Language

by Jack Spicer

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.[1] Spicer's poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement.

Reviews

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to date Jack Spicer in the afterworld.

[Vuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like Spicer just has an undeniable appeal to him. Unlike a lot of poets of his time, you don't need to know things to get him, and he has this playful way of getting deep. He'll throw in references to high art and low art, in the same context, which is where it becomes a more knowledge-based endeavor. But I mean, he'll write about Homer and then go on about baseball...it's got charm and tact to it!

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language is composed of seven parts: "Thing Language", "Love Poems", "Intermission", "Transformation", "Morphemics", "Phonemics", and "Graphemics".

"Thing Language"...

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

***

SPORTING LIFE

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios don't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram burns out replaceable, but not like that punchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet
Takes too many massages. The right to the ear that floored him in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with a champion.
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of them.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even know they are champtions.

***

I hear a banging on the door of the night
Buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz
If you open the door does it let in light?
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz; buzz, buzzz.

If the day appears like a yellow raft
Meow, meow; meow, meoww
Is it really on top of a yellow giraffe
Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow

If the door caves in as the darkness slides
Knocking and knocking; knock, knock, knock
What can tell the light of whatever's inside?
Knocking and knocking; knock, knock, knock

Or the light and the darkness dances in your eye
Shadows falling one by one
Pigs, and eels, and open sky
Dancers falling one by one
Dancers shrieking one by one

***

The log in the fire
Asks a lot
When it is lighted
Or knot

Timber comes
From seas mainly
Sometimes burns green
-Ly

When it is lighted
The knot
Burns like a joke
With the colour of smoke

Save us, with birthdays, whatever is in the fire or not in the fire, immortal
We cannot be
A chimney tree
Or give grace to what's mere-
Ly fatal

***

Finally the messages penetrate
There is a corpse of an image - they penetrate
The corpse of a radio. Cocteau used a car radio on account of NO SPEED LIMIT. In any case the messages penetrate the radio and render it (and the radio) ultimately useless.
Prayer
Is exactly that
The kneeling radio down to the tomb of some saint
Uselessness sung and danced (the radio dead bu alive it can connect things
Into sound. Their prayer
Its only connection.

***

Heroes eat soup like anyone else. Sometimes the kitchen is so far away
That there is no soup. No kitchen. An open space of ground recovered by
The sky.
Heroes eat soup like anyone else. False ground.
Soup 
Of the evening
And the sky stays there not an image
But the heroes
Like the image of an image
(What is made of soup from)
Zooms.

***

Smoke signals
Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the earthquake hit
Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them
On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be insane.
This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.

***

 A redwood forest is not invisible at night. The blackness covers it but it covers the blackness.

 If they had turned Jeffers into a parking lot death would have been eliminated and birth also. The lights shrine 24 hours a day on a parking lot.

 True conservation is the effort of the artist and the private man to keep things true. Trees and the cliffs in Big Sur breathe in the dark. Jeffers knew the pain of their breath and the pain was the death of a first-born baby breathing.

 Death is not final. Only parking lots.

***

The whorship of beauty
Or beautiful things take a long time getting used to.
There is no past in beauty. The car going at 97.5 miles an hour. The times changes
As you cross each border.
Daffodils, ceremonies of spring, sprang, sprung
And it is August
Another century.
Take each past, combine it with its present. Death
Is a tooth among
Strangers.

[...]

"Love Poems"...

1
Do the flowers change as I touch your skin?
They are merely buttercups. No sign of death in them. They die and you know by their death that it is no longer summer. Baseball season.
Actually
I don't remember even touching your back when there were flowers (buttercups and dandelions there) waiting to die. The end of summer
The baseball season finished. The
Bumble-bee there cruising over a few poor flowers.
They have cut the ground from under us. The touch
Of your hands on my back. The Giants
Winning 93 games
Is as impossible
In spirit
As the grass we might walk on.

2
For you I would build a whole new universe around myself. This isn't shit it is poetry. Shit
Enters into it only as an image. The shit the ghostses feasted on in the Odyssey. When Odysseus gave them one dry fly and made them come up for something important Food.
"For you I would build a whole new universe," the ghosts all cried, starving.

