s decisions are laudable, par-
sure, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry ticularly their inclusion of Spicer’s
and its perceived aspirations to- earliest poetry, which hitherto was
ward aberrance have become a available only in a separate vol-
convention unto itself. The latter’s ume.1 Each of Spicer’s serial se-
claiming of Spicer as arch-enabler, quences was originally published
like the Black Sparrow edition, in the form of a limited-run, illus-
gives a necessary but incomplete trated book; these books, produced
impression of Spicer’s importance by White Rabbit Press (principally
to contemporary poetics. operated by Spicer’s friend, Gra-
Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian’s ham Mackintosh), are works of art.
new edition of the collected poetry Illustration (most often by Spicer’s
of Spicer includes all of the serial friends or cohorts) and text twine
poetic sequences to be found in the into each other in the manner of
earlier volume, as well as his ear- William Blake’s illuminations.
lier nonserial poems, an extended Gizzi and Killian are therefore to
version of Spicer’s brilliant and hi- be commended for reproducing at
larious “Unvert Manifesto” (1956), the outset of each of Spicer’s indi-
and previously unpublished poems vidual books the original cover il-
from both Spicer’s early and later lustration of said work. Eventually,
productive years. Gizzi and Kil- ideally, we will have a facsimile of
lian’s edition offers a more ade- these works. Until then, we have
quate and less affectively distorting this incredible new edition. Spicer’s
account of Spicer’s amazing two poems have never looked so new.
decades of output. This new edi- And the surprise of rereading
tion is elegant and polished in all Spicer in this edition is great.
the ways the Black Sparrow im- In 1949, a twenty-four-year-old
portantly and justifi ably is not. My Spicer insisted that “[w]e must
ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 491
become singers, become entertain- seems for Spicer less paradigm of
ers. . . . There is more of Orpheus poetic charisma than natal mythol-
in Sophie Tucker than in R. P. ogy of poetic failure. We shall re-
Blackmur.”2 Bracketing the quasi- turn, likewise, to these ostensibly
Rimbaudian bravura of so preco- estranged narratives of failure and
cious a pronouncement—precocity charisma.
being advantageous for those Spicer’s reputation, far more than
who die so young as Rimbaud or that of other poets, has been adum-
Spicer (who died at forty)—this brated by his own pronunciamen-
dictum, notwithstanding its sur- tos, in part because Spicer seems to
facing throughout Spicer criticism, have found irresistible his peculiarly
suffers in its transparency so often teetering soapbox. At the same time,
being taken for granted. More sim- the foreclosures attendant to hold-
ply, Spicer’s accounts of his own ing Spicer to his own words can be
poetics too often are understood as redressed only in more scrupulous a
nonproblematically sincere, even relation to his provocation rather
as Spicer’s poetry admonishes us than recapitulation of it. I think, for
against so straightforward a sincer- instance, that there is a lot of Or-
ity. The foregoing dictum’s usual pheus in R. P. Blackmur; further,
gloss suggests that there is more of that Blackmur and Spicer have far
Sophie Tucker in Spicer than there more in common than literary his-
is of R. P. Blackmur, given Spicer’s tory and literary criticism would
supposed apostasy of the academy otherwise suggest. Beyond the bio-
in favor of a poetry along the graphical dovetail of Blackmur and
lines of Tucker’s burlesque and Spicer both dying in 1965 (Tucker,
vaudeville; although Blackmur for the record, died in 1966), Black-
only clumsily represents the acad- mur and Spicer equally engaged in
emy, per se, and more persuasively an ongoing study of what Blackmur
invokes a rigorous thoughtfulness denominated language as gesture.
not dissimilar from Spicer’s own. Not only language as gesture, but
Spicer’s poetry often speaks trucu- poet as gesture: Spicer, photogra-
lently against its own thoughtful- phically, has been preserved as a se-
ness, just as it speaks against the ries of gestures variously resonant
givenness of aforementioned sin- with his poetic production—Spicer,
cerity. Further, the gloss presumes hunched, Quasimodo of the Berke-
Spicer’s attachment to Orpheus ley Renaissance;3 Spicer, blurred
as obvious. Obvious, yes, if we equ- into a Francis Bacon of need, ruth-
ate Spicer’s career-long fascination lessly inseparable from ambitions
with Orpheus as self-explanatory. bent toward abdication of need;
Less obvious, if we honor Spicer’s gesture of obliquity, as though the
Orphic ambivalences. We shall re- sylph in a mirror, limit of a camera’s
turn to the matter of Orpheus, who capture.
