Dear Kent,

There is much in your thoughtful letter that I find valuable, as we delineate our respective approaches to Spicer. Yet I’m not sure I see how what I last wrote amounts to a misinterpretation, at least, of the broader contours of your “position.”  For instance, I did not overlook that passage from your second letter at all.  On the contrary, it continues to strike me very much as agitation toward that outer, meta-language we have been talking about (as indeed does much else from your latest entry)—and thus I take it as further evidence for my intuition of your faceted views.  And though clearly you’d no more bracket off the “imperfections” of poetic language than I, it seems to me we see those imperfections as operating in different, if not opposing ways.  Let me explain.

In the disputed passage you write, regarding Benjamin, that “translation answers as an echo, and it renders, through its imperfect correspondence, the original and the translation ‘recognizable as fragments of a greater language.’”  Here, it seems, you associate language’s imperfection with the Platonic ideal—ultimately as gesture toward the “Pure” which, you insinuate, is for both writers poetry’s “source and end.”  I don’t really disagree with you in this, insofar as your reading of Benjamin is concerned. Spicer is another matter; and without repeating arguments I have already made, let me at least concede you may be partly right about his intent, but this does not seem to me to bear on what the poems actually do.  In other words, I’ll admit that Spicer’s intentionality matters no more to me than it would have to Benjamin or, as we’ve agreed, to Spicer. Here then is what I take issue with: imperfection, as I see it, is very much opposed to the notion of the Platonic ideal. Thus I cannot help but read the very deliberate “imperfections” of Spicer’s texts—their “quirky” apparatus—as a move precisely toward an earthly language and away from its (questionably) “greater” idealization.  Imperfection, then, is not a gesture toward the pure, the infinite, but on the contrary toward the impure, the temporal, the regenerative—and finally, toward the “Real” as such.

There are a couple of other matters I’d like to touch on, while we are on the subject of misinterpretation.  When I contrast the late and early Spicer, it is not to imply a split so much as a progression— and certainly nothing like a “philosophical leap.” It is not unusual for poets’ positions to evolve over time, and Spicer, with his philosophical restlessness was, as you also have suggested, never fully satisfied with a stable positionality. This is precisely why it seems to me that materialism and mysticism both offer relevant entries to the work, but that neither, “in the last analysis”—and I contrast this with your claim—finally accounts for the work’s salient features.  I’d argue then that this “material” apparatus, whether or not “mystically” derived, defines how one is able to approach the work and thus somewhat undercuts a solely metaphysical reading (as does the ironic tone of an author who is very much not in a state of rapture).  And so, in this sense, the work DOES anticipate what we might consider to be postmodern strategies, and not in an incidental way—even if Spicer, as you point out, was no stranger to the Tarot, and probably never read Barthes.

Secondly, I have to object to what strikes me as your implied, if perhaps unintended critique of my reading of the first poem from “Thing Language.” While it is true, as you point out, that that poem has been cited by some of the Language Poets, and I think specifically Ron Silliman, as evidence for Spicer’s materialism, my reading of it in no way rehashes the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E position(s). In fact, Kent, I share at least some of your uneasiness at the “technocratic” implications of the Language project, at its outer limits. (Though I would point out, circa 2004, that that “project” has less and less potential sway over even “post-avant” poetics than it did, say, circa 1984—and that furthermore it has evolved considerably since then).  Obviously something like “the mystical” can’t, as I’ve stressed, be avoided in approaching Spicer—not least because of his own view of his poetics. Yet it seems to me that unlike even a few of the dreaded LPs (Fanny Howe, Tom Mandel) you would cast “materialist” and “metaphysical” approaches as mutually exclusive—or at least claim that, if they coexist, one or the other must be dominant. So when you write that “an immanent idealism impels the poetry throughout, and the metaphysical convictions that fuel the early work become, if anything, more insistently framed later on,” etc., it strikes me as just as reductive as any strictly “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” reading of Spicer might be—if such a monster exists.

