Impressions of Jack Spicer

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Born in Hollywood in 1925 but claimed he was born in 1946, the year he met Robert Duncan (with whom I share a birthday) and Robin Blaser—they were later called the “museum poets” for their bookishness.

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Roughly four hundred pages of poetry. Both irreverent and to the point. California. Incipient alcoholism. Prehepatic coma. Noticeably intoxicated. Researcher in linguistics, Berkeley. Alcohol poisoning. Product of the 1950s. White. Masculinist. Post-war America. With all its “honor” and disappointment. Racial tendencies. Not beatnik but bohemian. “Funk” or “junk.” Turbulent humanity.

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Died. Poeverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital. August 17, 1965.

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From “Fifteen False Propositions Against God”:

Trees in their youth look younger
Than almost anything
I mean
In the spring
When they put forth green leaves and try
To look like real trees
Honest to God my heart aches when I see them trying.

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Jack Spicer, in a letter to Graham Mackintosh, 1954:

“There’s a big difference between talking as a teacher, which is easy, and talking as a poet, which is heartbreakingly difficult if you want to talk honestly.”

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Jack Spicer, in a letter to Robert Duncan, 1955:

“… the best way to get a method for a new description of poetics is to look at the failures and successes of such things in other arts. Color theory for painting gives, I think, the most exact analogy. What we need is a color wheel for sounds.”

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Jack Spicer on New York, 1955:

“No sense of abandon here. No head-talk even among heads. People smoke their pot sadly. Nobody loves anybody. Nobody speaks Martian.”

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North Beach bars. San Francisco parks. “Several Years’ Love”:
…
I’m not certain of their faces
Or which I kissed or which I didn’t
Or which of them I hadn’t.

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“Dictated” poems.

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Thomas Parkinson, characterizing Spicer while introducing his last public reading at the Berkeley Conference:

“I was trying to think of what it was that Jack does for people who’ve known him long and rather deeply. I think that one of the things that he always does for us is to ask that we do our better work. In this sense, I suppose that Jack has been a conscience for many of us at points when we might have done our better work and we might have settled for something less. And I think this is a very important thing that he does for all of us. And seeing his own work, which is always his better work, and which becomes, to my sense at least, better as he goes on, is a constant rebuke to those of us who are likely to do less than we should.”

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People smoke their pot sadly.


Lecture 4: “Poetry and Politics”:

“The point is then, if you’re poets—not too many flashbulbs, huh?—you out to figure out what the power system is within your own community. Your enemy is simply something which is going to try to stop you from writing poetry.”

…

“People will exploit poets. They’ll exploit the old ones for the knowledge they have, and they’ll exploit the younger ones for the promise they have … Stay absolutely loose, and don’t accept any offers whatsoever… But you’re not just a poet. You’re also a human being who wants to be recognized and everything else… What I’m saying is that you’re going to sell out eventually. You have to, just for economic reasons. But when you [do] … know exactly what is the price you can sell out for.”

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“The writing of poetry, essentially, is something which you really can’t say anything about except that if you violate something deep inside you – maybe even something that you didn’t know was deep inside you – you’re lost. You don’t write, or you write bad poetry.”

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Nobody loves anybody.