492 M. D. SNEDIKER
Spicer as gesture: love child of limp With peals of distant ironical
wrist and the middle fi nger. Flipping laughter at every word
the bird, again and again and again. I have written or shall
As Spicer writes in his anti-Whitma- write,
nian “Song for Bird and Myself” Striking me with insults till
(1957) (in which the Bird on one level I fall helpless upon the
refers to Charlie “Bird” Parker), sand.4
Spicer’s “The Poem Isn’t Over” as
But the poem isn’t over.
accurately describes the constitutive
It keeps going
unfi nishability of Whitman’s own
Long after everybody
Leaves of Grass, a book revised under
Has settled down comfortably
the same name seven times, across
into laughter.
four decades.5 Only the coercions of
The bastards
chronology and adjudication would
On the other side of the paper
indicate each revision as an improve-
Keep laughing.
ment upon those preceding. More
listen.
interesting in relation to Spicer is the
stop laughing.
notion that Leaves of Grass, divorced
the poem isn’t over. Butterfl ies.
from the diachronic, coexists with
other versions of itself. Such is an
(70)
underlying motive in Spicer’s turn
to serial poems, and no less, his exp-
Spicer’s poem, more accurately, is
erimental poetic attempts at both
both anti-Whitmanian and Whit-
proliferating and sustaining simul-
manian. Whitman, campily char-
taneously multiple versions of per-
acterizing himself as “me imper-
sons. Whitman’s contribution to
turbe” (191), as often strikes the
American poetry too often is vitiated
pose of perturbation:
in terms of his ancestral function as
bardic gay avatar, as though Crane
Aware now, that amid all and Spicer learned how to write gay
the blab whose echoes poems thanks to Whitman’s earlier
recoil upon me, I have gay poems. Whitman’s testing of
not once had the least nondiachronic multiplicity is not
idea who or what I am, unrelated to questions of queer
But that before all my insolent poetic form; but the infl uence on
poems the real Me still Spicer of Whitman’s formal assays of
stands untouched, untold, genre can’t be underestimated—
altogether unreached, neither subordinated nor separated
Withdrawn far, mocking from either’s queer poetics.
me with mock-congratu- But back to perturbation. “Have
latory signs and bows, you ever wrestled with a bird / you
ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 493
idiotic reader?” (71). Spicer’s po- situations, but more so when
etry asks on many registers to be launched against the predicament
dismissed: as irritant, as irascibility. of poetry, as such:
In the case of “Song for Bird and
Myself,” the poem presumes it has —A human love object is
been dismissed before it necessarily untrue.
has been, or stages dismissability’s Screw you.
incontrovertability as grounds for
the poem’s short temper. It is wise, —A divine love object is
here, to think of Donald Winni- unfair
cott, for whom aggression is the Defi ne the air
infant’s experiment in testing the It walks in.
limits of another’s love. How long
will it take for you to leave me, as Imagine this as lyric poetry.
thunder that precedes the light-
ning of Don’t Leave Me. (307)
Spicer’s poems are both exercises
and experiments in gesture. As Spicer’s anger—as both abstraction
Blackmur writes, “[W]hen the lan- and particularity—is directed at
guage of words most succeeds it form, at voice, at the hypothesis of
becomes gesture in its words. . . .”6 content. This is to say that Spicer’s
All the more so in Spicer’s poetry, anger keenly surfaces in the rav-
in which the form of poetry cleaves eled snags of form, voice, content.
to poetic language, conventionally Or to cite Blackmur citing Othello,
understood. Spicer’s poems, at their “I understand a fury in your words /
most fl inty and confoundingly But not the words.”7
beautiful, are gestures. Not only in Blackmur published Language
the sense of gesturing toward, but as Gesture in 1954, as Spicer very
gesturing for their own sake. The much was reaching poetic boil.
poem as vehicle for some other Spicer’s poems came fast, just as
demonstration. If Whitman, ges- Blackmur was hammering away at
turally, conceives a poetics of cruis- a corresponding set of poetic prob-
ing, Spicer extends a Benjaminian lematics. Blackmur’s attachments
topos of cruising-in-ruin. Signals to Hart Crane and Emily Dickin-
are overdetermined, or undetected son chime with Spicer’s attach-
altogether. Proustian choreogra- ments to Crane and Dickinson. In
phies of implicit seduction cede to the case of Crane, Spicer might
demands, rejections, and regrets fi nd a template of fl aming inebri-
stitched with their own sense of in- ation burning itself out. In the
evitability. The anger of Spicer’s case of Dickinson, Spicer might
poetry is striking, not only as di- see in her extravagant variants a
rected at particular persons or model for Spicer’s variant-like
494 M. D. SNEDIKER
serial poems (intimated in Spicer’s if curmudgeonly essay on Crane.
brilliant review of Dickinson’s var- Two gay alcoholic poets who die be-
iorum edition). The poets that fore their careers could adequately
Language as Gesture eclectically ex- explain themselves. The teetering
plores are the poets to whom Spicer soapbox: let me say what I can while
likewise attaches (as, for instance, I am able.
