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The Heads of the Town up to the Aether
Paperback in very good condition. First edition. Lithographs by Fran Herndon. Covers and page block are lightly marked. Spine and rear lower leading corner are creased. Minor creases on some pages. Pages are clean and text is clear throughout. HCW
- GenresPoetry
109 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
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41 people want to read
About the author
Jack Spicer
56 books80 followersJack 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 17, 2020
Spicer is a tragically overlooked poetic gem in the canon of American poetry, part of the crucial San Francisco Renaissance period that shaped the Beats coming along a decade later. It was Duncan, Rexroth, Spice, and Patchen to a lesser degree that influenced Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, McClure, DiPrima, etc., and somehow the general poetry reading public doesn't know this, they were simply left in the dust by the primacy of the Beats. To understand Beat writing, I would argue it's necessary to understand San Francisco Renaissance poets and writers, and Spicer is one of the better places to start. Strongly recommended.
December 6, 2011
My favorite Spicer collection.
December 1, 2025
“Dante would have blamed Beatrice
If she turned up alive in a local bordello
Or Newton gravity
If apples fell upward
What I mean is words
Turn mysteriously against those who use them
Hello says the apple
Both of us were object”
—
“The fate of the car
And the fate of the ride
Is only a bridegroom
Without a bride
Though she hasn’t a fate
And I haven’t seen her
She isn’t a mirror
Whatever she was.
And the light in the air
Was as real as it was
And it hasn’t her beauty
Whose blankness I stare.”
—
“Whispers—
Eurydice’s head is missing
Whispers—
Get out of hell—
Whispers—
You big poet
We soldiers from hell’s country
Here
Safe as you are
You write poetry
For dead persons”
—
“Love isn’t proud enough to hate
The stranger at its gate
That says and does
Or strong enough to return
Or strong enough to return (and back and back and
back again)
What was”
—
“A write rabbit absolutely outlined in whiteness
upon a black background
A ghost
The most
We can say or think about it is it stays
Not as a memory of something that happened or
a symbol of anything
We loved or respected or was a part of history
Our history
It stays
In a closet we wear like a ring on our fingers
The rabbit
Ghost of them
Most of what we knew.”
—
“The bell went ‘rrrr’
And we both went ‘rrrr’
And there was a beauty
In talking to him.
But angel-talk howls
At the edge of out beds
And all of us now
Are partners of hell.
For crocodile crys
Every tear that we know
And our tears are our blankets
Wherever we go.”
—
“They are the people we expected on Halloween who never came—in spite of our good wishes. Hell is where we place ourselves when we wish to look upward. Eurydice and Orpheus and Hermes were all simpleminded.”
—
“I couldn’t get my feeling loose
Like a goose I traveled. Well
Sheer hell
Is where your apartness is your apartness
I mean hell
Is where they don’t even pick flowers.”
—
“The human voices put the angels
Pretty far away. The sleigh-bells
In the distance go
As if we had never seen snow.
Pray for the right of the thing of the universe
The knot which is unknotted by something other than
our hands
We, ghosts, lovers, and casual strangers to the poem.
Me, the ghost says.”
—
“Not anything real. The snowflakes are equidistant from themselves and fall slowly. Almost impossibly. There is nothing left of it. Not even the water its crystals puddle. These persons know reality for what they are.”
—
“What has four legs, three feet and seldom talks to anyone?
A corpse.
What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest?
A ghost.
What lives forever, has three knots in its rainbow, stores up passion like a squirrel stores up food for the winter, is disengaged from everything worthless, does not even sense the dreamings of poets or notice the river
They.
Notice the last lack of questionmark, notice the toss of the last question
A defeat.”
—
“I can’t take the inferior while the superior is there. I, the author of the novel, the dupe—the danger any reader takes reading these words.
After the breath stops, the words listen. To each other? To the song of each idea (whatever that means) that they are bound to? To something’s heart?
A metaphor is something unexplained—like a place in a map that says after this is desert. A shorthand to admit the unknown.
A is a blank piece of driftwood being busted. E is a carpenter whose pockets are filled with says, and shadows, and needles. I is a pun. O is an Egyptian tapestry remembering the glories of an unknown alien. U is the reverse of W. The are not vowels.
