Date:    Sat, 7 Nov 1998 18:06:01 -0500
Reply-To:  UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender:    UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From:    "http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9811&L=poetics&D=1&O=D&P=10369"
KENT JOHNSON <kjohnson@HIGHLAND.CC.IL.US>
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject: "http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9811&L=poetics&D=1&O=D&P=15029"
Re: What sticks to the real
 
On 7 Nov. Steve Shoemaker wrote:
 
>The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the
>world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a
>kind of wrestling with a non-linguistic Other."
 
Steve:
 
Just a thought to add to your post, to which I hope Ron [Silliman]
responds because the issue you pose is interesting. My thought
is something of a qualification to yours: One of the qualities of
Spicer that most appeals to me is how speculative and notational his
sophisticated thought is. In fact, aside from a decidedly mystical
metaphysics, I'm not sure, really, to what extent one can speak of a
Spicer "Poetics," if by that term one means a system of thought that puts
itself forth as internally consistent and insistent in terms of its proposals.
The pursuit of a poetry that shows "the mind in control of its language," for
example, an oft-quoted remark from Watten, I believe, which could
stand as a kind of epigraphic call to arms of the old Language
circle, encapsulates a poetics that is aggressively confident and
relatively technocratic in its ambitions. But Spicer's attitude (though he was
certainly not an unconfident poet!) is very different, inasmuch as his idea of
dictation implies a mind not really in control of language at all. In
fact, I think one can find much in JS that points to his "poetics"
as largely affirmation that the poetic act and vocation is
outside of, and irrelevant to, theorization.
 
One of the aspects of JS's thought that would support this is,
actually, his "consistently" ambiguous and even contradictory stance
regarding the language/world, self/other conundrum. When one
considers Spicer's poetically charged statements about "poetics" in
the poetry, letters, and talks, it often seems he is proposing, as
you suggest, that there is an "outside" that is "non-linguistic,"
other and blank in the sense of the human meanings we ascribe to it.
But at the same time, Spicer proposes that language comes to us from
that very "blank" outside, that language is a part of the Outside no
less than are rocks in a field, and that it is the palpable filament
that connects us to the Other and weaves us into it, so that one
could say the Outside was never "other" in the first place. The poet,
as he said, is a radio through which the outside speaks; but a radio
is also a piece of furniture in the room-- inside the room , not
outside. Perhaps the mystery of the poetic act, the "practice of the
Outside," is the mystery that there is no outsidedness to the "Outside."
 
So what I would differ with in your post is the notion that Spicer
has a "position" that makes him different from the "Language" poets
(if they actually exist anymore?). What makes Spicer wholly different, I’d say,
 is that he doesn't have a position that allows us to comfortably place him in
a geneology or spectrum of poetics. And in these times when it's so
easy to draw parallels and make schools and trace allegiances, maybe
that's why he is more and more attracting the interest of poets.
 
Kent
 
**
 
Date:        Sun, 8 Nov 1998 10:43:48 -0500
Reply-To:  UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender:    UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From:    "http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9811&L=poetics&D=1&O=D&P=15325"
KENT JOHNSON <kjohnson@HIGHLAND.CC.IL.US>
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject: "http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9811&L=poetics&D=1&O=D&P=16591"
Re: What sticks to the real
 
 
On 8 Nov., Steve Shoemaker said:
 
>...the truth is that I don't know Spicer's work well enough to
>venture any broader speculation.
 
Steve:
 
My personal feeling is that the more one reads Spicer, the more
necessary it becomes to "speculate" as a means to "understand." This
is the path to understanding that Blaser's great essay takes, an
essay unlike any other I've read--one that truly opens up the
mystery of a work rather than cataloguing it and explaining it
down. We are initiates all. Further on you say:
 
>...it seems to me that that Other was there *before* language as we
>know it. The most recent evidence seems to suggest that we started
>speaking around half a million years ago, but we were walking around
>on those "rocks" long before that.
 
This is true. But I would prefer to think of the Other as
always unfolding. "Rocks" weren't always there either. Language
"appears" into the Other like rocks did long before it.
 
And if I can go back and comment on something else you said in the
previous post:
 
>The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the
>world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a
>kind of wrestling with a non-linguistic Other.
 
Important to say that Spicer's "poetics" is indeed impelled by the
desire to constitute a world--a "city" of readers and
lovers and friends which is realized through that Otherness of
language. Spicer's, really, is one of the most
"world-constituting" bodies of poetry that we have.
 
But here, too, that paradoxical interpenetration of worlds is at
work: The "real" space of human beings fully owes its being to an
"outside" realm whose mysteries are beyond and not for us. So in this
sense that in Spicer a ghostliness always inhabits the real...
 
I haven't seen the analogy drawn in terms of JS before, but there is
something ancient and "classical" about this, I think (therefore I
speculate): the many-godded and ghosted world of the Greeks, where
the passions and folly of the human sphere are enacted on the stage
of an "Outside" theater for the amusement of the gods and the ghosts.
Poor us, Spicer seems to be saying, it's all we can here aspire to.
But at least we're in contact with the infinite.
 
Kent

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