in Spicer’s early poem for Hart The vicissitudes of the soapbox
Crane, “A Portrait of the Artist as are further complicated by Spicer’s
a Young Landscape” [2000]).8 Lan- eventual attachment to tropes of
guage as Gesture, aware of Spicer or vocal displacement. For instance,
not, uncannily offers a succinct en- Spicer insists in his eleventh-hour
graving of Spicer’s own onerous, Vancouver lectures that the poet
brilliant adventures in the pervi- is a radio, receiving the transmis-
ousness of person and form. The sions of Martians.10 The insistence
following, from Blackmur, citing of a Martian language sustained
Yeats’s “Crazy Jane”: through if not redeemed by poetry
smacks of the facetious. This is
I had wild Jack for a lover; nonsense, and I’m doing my best to
Though like a road transliterate nonsense—a return to
That men pass over Spicer’s earlier animation of Dada
My body makes no moan and Kurt Schwitters’s Mertz: the
But sings on: latter of which indubitably pro-
All things remain in God.9 poses a false etymology of the Mar-
tian, as though the poet’s obligation
Or as Spicer would say, Poet, be like were to salvage what for others
God (30). I had wild Jack for a lover. was dejecta and jetsam. Nonface-
Yeats’s stanza approaches the spati- tiously, Spicer’s fi delity to Martian
ality that informs Spicer’s own scru- langu age registers as fl ippant and
pulous investigation of poetic form. simultaneously perhaps resists its
Is poetry like a road, or like a room? own fl ippancy (dares us to take it
How to distinguish the song from seriously). Sometimes, I am in-
the moan? These questions are at clined to think of Spicer’s insistence
the heart of Spicer’s poetry, even as on this particular sci-fi Ars Poetica
Spicer already resonates with Yeats: not only as fl irtation with its own
two poets, distracted and consumed blitheness, but covert means of
by the possibility of love channeled keeping safe the sensitive stakes of
across the long distance of mortal- the project under hand. One could
ity. Which likewise describes the turn here to Derridean theories of
lyric experiments of Dickinson and translation, although translating
Crane: the distance between life and Spicer’s project into the Derridean
death, which, poetically speaking, invariably leaves out too much of
Blackmur articulates in his brilliant Spicer’s own innovations: just as
ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 495
good-intentioned but similarly “The Italian Lesson” (1925), in
scalpeled attempts in previous de- which a silver-tongued, silver-
cades have left too much of Spicer’s spooned woman of means “trans-
poetry on the fl oor for the sake lates” the fi rst lines of Dante’s
of resuscitating Spicer as proto- Inferno.
Blanchot, proto-Derrida, proto-
Lacan. Translation, for Spicer, Oh what wonderful lines!
arises as an amorous ordeal, the Aren’t they marvelous? Now
imagined crux of attempting less let’s see, “nel mezzo,” let me
to understand than to formulate see, “nel mezzo” just means
what arises from beyond. Martians, “in the middle,” doesn’t it?
for Spicer, are a limit case. How to “In the middle.” And “del
honor not only what is light-years camin” means, um, “of the
away, but what is both light-years road.” “In the middle of the
away and barely taken seriously? road.” That’s not very poeti-
That Spicer dares his readers to cal, is it, in English. Now
take and not take the Martians se- well we can take certain lib-
riously is compounded by the fact erties, don’t translators al-
that Spicer insists on poetic prac- ways, I mean take certain
tice-as-Martian dictation for the liberties in order to maintain
sake of reneging his own writerly the beauty of it and the mean-
self- signifi cance. We have here ing at the same time. For
a version of Cocteau’s Orpheus example, we could say instead
awaiting a radio signal—Samuel of saying “in the middle” we
Delaney meets T. S. Eliot’s poetic could say “midway,” and in-
impersonality.11 Such self-abdica- stead of saying “of the road,”
tion is complicated not only by the we could say “along the
inimitability of Spicer’s presence pathway.” Don’t you think
in these poems—affectively, intel- that sounds better?12
lectually, corpulently, erotically,
etc.—but likewise by the inimita- Draper’s dilettante is a lovable
bility of Spicer’s mythology of nut, and loving her is different
self-abdication. Impersonality- from loving Draper doing the nut.
as-transmittability doesn’t oppose What matters, in this context, is
personality so much as become the way in which Draper was fa-
personality unto itself. An analog mous for being other people, and
would be the famous “transmis- that the funniness of her mono-
sions” and impersonations of Ruth logues arises as much from the en-
Draper. I have never heard Ruth actment of verisimilitude as from
Draper’s voice, per se, but I’ve absurdity itself. Draper channels
heard her voices. Most indelible someone channeling Dante erro-
for me is Draper’s monologue, neously, and this meticulous
496 M. D. SNEDIKER
enactment of meticulous and ex- The voice sounds blond and
travagant erroneousness (“Don’t tall.