When he said it first, he created the world.”
—
“Inside every Rimbaud was a ready-made dead-letter officer. Who really mailed the letter? Who stole the signs?
The signs of his youth and his poetry. The way he looked at things as if they were the last things to be alive.
The robes of his office are vague and noble. He has a hat that he wears on his head. His arms are attached to his shoulders.
Our contempt for him is general and is echoed even in the house of the dead. Blood would not appease his ghost which stays in us even after we are in the house of the dead. He is in every corpse, in every human life.
He writes poems, pitches baseballs, fails us whenever we have a nerve to need him. Button-molder too, he grows in us like the river of years.”
—
“The first seal is the name of President Buchannan. He is there because he is there unashamed in his role of building the post office.
The second seal is love. It has not been known to include the neighboring countries.
The third seal is boredom. It is called history or politics depending on the context.
The fourth is Jim. A private image. A poet demanding privacy in his poem is like a river and a bank unable to move against each other.
The fifth seal is the eternal privacy words offer. Making them human.
Rimbaud. A cry in the night. An offer. What the words choose to say. An offer of something. A peace.”
—
“Rimbaud is 106 years old. Meanwhile everything is going on. A style creates its own context as a river has eels in it.
A piece of marble got lost when they were digging the quarry. His face when he was 86 years old or 104. The mystery of why there is a beauty left in any of us. Human beauty. In marble or in age.
These mysteries are real mysteries. It is I that proclaim these mysteries. Playing leapfrog with the unknown. With the dead. It is I that proclaim this history.
Look at the statues disappearing into the distance. They have space to disappear. Rub your eyes to see them. It is a strategy where we miss what we hit.
I mean that the reader of this novel is a ghost. Involved. Involved in the lives of Rimbaud.
—
“Taught. As a wire which reaches. A silver wire which reaches from the end of the beautiful as if elsewhere. A metaphor. Metaphors are not for humans.
The wires dance in the wind of the noise our poems make. The noise without an audience. Because the poems were written for ghosts.
The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems. We have it second-hand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making.
Yet it is not a simple process like a mirror or a radio. They try to give us circuits to see them, to hear them. Teaching an audience.
The wires in the rose are beautiful.”
—
“The poet thinks continually of strategies, of how he can win out against the poem.
Seeking experience for specific instances, drawing upon the pulp of the brain and the legs and the arms and the motion of the poet making him see things that can be conveyed through their words.
Or disbelief too. Seeking experience for specific instances. And in the gradual lack of the beautiful, the lock of the door before him, a new Eurydice, stepping up to him, punning her way through his hell.
They won’t come through. Nothing comes through. The death
Of every poem in every line
The argument con-
tinues.”
—
“Nothingness is alive in the eyes of the beloved. He wears the clothes wherein he walks naked. He is fame.
Sounded ahead by the trumpets of unreason. Barely accounted for by the senses. He is what he is because he is never where he is.
I cannot proclaim him for he is not mine. Eros, armor, feely love, his body is more abstract than all the messages my body sends my brain of him. And he is human. I cannot proclaim starlight for it is never in the same place.
I can write a poem about him a hundred times but he is not there. The mere numbers precent his appearance as the names (Eros, Amor, feely love, Starlight) for his fame is as the fame of What. I have not words for him.”
—
“If you see him everywhere or exactly nowhere, he becomes as it were the circumference of a circle that has no point but the boundary of your desire. Coming to a point.
And the human witness of this passion is rightly stunned by the incongruity of it. Lifting a human being into a metaphor.
All that we do in bed, or sleep, or sex is limited by this circle which can only be personally defined.
On the outside of it is what everybody talks about. On the outside of it are the dead that try to talk.
Once you try to embrace an absolutely geometric circle the naked loss stays with you like a picture echoing.”
—
“Being faithful. And you are only being faithful to the shadow of a word. Once lost, once found—in the horny deeps below finding. Once cast ashore upon me like the heart’s cargo.
And this is the system of metasexual metaphor. Being faithful to the nonsense of it: The warp and woof. A system of dreaming fake dreams.
Being faithful to it. All the ache of remembering the past, what the body doesn’t know—the ache that isn’t really there.