3
"'Arf,' says Sandy"
"To come to the moment of never come back to the moment of hope. Too many buses that are late" Hugh O'Neill in our Canto for Ezra Pound.
The ground still squirming. The ground still not fixed as I thought it would be in an adult world.
Sandy growls like a wolf. The space between him and his image is greater than the space between me and my image.
Throw him a honey-cake. Hell has been proved to be a series of image.
Death is a dog and Little Orphan Annie
My own Eurydice. Going into hell so many times tears it
Which explains poetry. 

4
"If you don;t believe in god, don't quote him," Valery once said when he was about ready to give up poetry. The purposefull suspension of disbelief has about the chance of a snowball in hell.
Lamias maybe, or succubi bu they are about as real in California as night-crawlers
Gods or stars or totems are not game-animals. Snark-hunting is not like discussing baseball.
Against wisdom as such. Such
Tired wisdom as the game-hunters develop
Shooting Zeus, Alpha Centauri, wold with the same toy gunu.
It is deadly hard to worship god, star, and totem. Deadly easy
To use them like worn-out condoms spattered by your own gleeful, crass, and unworshiping
Wisdom

[...]

"Intermission"...

INTERMISSION I

"The movement of the earth brings harms and fears.
Men wonder what it is and what it meant."
 Donne
In the next line
Contrasts this with "the celestial movement of the spheres."
 Rhyme soothes. And in a book I read in college fifteen years
 ago it said that this was an attack on the Copernican theory
 and a spidery hand had penciled in the margin
 "Earthquake."
Where is the poet? A-keeping the sheep
A-keeping the celestial movement of the spheres in a long,
 boring procession
A-centre of gravity
A-(while the earthquakes of happiness go on inside and outside
 his body and the stars in their courses stop to notice)
Sleep.


INTERMISSION II

The Wizards of Oz have all gone kook
There are no unidentified flying objects. The
Moon may not be made of green cheese but my heart is. Across
 the Deadly Desert We found a champion. The poem
Which does not last as long as a single hand touches.
Morning comes. And the signs of life
(My morning had a telegraph key at here)
Are less vivid. There is a long trail in the back country. Choose
Carefully your victim.
Around the campsite we argued who would choose the fire
I left in a huff with your hand
Naked.


INTERMISSION III

Stay there on the edge of no cliff. With no conceivable future
 but progress - long, flat mesa-country. A few sheep you will
 hold for the rest of your life. Rimbaud's lover
Who had tears fall on his heart or some sweet message.
Dare he
Write poetry
Who has no taste of acid on his tongue
Who carrys his dream on his back like a packet?
Ghosts of other poets send him shame
He will be alive (as they are dead)
At the final picking.

"Transformation"...

TRANSFORMATIONS I

They say "he need (present) enemy (plural)"
I am not them. This is the first transformation.
They say "we need (present) no enemy (singular)" No enemy in
 the universe is theirs worth having. We in an intimate
 pronoun which shifts its context almost as the I blinks at it.
 Those
Swans we saw in the garden coming out of the water we hated
 them. "Out of place," you said in passing. Those swans and
 I (a blink in context), all out of place we hated you.
He need (present) enemy (plural) and now it is the swans and
 me against you
Everything out of place
(And now another blink of moment) the last swan back in
 place. We
Hated them.


TRANSFORMATIONS II

"In Scarlet Town where I was born
There was a fair maid dwelling."
We make up a different language for poetry
And for the heart - ungrammatical.
It is not that the name of the town changes
(Scarlet becomes Charlotte or even in Gold City I once heard a
 good Western singer make it Tonapah. We don't have
 towns here)
(That sort of thing would please the Jungian astronauts)
But that the syntax changes. This is older than towns.
Troy was a baby when Greek sentence structure emerged. This
 was the real Trojan Horse.
The order changes. The Trojans
Having no idea of true or false syntax and having no recorded
 language
Never knew what hit them.


TRANSFORMATIONS III

This is the melancholy Dane
That built all the houses that lives in the lane
Across from the house that Jack built
This is the maiden all forlorn, a
 crumpled cow with a crumpled horn
Who lived in the house that Jack built.
This is the crab-god shiny and bright
 who sunned by day and wrote by night
 And lived in the house that Jack built.
This is the end of it, very dear friend, this
 is the end of us.

"Morphemics"...

