My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer Book

It is my hope that at least one person will be glad I wrote this review. There will be no need to thank me. First off I want to express the great respect I have for the mind of Jack Spicer, for the seriousness in which he took his poetry, and the demands he placed on his students for them to do their very best work. It is also important to note that reading both the poems and lectures together concurrently offers more to the student of his verse and helps to focus on the particular components of his teaching. Even after plowing through the first sixty pages of his verse in these collected poems I was already doubting their worth to our literary history. Though a newcomer to the work of Jack Spicer it is clear to me he is, as a person and teacher, more well known than his poems. But it is possible, but not likely, that his teaching of poetry and his writing of it gave him all the fame he really needed.

The very first poem of the collection begins with Berkeley in the Time of Plague and with that beginning I was immediately impressed and excited about what I would find as I continued through the book. There were three poems worth reading and remarking on in that first book and it wasn't until his leaving Minnesota and arriving in New York City and Boston that Jack seemed to hit his stride. But it did not last. Soon after his most-loved book After Lorca was published in 1957 Jack Spicer began his swift descent downhill. But in the meantime he was certainly developing his infamous teaching style, and the method in which he claimed to write his poems became for some otherworldly. And that is not a compliment. In my opinion, anyone who claims to hear the word of God, His voice, or even the voice of a green Martian dictating poems to him is cause for great concern. Whoever, in Jack's mind, was dictating to him as if it were divine word and in no need at all of any revision or editing, but instead transcribed verbatim, is frightening. The evidence presented in the poems for us is proof they were not godly, not otherworldly, and not untranslatable. This provided some comfort to me by knowing his method and results were basic lies and I was dealing with a delusional man who craved these powers so much enough to imagine they were real. And for the student of poetry today who subscribes to these ideas of Jack Spicer's I say good luck. The larger your collective crowd becomes the greater your delusions of grandeur about yourselves and your poetry shall be. And your castles will be made of sand.

For sake of argument and disclosure I will confess my own desire for composing poetry stems from the concept of my tricking my own unconscious enough that it speaks, which is not an easy thing to do, and not something to be recognized until the final product has been honed to perfection. It is true that a poet can know when a poem is right and there is nothing else to be done with it. It begins to have a life of its own. It is possible that Jack Spicer's word for the unconscious was Martian or dictation, but again, I highly doubt it. I am also suspect of his so-called furniture placed within his "serial" poems. I just do not believe him. As much as I want to make claim that Jack was a liar and a fraud I will instead relax my toughened stance and give him measure enough to suggest again my idea of his likely delusions. Individuals in great pain are often delusional. Serious and practicing alcoholics are for sure.

It is quite obvious to me after reading just the very first lecture in The House That Jack Built, that Spicer was an engaging poet and teacher who was very smart and who could have been so much better as a poet and teacher than he turned out to be. It is a fact, for anyone interested, that practicing drug addicts and alcoholics do not mature emotionally. These addicts may have fantastic vision and resources in which to make a huge difference to the development of our art and social sciences, but never can they achieve their more vast potential that is due their talents and skills they have been born with or worked so hard to acquire. Even the hardest efforts involved in being an artist of some higher rank will fail in direct respect to what a more evolved and mature artist with the same exact talent and skills going for them can produce. A prime example of an evolved, mature artist would be Wallace Stevens. A brief look at the very first poems of Jack Spicer written in the early fifties can also prove this point. There are some brilliant pieces in that group and it is a shame he could not continue on with the job at hand with sober mind and the intensity he had for his writing and art. Early on in his poetry collection, My Vocabulary Did This to Me, I noticed the poems getting silly, coded, and abstract to the point of a pretentious elitism that was wasted on me as I was not at all impressed. It is the same reason I never have liked the poetry or prose of The Beats, and I predict that history will discount their work as art and only mention it in regards to its effect on our history. The Beats were definitely an historical sociological event, but really nothing much else. The title of the Spicer collected poetry edition incorporates his purported dying last words referring to his vocabulary. My argument would be that Spicer did not use his vocabulary to the poems' benefit. Often a mediocre word or unnecessary word is used in any given line. A weak word rather than a strong word was typically used in almost every poem, and nowhere have I read that words were important to Spicer. Words are things and things are important. There is no doubt in my mind that Spicer would have benefited having a tyrannical editor and the fact that Spicer resisted any editing or revision of his poems tells me he was either delusional about the voices he was hearing in his head or afraid of the consequences an authority figure would have inflicted on his poetry. It is not a far stretch to imagine Spicer avoiding at all costs any authority outside himself and the Martians communicating to him.