Sorry for themselves, the Words beckon terribly to me. They wave past out the door: ‘Goodbye, I love you.’
Being faithful. I pray hope to it. Not them. Not even the words.”
—
“It is not unfair to say that a city is a collection of humans. Human beings.
In their municipal trust they sit together in cities. They talk together in cities. They form groups.
Even when they do not form groups they sit alone together in cities.
Every city that is formed collects its slums and the ghost of it. Every city that is formed collects its ghosts.
Poetry comes long after the city is collected. IT recognizes them as a metaphor. An unavoidable metaphor. Almost the opposite.”
—
“The city redefined becomes a church. A movement of poetry. Not merely a system of belief but their beliefs and their hearts living together.
They are angry at their differences—the dead and the living, the ghosts and the angels, the green parrot and the dog I have just invented. All things that use separate words. They want to inhabit the city.
But the city in that sense is as far from me (and the things that speak through me) as Dante was from Florence. Farther. For it is a city that I do not remember.
But this city that we create in our bartalk or in our fuss and fury about each other is in an utterly missed and mirrored way an image of the city. A return from exile.”
—
“Wanting to explain. It is wanting to explain. And all through it burrows of rabbits hover like mice in chimneys or metaphors in the middle of a gingerbread cake.
The poet wants to take up all the marbles and put them in his pocket. Wants marbles. Where the poem is like winning the game.
It is so absurd that the rats calling, ‘Credo quia absurdum’ or the cats or the mountain lions become a singular procession of metaphors. Each with their singular liturgy.
These are words and their words holler hollowly in the rabbit burrows, in the metaphors, in the years of our life.”
—
“Like love being made between fire-engines the poets talk to each other. To put out the fire—not in each other but the fire the poems made.
To feel sorry for the bastard. Us. Who walk through hell’s fire without moving (quickly) listening to seashells while in our ears there is its real roar.
Quickly. And then the sea moves toward us conveniently. As if death were an excuse for all of our sorrows.
The birds fly away. The surf breaks on the shore, on the rocks, on whatever the ocean, being ocean, is conscious of. Deliberately.
And the tides pull back against the very bones we have let them.”
If she turned up alive in a local bordello
Or Newton gravity
If apples fell upward
What I mean is words
Turn mysteriously against those who use them
Hello says the apple
Both of us were object”
—
“The fate of the car
And the fate of the ride
Is only a bridegroom
Without a bride
Though she hasn’t a fate
And I haven’t seen her
She isn’t a mirror
Whatever she was.
And the light in the air
Was as real as it was
And it hasn’t her beauty
Whose blankness I stare.”
—
“Whispers—
Eurydice’s head is missing
Whispers—
Get out of hell—
Whispers—
You big poet
We soldiers from hell’s country
Here
Safe as you are
You write poetry
For dead persons”
—
“Love isn’t proud enough to hate
The stranger at its gate
That says and does
Or strong enough to return
Or strong enough to return (and back and back and
back again)
What was”
—
“A write rabbit absolutely outlined in whiteness
upon a black background
A ghost
The most
We can say or think about it is it stays
Not as a memory of something that happened or
a symbol of anything
We loved or respected or was a part of history
Our history
It stays
In a closet we wear like a ring on our fingers
The rabbit
Ghost of them
Most of what we knew.”
—
“The bell went ‘rrrr’
And we both went ‘rrrr’
And there was a beauty
In talking to him.
But angel-talk howls
At the edge of out beds
And all of us now
Are partners of hell.
For crocodile crys
Every tear that we know
And our tears are our blankets
Wherever we go.”
—
“They are the people we expected on Halloween who never came—in spite of our good wishes. Hell is where we place ourselves when we wish to look upward. Eurydice and Orpheus and Hermes were all simpleminded.”
—
“I couldn’t get my feeling loose
Like a goose I traveled. Well
Sheer hell
Is where your apartness is your apartness
I mean hell
Is where they don’t even pick flowers.”
—
“The human voices put the angels
Pretty far away. The sleigh-bells
In the distance go
As if we had never seen snow.
Pray for the right of the thing of the universe
The knot which is unknotted by something other than
our hands
We, ghosts, lovers, and casual strangers to the poem.