1
Morphemes in section
Lew, you and I know how love and death matter
Matter as wave and particle - twins
At the same business.
No excuse for them. Lew, thanatos and agape have no business being there.
What is needed is hill country. Dry in August. Dead grass leading to mountains you can climb onto
Or stop
Morphemes in section
Dead grass. The total excuse for love and death

2
The faded-blond out beauty
Let me tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget you Zion.
There we wept
He gave me a turn. Re-
Membering his body. By the waters of Babylon
In a small boat the prince of all the was to come
Floating peacefully. Us exiles dancing on the banks of their fucking river.
They asked us to sing a sad song How
Motherfucker can I sing a sad song
When I remember Zion? Alone
Like the stone they say Osiris was when he came up dancing. How can I sing my Lord's song in a strange land?

3
Moon,
 cantilever of sylabbles
If it were spelled "mune" it would not cause madness.
Un-
Worldly. Put
Your feet on the round. Mon-
Ey doesn't grow on trees. Great
Knocker of the present shape of things. A tide goes past like wind.
No normal growth like a tree the moon stays there
And its there is our where
"Where are you going, pretty maid?"
"I'm going milking, sir," she said.
Our image shrinks to a morpheme, an -ing word. Death
Is an image of sylables. 

[...]

"Phonemics"...

No love deserves the death it has. An archipelago
Rocks cropping out of ocean. Seabirds shit on it. Live out their lives on it.
What was once a mountain.
Or was it once a mountain? Did Lemuria, Atlantis, Mu ever exist except in the mind of old men fevered by the distances and the rocks they saw?
Was it true? Can the ocean of time claim to own us now adrift 
Over that land. In that land. If memory serves
There (that rock out there)
Is more to it.

***

Wake up one warm morning. See the sea in the distance.
Die Ferne, water
Because mainly it is not land. A hot day too
The shreads of fog have already vaporized
Have gone back where they came from. There may be a whale in this ocean.
Empty fragments, like the shards of pots found in some Mesopotamian expedition. Found bu not put together. The unstable
Universe has distance but not much else.
No one's weather or room to breathe in.

[...]

Malice aforethought. Every sound
You can make making music.
Tough lips.
This is no nightingale. No-
Body's waxen image burned. Only
Believe me. Linguistics is divided like Graves' mythology of mythology, a triple goddess - morphology, phonology, and syntax.
Tough lips that cannot quite make the sound of love
The language
Has so misshaped them.
Malicious afterthought. None of you bastards
Knows how Charlie Parker died. And dances now in some brief kingdom (Oz) two phonemes
That were never paired before in the language.

[...]

"Graphemics"...

1
Like a scared rabbit running over and over again his tracks in the snow
We spent this Halloween together, forty miles apart.
The tracks there and the rabbit's feeling of death is there.
 And the children no longer masquerading themselves as
 ghosts bu as businessmen, Yelled "Trick or treat," maybe
 even in Stinson
The tracks in the snow and rabbit's motion which writes it is 
 quite legible. The children
Not even pretending to be souls of the dead are not. Forty miles.
 Nothing really restores
We
And the dead are not really on the frozen field. (The children
 don't even wear masks) This
Is another poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.

2
It's been raining five more days and will probably keep raining five 
 days more
I get up in the morning, see the treacherous sun and try to read
 the Indian signs on the pavement. Not much water. Has it
 been raining while I dreamed?
The sky is no help. The clouds are to the east and the sky
 (treacherous blue) is no help. It is going to rain from the
 west.
Nevertheless (while the wind is blowing from the west) I can 
 smell the clouds that won't appear - bu will for five or ten
 days. Your heart, and the sky has a hole in it.
In my heart, as Verlaine said, I can hear the little sound of it
 raining
Not an Indian sign. But real unfucking rain.

3
Let us tie the strings on this bit of reality.
Graphemes. Once wax now plastic, showing the ends. Like a
 red light.
One feels or sees limits.
They are warning graphemes bu also meaning graphemes
 because without the marked ends of the shoelace or the
 traffic signal one would not know how to tie a shoe or cross
 a street - which is like making a sentence.
Crossing a street against the light or tying a shoe with a granny
 knot is all right. Freedom, in fact, providing one sees or feels
 the warning graphemes. Let them snarl at you then you 
 snarl back at them. You'll be dead sooner.
But so will they. They
Disappear when you die.

[...]