Whether Martians are dictating to you, or a muse, or a memory of something still there in your subconscious, or any other of the multitudes of methods poets reveal and lay claim to as the way in which they get a poem onto the page, it matters little to me and I wonder why these people who teach (like Jack Spicer) and act as if they know make such a great big deal out of it. I love a good lecture. I have been present for several of the seven to ten hour lecture-ordeals made of, and by, Gordon Lish in his fiction-writing classes he has held privately for over forty years. What will be a thread in this digression to follow is that Lish championed a student of Jack Spicer's back in 1962 and this ex-student, Jack Gilbert, went to on to immediate great fame for six months before rejecting it and escaping to an island off of Greece, not to be heard from again for twenty years. In 1982 Lish, as an editor at the publishing house Alfred Knopf, published Gilbert's second book of poetry, Monolithos, and Knopf continued to publish every book thereafter until last year in 2012 when the Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert arrived to literary acclaim. Instead of attacking Jack Spicer and provoking the wrath of all his admirers, I think it best for me to focus on what made Jack Gilbert such a better poet than any of his contemporaries of the sixties including Denise Levertov, the Beats, Duncan, Spicer, and anyone else who might come to mind in the process of my expression. There is good reason to expect I will also say something about the methods Spicer used to exact his poems and the reason I think he was wrong in the way he went about it, precisely because their quality was surely lacking.

Most of us who are aware of the pop group, The Beatles, and the beautiful catalog of songs, specifically the ones credited to Lennon and McCartney, are also aware that on the rare occasion a song came to one of the boys in a dream or in waking from a sleep and was written down exactly as it came to them. The key word here is "rare". It does happen. I can attest to it happening to me at least twice. But to think that anything that comes through our consciousness is worthy of not editing, not revising, not taking a second look at to see if it can be improved is hogwash pure and simple. Many times a poem that comes to us by way of stream of consciousness is simply a matter of getting our attention, writing it down as it comes, and then going to work on it similar to an ironsmith working away at his anvil. Jack Spicer did not believe in this method of composition and that is why the vast majority of his poems are unfeeling, blank, and full of unnecessary and weak words. Only a pretentious and delusional person would think that what they wrote spontaneously and verbatim would be worthy of no revision and actually looked on as great art by the person who feels he or she was the vehicle for the enlightened artistic transmission. It is difficult for me to imagine Spicer devoting four hours of gestation over a line he first heard before setting it down on the page. Making sure he was listening correctly to the Martians instead of simply arranging the furniture in his head seemed ludicrous to me and more than slightly insane. Catchwords such as "dictation", "furniture", and "craft" go a long way in explaining Spicer's verse but fail in making his poems ultimately worth reading.

It became obvious to me later in the collected poems of Jack Spicer that his so-called "furniture" was made up of an enormous study on his part and a working knowledge of historical works by dead poets of some renown. For me it was no different than Yeats using the Greek mythologies and other more sophisticated ideas to construct poems that only brilliant academics and students of this mythology could ever understand. It was this code that would keep the common man at bay and unable to appreciate the poetry of William Butler Yeats. In other words, his work is useless to the vast majority of people on the planet. Same goes for Spicer but he calls this his furniture and respects its use when dictated to him from the voice he happens to be listening to coming from his head. In most of the lectures it is painfully obvious to me that Spicer is nothing less than full of shit, but he does believe in what he is saying, and therefore, for me at least, extremely delusional. It is a wonder to me how poets of this northwestern region became so respected and revered when an actual real poet such as Jack Gilbert stayed basically on the periphery. History is bound to correct this grave mistake and I suppose Gilbert knew it all along and felt no need to self-promote or advertise his genius. This private and reclusive behavior can be likened to Emily Dickinson who must have known she was producing great work that the common people were just not ready for either. After the end of her humble life, history has shown her to be as great as she most likely already knew she was.

The introduction to the third lecture, Poetry in Process, warns the reader that it is "the most contrary and least accessible of Spicer's lectures." I believe the lecture is inaccessible because of its hogwash and the examples Spicer gives and reads from, Book of Magazine Verse, is probably the worst poetry of all his poetry to date that I have read. Connecting his dots as if God had spoken to him as He did with Moses is the most grandiose stretch he has produced yet on the page. It was such a burden for me to complete this lecture, but I did so in order to see the trees. Spicer glorifies in the absurd, claims that poetry is not to be enjoyed, and suggests he is providing the world some greater spiritual truth if only he and his students can figure out what the Martians are attempting to say through Spicer's poetry. Respectfully, I must ask of those who are his acolytes if you are all just kooks? A poem without feeling is to be avoided. Without feeling, there is no reason to even live or especially to suffer through reading bad poetry. A dead poem is entropy and to be avoided at all costs. Having to have something explained is not poetry at all but allegiance to a false god.

Now typically I would say these types of gods must be destroyed, but I doubt Spicer had anything evil going on but a bad case of low self-esteem. He was short, and rather ugly, and bit sexually confused according to what I have read so far about the loves in his life. Spicer had little respect for authority or those poets and teachers elevated to higher standing than he enjoyed. By being contrarian and smart, as well as dangerously versed in poetic history, artists on the fringe were attracted to his teaching. Wannabes especially. Spicer insisted that poems were made to be read by, and to, other poets as nobody else could ever understand them. This club-elitism is sickening to me and ridiculous. Of all the poets present for these lectures of 1965 in the rooms of Vancouver, how many are known or respected today as poets of the first rank? Jack Spicer is hugely popular today for reasons I have not quite figured out, but definitely his current popular rise is an interesting study of the human condition. In the following segments I have taken in pieces from an interview of Jack Gilbert, it is interesting to note the differences Gilbert saw between himself, Jack Spicer, and Allen Ginsberg.


