Dear Mark,

I don’t think we’re so far apart. But there are some differences of emphasis, to be sure. Let me conclude by trying to briefly clarify what those seem to be; doing so, perhaps, will provide a jumping off point for others who might wish to develop the discussion.

First, I feel compelled to reiterate that I do not share the notion, as you suggest I do, “that ‘materialist’ and ‘metaphysical’ approaches are mutually exclusive” as entries into Spicer’s work, and I believe a number of my comments should make this evident—the posts to Steve Shoemaker with which I concluded my last letter, for example, are quite clear in this regard, I think. So there is no “either/or approach,” I emphatically agree. My point is, simply, that one does not (contrary to the drift of some recent studies of Spicer—Peter Gizzi’s superb “Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading” notably excepted) have the option of turning the metaphysical dimension of the work into a quaint, incidental sidelight to the material, linguistic primacies of the poetry. The “formal apparatus,” as you put it, along with Spicer’s self-reflexive negotiation of that formal dimension, is always rooted in a cosmology that radically effaces the poet’s compositional authority.

You had quoted Spicer earlier from the Vancouver Lectures to argue that his claims for a “beyond” come tempered with an undercutting wink:

Please don’t get me wrong. Martian is just a word for X, you know.  I am not saying that little green men are coming in saucers and going into my bedroom and helping me write poetry. And they ain’t.

It goes without saying Spicer wasn’t serious about close encounters with little green men. But what about the “X” that “Martian” is just a counter for? Here is Spicer, elsewhere in the Vancouver Lectures, talking about the “X”:

Question from audience: You always talk about yourself and then that very other thing, the ghosts, and I keep wanting to say there must be a position where you don’t notice the distinction so much, where that’s not what gets you about the two things— that they are one thing.

Spicer: (N)obody believes me when I say there is a distinction. I still believe there is. But I don’t believe it’s a psychological distinction or anything else. I don’t think it’s something the electroencephalogram would get. I don’t think it has anything to do with what’s in my skull. I think there is something Outside. I really believe that, and I haven’t noticed really, in all these people who come here, who did seem to believe that I believed it [sic], but I do—And I don’t care if you don’t. It doesn’t matter a good goddamn to me. But I just want to say for the record that I do believe it, that there is something Jenseits that has nothing to do with me whatsoever, and this I believe. [Gizzi, 134] (“Jenseits,” as Gizzi notes, is German for the “other world.”)

Clearly, for Spicer, the Outside is a first power: he believes it to be the source of poetry (however weakly and fragmented and jumbled the messages arrive from it, however contaminated the messages become in language) no less than Lorca believed in duende. Language is material, but there is nothing primary about it; it is dead matter, dead letters, to be moved around by something beyond it.

All of which is important, I believe, in a consideration of Spicer’s whole work—and absolutely crucial in a consideration of After Lorca, a correspondence with an “afterlife” that marks, as you yourself point out, the beginning of the “dictation” he channeled across the rest of his poetic career.

Of course, I absolutely agree with you, Mark, that a number of other poets of the post-avant have enriched our experience of Spicer. It would be foolish, obviously, to try to exhaust the mysteries of the book through the tropes and mystical speculations Benjamin proffers in “The Task of the Translator.” On the other hand, there’s a lot there to explore by way of analogy. And I would argue that After Lorca is the most Benjaminian book we have in American poetry.

Thank you for your thoughtfulness and insight, Mark, from which I have learned.

Kent

PS: And lowghost and behold, just as I am revising these entries for the last time, I receive from Ron Silliman a copy of “My Vocabulary Did This to Me,” his essay from the special ACTS Spicer issue. It is an essay I had never read. Here is a sentence from it:

Pure Language is to Benjamin what the Martians are to Spicer.

I am glad to see the correspondence, so to speak. And I think it is quite possible that “somewhere outside Granada” or San Francisco, Spicer is reiterating that “Martians” is just a word for X, that it is the X that means everything, and that when poetry is disconnected from the X, it becomes nothing but language, nothing but furniture in the room.

notes