you think that sounds better?”) il- “I’m Barnacle Bill. I sank
luminates one aspect of Spicer’s with the Titanic. I rose in
own project—to return to earlier salty heaven.”
terms, the necessary collision of The voice sounds blond,
charisma and failure, or failure, sounds tall, sounds blond
lovingly rendered, as its own char- and tall.
ismatic allure. As Spicer writes, in
his own “loose” translation of the (27)
Inferno,
As with Ruth Draper, I gravitate
Dante would have blamed toward a version of Spicer who
Beatrice slips away, even as that slippage is
If she turned up alive in a signature,14 and inseparable from
local bordello the sense that one is close enough
Or Newton gravity to smell his breath. Poetry as inti-
If apples fell upward macy of effl uvium. Each ventrilo-
What I mean is words quization in the preceding lines
Turn mysteriously against only nominally removes us from
those who use them Spicer. The very terms of the
Hello says the apple channelings characterize Spicer
Both of us were object. far more than they do Eve, Min-
nie, or Bill. And each conjuring,
(“Sheep Trails Are Fateful like a tall glass of water, sounds
to Strangers,” 257)13 blond. Spicer, especially in the
glory days of Berkeley, was in his
Or as Spicer wrote years earlier, in own fashion a tall blond. But is
“Imaginary Elegies” (1960), Spicer losing himself to his own
voice, or losing himself in the
It is as if we conjure the dead voices of others; or some combina-
and they speak only tion of the two? Vocal dissipation
Through our damned trum- grounds itself in the voice of some
pets, through our damned hunkier tall blond man (we’re
medium: talking blond, after all, not
“I am little Eva, a Negro prin- blonde), both effecting self-loss
cess from sunny heaven.” and somehow conducting an
The voice sounds blond and austere conduit to an object of
tall. hypothetical desire: “blond and
“I am Aunt Minnie. Love is tall” as distillation of amorous ob-
sweet as moonlight here ject, reduction of person to the
in heaven.” statistical (not even, as they say,
ON JACK SPICER’S COLLECTED POETRY 497
the vital statistics), if only because or otherwise) is nonequivalent to
the tall blond man is accessible imagining, as such. Spicer’s poetry
only on the level of voice. And doesn’t afford a consoling proxy
barely: as Spicer writes, “The sun for what beyond poetry is unavail-
that shines so brightly on your lips able (e.g., a tall blond), but reca-
has made you forget how to cast a pitulates a calligraphy of empirical
shadow. We have been looking unavailability, staging the latter as
for you on the insides of mirrors. the fate of both poet (curt, cranky)
You might have given us great joy. and poet’s putative fantasy. That
No, you are too tall for love” (53). Spicer so demonstratively circum-
The pathos of anyone nearly be- scribes the fl ourishing utilities of
ing anyone else circulates through- his medium countermands mod-
out Spicer’s poems as both the ernism’s Make it New; and, con-
occasion and stymieing of poetic trarily, asserts poetry as far less
(which, apropos Spicer, is to say availing than it might be. Such an
erotic) hopefulness: enterprise, in the end, is what
makes Spicer’s poetics so counter-
Eurydice could be anyone. Is intuitively availing, full of fl our-
I suppose ish. That Spicer’s poetry restricts
Anyone. rather than realizes (or perhaps
That makes the poem harder. realizes restriction) importantly
complicates Spicer’s biographically
(60) chronicled interest in magic: for
instance, Spicer’s abiding interest
Harder as more diffi cult, as more in the tarot,15 or—as wonderfully
durable, as more erect, as more un- collected in this new volume—
bearable. One can’t have one with- Spicer’s “Poetry as Magic” (1957)
out the others. The voice of a tall workshop questionnaires. Contra
blond that arises, perhaps unex- apocrypha, Spicer is at best an am-
pectedly, is any tall blond, and no bivalent believer in magic and, at
tall blond, and in the vexed spirit his most movingly stern, a depo-
of Spicer’s multitudes—both appo- nent of magic. The fi rst instance in
site with and against Whitman’s Spicer’s poems of magic’s equivo-
multitudes—it is this that makes cally charged unavailability ap-
lasting poetry, which sustains what pears in “Some Notes on Whitman
otherwise feels (for Spicer, for the for Allen Joyce” (1980):
poems, for the reader) dangerously
fugacious. He was reaching for a
Here we come to one of Spicer’s world I can still remember.
most disarming and thoroughgo- Sweet and painful. It is a
ing poetic enterprises: that poetry’s world without magic and
capacity for imagining (erotically without god. His ocean is