From The Paris Review
"Interviews"
Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91
Interviewed by Sarah Fay
(regarding Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg)

INTERVIEWER
Is there a community'of writers or of anyone'to which you feel you belong?

GILBERT
Not anymore. No.

INTERVIEWER
Was there ever? Have you ever felt that someplace was home?

GILBERT
San Francisco during the sixties maybe. I lived there for seven years, like a hippie without drugs. That was lovely.

INTERVIEWER
In the late 1950s you were in Jack Spicer's poetry workshop'what was that like?

GILBERT
You have to understand that Jack and I were very different. We knew each other well. We hung out the way everyone hung out in San Francisco at that time. We used to play chess a lot. He always lost. One day he was sitting there mumbling to himself and finally said, You cheat! What do you mean, I cheat? I said. How can you cheat at chess? You're not so stupid that I could take pieces off the board. And he said, You cheat. You're thinking. He was dead serious.

INTERVIEWER
You say it was lovely to belong in San Francisco in the sixties. It was also an intense literary scene. Did you ever feel that you were in anyone's shadow?

GILBERT
There were people I respected, but we weren't fighting. Today, you have to do something to distinguish yourself. Maybe because there's so much money in poetry now. We used to type our poems and then go around and nail them up. Nobody would give Allen Ginsberg any money for "Howl." It wasn't in the running.

INTERVIEWER
You knew Ginsberg. How did you meet?

GILBERT
We had an argument about meter. He was trying to explain anapests to one of the young poets in North Beach. I leaned over and told him he was wrong. He was fresh from New York and of course thought he knew everything. He was affronted. We started arguing. Finally, he admitted I was right and he took out a matchbook, scribbled his address on it, handed it to me, and said, Come and see me. I liked him.
When he came to town he wanted to write little quatrains. They were neat, but they weren't very good. We liked each other, but I kept laughing at him nicely. One day, he got on a bus and went across the Golden Gate Bridge to see me in Sausalito. The streets turned to lanes, and the lanes to gravel, and the gravel turned into a path and then just woods. Up and up. He finally reached the abandoned house where I was living. After we talked, he said he had something he wanted to show me. He got two pages out of his bag. I read them and then read them again. I looked at him and told him they were terrific. Those two pages eventually became "Howl."
...

INTERVIEWER
In your poems, how important is the interplay between syntax and line breaks?

GILBERT
I don't think that way. I work by instinct and intelligence. By being smart, emotional, probing. By being sly, stubborn. By being lucky. Being serious. By being quietly passionate. By something almost like magic.

INTERVIEWER
To which of your poems are you most attached?

GILBERT
That's like asking to which of the women you've loved are you most 
attached'the best ones.

INTERVIEWER
Do you revise a great deal?

GILBERT
Yes.

INTERVIEWER
Do you throw away a lot of poems?

GILBERT
More than I would like.

Both Jack Gilbert and Jack Spicer were a bit obsessed with myth and often we see Orpheus present in their poems. For the sake of comparison two early poems by each should cast light on their qualities as poets and who might have had the better luck at getting to the meat of them.



ORPHEUS IN HELL


When he first brought his music into hell
He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the
shapeless fires
And the jukebox groaning of the damned
Some of them would hear him. In the upper world
He had forced the stones to listen.
It wasn't quite the same. And the people he remembered
Weren't quite the same either. He began looking at faces
Wondering if all of hell were without music.
He tried an old song but pain
Was screaming on the jukebox and the bright fire
Was pelting away the faces and he heard a voice saying,
"Orpheus!"
He was at the entrance again
And a little three-headed dog was barking at him.
Later he would remember all those dead voices
And call them Eurydice.




ORPHEUS IN GREENWICH VILLAGE

What if Orpheus,
confident in the hard-
found mastery,
should go down into Hell?
Out of the clean light down?
And then, surrounded
by the closing beasts
and readying his lyre,
should notice, suddenly,
they had no ears?



One poem is full of unnecessary words and bereft of feeling. The other is compressed and strong and musical. I hope you can tell that it is Gilbert's poem which comes last. There are many examples of brilliant and important poems written by Jack Gilbert. I cannot think of one important poem written by Jack Spicer, nor can I remember one I might even call remarkable. But Spicer's quest for fame, respect, and acknowledgment is definitely remarkable, as was his brilliant mind, but it is a shame that he never really grew up, just as many others of his time on the planet failed to do either. It is time we recognized the truer greatness of Jack Gilbert and others attempting to take poetry to the level it deserves and something the common man can enjoy and hold on to. I am so sorry to have to say it, but Jack Spicer fails to make this grade.