Yet I do appreciate your willingness to acknowledge the “quite obvious ways [Spicer’s] work engages the ‘material,’ linguistic field.” In fact, in a way that strikes me as unique among his contemporaries (except the Robert Creeley of Words and subsequent books), Spicer demonstrates a consistent awareness of form as a constituent part of meaning.  A few examples: the embedded ghost-texts serving as fake commentaries for the “real” poems above them (“Homage to Creeley”); the “analytic” mode of “A Textbook of Poetry,” so much in contrast to Spicer’s normal brand of ironic lyricism; the graphic impulse of the large, cursive “I”s in “Graphemics”; the use of different types of paper to connote different magazines in the original edition of Book of Magazine Verse.  All of these moves are quintessentially Spicerian and, if I can’t quite see them as “metaphysically derived,” neither do they suffer from the blandly generic formalism of the worst recent poetry. Spicer’s work, then, is recognizable and distinct—if also evasive.

This of course is part of what we both, in our own ways, have been saying all along.  That what draws us (you and me, and maybe even some of those Language Poets) to Spicer, is precisely the fact that the work is not reducible to any given reading, whether of the eccentric mystical or knee-jerk materialist variety. That, as you shrewdly put it, hitting the nail on the head—Spicer’s work evades position. And so I believe that categories such as the metaphysical and the material were much less “pure” or stable in Jack Spicer’s practice than you might admit—much as I have argued that, for him, the Benjaminian split between translation and creation was not an absolute but a matter of degree. When faced with such an either/or split Jack Spicer, it seems to me, always defiantly chooses both.  This, as you suggest, may indeed be a reason why poets, such as you or I, coming after Langpo but not dogmatically following its prescriptions, are drawn to him.

Yes, Spicer’s work continually taunts us with the fact that it is not reducible to any “position” (including those of his admirers).  No writer who is any good faithfully reenacts the conditions of their predecessors, and—as a result?—no subsequent reading can fully account for that writing.  After Lorca amusingly foregrounds the very real possibility that Lorca, had he lived, might not have approved of Spicer’s poems or their bastardizations of his. Does that matter?  Should it?  Of Spicer’s other influences, how many, with the aid of a time machine, might have returned his admiration?  Mallarmé, possibly—but Yeats?

Like any poet whose work amounts to something, Spicer’s poems are really all of ours, and no one’s.  Though of course I agree that Spicer would have been horrified at a poetic “bereft of channeled messages and ghosts,” I don’t think that fact in itself obliges any of his admirers toward a dutifully Spicerian “metaphysics”... if that’s what you’d call it.  And while I’m not so sure that Language Poetry in its various incarnations is, despite Barry Watten’s best efforts, “predicated on the principle of ‘a mind in control of its language’” (think of Hannah Weiner’s work, for one), I’ll grant you that Spicer wouldn’t have endorsed literary developments in the 1970s and 80s, not least because of what he would have disapprovingly perceived as the “careerism” of the principal movers & shakers.  (Nor, had he survived by some miracle, do I think that he would have failed to alienate them: the Killian/Ellingham biography is rife with anecdotes of Spicer’s sometimes difficult personality).  Does all of this mean that the Language Poets can’t or shouldn’t cite Spicer as an influence, just because their individual and collective “projects” differ from his in some of the ways you suggest?  Of course not!

Yet here, as is often the case, I feel that talk about the Language Poets—however much their interest in Spicer may have colored his contemporary reception (which I’ll freely grant it does4)—is at best only a starting point, perhaps even a false one.  One of the things I value about this exchange, Kent, has been the opportunity to make a fresh appraisal of Spicer in a context that isn’t primarily charged with the poetics of that ubiquitous group.  While I value the contributions of many of the Language Poets individually, it often seems that the weight of their collective project(s), and whatever is said and re-said endlessly about them, takes up all the energy in the room—whatever room one happens to be in.  This in turn seems to set up the LPs as the perfect straw-men-and-women to anyone’s jaundiced assessment of recent US poetry—something of which you and I have no doubt been somewhat guilty.  And so I think it’s important, as much in the context of this conversation between two poets as for any thorough reconsideration of Spicer, to bracket off that at times circular dynamic, if only to allow space to develop ideas anew.  Regarding Spicer, I would say that is a process that we’ve at least (tentatively) begun here.5 And if we haven’t always agreed, all to the good. Besides being a necessary precondition to such a productive exchange, it seems, so far as I can tell, to be exactly what Spicer would have wanted.

Thanks again for suggesting this project, which I hope now proves as fruitful to the stray reader as it has been, at least, to me.

“What is real, I suppose, will endure.”6

Mark

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