In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were.... (W)hat reaches this region is that element in a translation which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter. This nucleus is best deigned as the element that does not lend itself to translation. Even when all the surface content has been extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive.

—Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator

The fact that I didn’t know Spanish really well enough to translate Lorca was the reason I could get in contact with Lorca.

—Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lectures

Dear Mark,

Your last letter is quite brilliant, and there is much there to enrich consideration of After Lorca, in particular, and Spicer’s work, in general.

However, I must correct you on what I sense is your misinterpretation of certain key aspects of my “position.” You write, for example,

I find your suggestion of an intentionality inside language pleasing—and perhaps this is the “Pure or Platonic state” which is ultimately the object/Outside of Spicer’s desire. Yet I think it is hardly so pure as you suggest, and I can’t quite agree either that its imperfections, which both Spicer and Benjamin recognized, are gestures toward a Platonic meta-language so much as reflections of language’s own limits. (I might also point out that, while Benjamin saw imperfection as at least unavoidable, as part of the fabric of writing, Spicer actively sought out imperfection in his own work, which seems, if nothing else, a healthy and logical development, and one which Benjamin would surely have welcomed).

But you seem to have missed my saying this:

Around this absence, the translation answers as an echo, and it renders, through its imperfect correspondence, the original and the translation “recognizable as fragments of a greater language.” Poems should not hide their imperfections, Spicer will later write. And neither, it seems he early sensed, should translations. “Imperfection,” in this sense—or as Benjamin puts it, language that is “unsuited to its content”—is not a lack or failing, but the very way poetry has of gesturing toward that “Pure” force that clearly is, for both Spicer and Benjamin, its source and end.

Yes, there is no question Spicer’s “yearnings,” if that is the best word, are countered by an actively ironizing recognition that the language material at our disposal in this world of Forms is imperfect, that the furniture in the room is a sad shadow—as it is for Benjamin—of a greater otherness toward which language haltingly “intends.”

I point this out because I want to be clear that what strikes you as being a bit too “earnest” in my position is not a result of my not being cognizant of Spicer’s epistemological contradictions and ambiguities, or, much less, of my being oblivious to the quite obvious ways his work engages the “material,” linguistic field. In this regard, Mark, I’m in complete accord with Lori Chamberlain, who writes, in one of the few studies of After Lorca, that Spicer “seems to vacillate between being a postmodern Platonist in search of essences and a postmodern Aristotelian in search of the here and now.”  [Chamberlain, 432-3]

So my intent is not to suggest Spicer be pigeonholed as some kind of tarot-reading occultist (though he was not a stranger to tarot), but to propose a little correction to the crucial ways the metaphysical energies of his work have been slighted and obscured in process of its “adoption” by a decidedly “non-metaphysical” tradition in recent American poetry. I’m aware, I assure you (and I’ll quote some prior things I’ve written elsewhere to make it clear), that Spicer is plenty double-edged when it comes to pinning down his “philosophical position.”

Nevertheless, I do maintain (and in this regard your broad intuition of my stance is correct) that the energies of a decidedly anachronistic metaphysics drive the work and can be seen as accounting, in the last analysis, for the eccentric “avant” formal features some have wished to see as the poetry’s impetus and raison d’�tre. To say that, however, is hardly to offer a view “poised solely on the metaphysical.”

Now, your notion, as I read it, of a kind of split in Spicer’s poetics between the early and later work is tantalizing. And there are certainly changes in tonal and formal disposition along the way. But I’m not sure anything along the lines of a philosophical leap takes place, as I understand you to imply, between After Lorca and Language. From the “words that are as valuable as rope with nothing to be tied to,” up to the “perfect baseball diamond high in the Runcible Mountain wilderness,” an immanent idealism impels the poetry throughout, and the metaphysical convictions that fuel the early work become, if anything, more insistently framed later on—in the poems and lectures—as propositions of an eccentric but omnipresent mysticism (The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, for instance, is cited by Spicer as containing some of his most intensely dictated sequences.). Indeed, the famous poem you cite from Language, for good example, is nicely emblematic of his staunch belief that Poetry exists in “a world and cosmology without image,”* that it is other and “Outside,” that the poems we write here in the space of people and things (our translations, feebly reaching toward that Pure Language) are shadows that intimate another, mysteriously sovereign, realm. Things correspond, Spicer said, and it’s the poet’s task to tune in those distant frequencies of relation. But the “Real” ocean is finally beyond us, and its “aimless signals” all we can hope to faintly sense.

So it’s fascinating, in this regard—to return to an issue I brought up in my second letter—that his poetics are increasingly proposed (and on more than one occasion the poem you’ve cited has been quoted for evidence) as foundational for the materialist formalism of the Language group and their heirs, as if Spicer were a more or less innocent precursor of the “post-avant,” a great but loopy theosophical writer, now properly stood on his head by an advanced, more rational poetics. Yet such a relation, were it the case, would imply that some meaningful substance of the old inhere in the content and form of the new. And in the sweeping rejection of Spicer’s governing metaphysics and the daemonic proceedings of his method, everything save the after-mirage of an “experimental style” does, in essence, get discarded.

Imagine Spicer’s response to a poetry bereft of channeled messages and ghosts, to a poetry predicated on the principle of “a mind in control of its language”—to the notion, in other words, of an Author in command of his or her position in the poetic field. Nothing could be more contrary to Spicer’s thought or, as I believe we’ve agreed, to that of Benjamin. Spicer is simply not readily assimilable to any genealogical tree of materialist creed. All those quotidian things in the poems, all those linguistic swerves and feints, are ultimately furniture in the room which something else is moving around. There is no way of apprehending the animus of the work if you bracket that hauntedness as some kind of misguided peculiarity incidental to it. And I guess that’s a central point I wanted to make.

Going through my folder of Spicer notes, I came across two printouts from posts I’d sent to Poetics way back in 1998. They are part of an exchange on Spicer’s poetry I had with Steve Shoemaker, part of a thread that involved others, including you. They seem apropos what we are discussing here, so I thought I would include them, slightly edited. The second letter below ended with a mention of the ancient Greeks, and since I just published a book titled The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek, I’ll take that little coincidence as my cue to close my remarks here.

abrazos,

Kent

*Robin Blaser’s phrase, from The Practice of the Outside.

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