Me, the ghost says.”
—
“Not anything real. The snowflakes are equidistant from themselves and fall slowly. Almost impossibly. There is nothing left of it. Not even the water its crystals puddle. These persons know reality for what they are.”
—
“What has four legs, three feet and seldom talks to anyone?
A corpse.
What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest?
A ghost.
What lives forever, has three knots in its rainbow, stores up passion like a squirrel stores up food for the winter, is disengaged from everything worthless, does not even sense the dreamings of poets or notice the river
They.
Notice the last lack of questionmark, notice the toss of the last question
A defeat.”
—
“I can’t take the inferior while the superior is there. I, the author of the novel, the dupe—the danger any reader takes reading these words.
After the breath stops, the words listen. To each other? To the song of each idea (whatever that means) that they are bound to? To something’s heart?
A metaphor is something unexplained—like a place in a map that says after this is desert. A shorthand to admit the unknown.
A is a blank piece of driftwood being busted. E is a carpenter whose pockets are filled with says, and shadows, and needles. I is a pun. O is an Egyptian tapestry remembering the glories of an unknown alien. U is the reverse of W. The are not vowels.
When he said it first, he created the world.”
—
“Inside every Rimbaud was a ready-made dead-letter officer. Who really mailed the letter? Who stole the signs?
The signs of his youth and his poetry. The way he looked at things as if they were the last things to be alive.
The robes of his office are vague and noble. He has a hat that he wears on his head. His arms are attached to his shoulders.
Our contempt for him is general and is echoed even in the house of the dead. Blood would not appease his ghost which stays in us even after we are in the house of the dead. He is in every corpse, in every human life.
He writes poems, pitches baseballs, fails us whenever we have a nerve to need him. Button-molder too, he grows in us like the river of years.”
—
“The first seal is the name of President Buchannan. He is there because he is there unashamed in his role of building the post office.
The second seal is love. It has not been known to include the neighboring countries.
The third seal is boredom. It is called history or politics depending on the context.
The fourth is Jim. A private image. A poet demanding privacy in his poem is like a river and a bank unable to move against each other.
The fifth seal is the eternal privacy words offer. Making them human.
Rimbaud. A cry in the night. An offer. What the words choose to say. An offer of something. A peace.”
—
“Rimbaud is 106 years old. Meanwhile everything is going on. A style creates its own context as a river has eels in it.
A piece of marble got lost when they were digging the quarry. His face when he was 86 years old or 104. The mystery of why there is a beauty left in any of us. Human beauty. In marble or in age.
These mysteries are real mysteries. It is I that proclaim these mysteries. Playing leapfrog with the unknown. With the dead. It is I that proclaim this history.
Look at the statues disappearing into the distance. They have space to disappear. Rub your eyes to see them. It is a strategy where we miss what we hit.
I mean that the reader of this novel is a ghost. Involved. Involved in the lives of Rimbaud.
—
“Taught. As a wire which reaches. A silver wire which reaches from the end of the beautiful as if elsewhere. A metaphor. Metaphors are not for humans.
The wires dance in the wind of the noise our poems make. The noise without an audience. Because the poems were written for ghosts.
The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems. We have it second-hand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making.
Yet it is not a simple process like a mirror or a radio. They try to give us circuits to see them, to hear them. Teaching an audience.
The wires in the rose are beautiful.”
—
“The poet thinks continually of strategies, of how he can win out against the poem.
Seeking experience for specific instances, drawing upon the pulp of the brain and the legs and the arms and the motion of the poet making him see things that can be conveyed through their words.
Or disbelief too. Seeking experience for specific instances. And in the gradual lack of the beautiful, the lock of the door before him, a new Eurydice, stepping up to him, punning her way through his hell.
They won’t come through. Nothing comes through. The death
Of every poem in every line
The argument con-
tinues.”
—
“Nothingness is alive in the eyes of the beloved. He wears the clothes wherein he walks naked. He is fame.
Sounded ahead by the trumpets of unreason. Barely accounted for by the senses. He is what he is because he is never where he is.
I cannot proclaim him for he is not mine. Eros, armor, feely love, his body is more abstract than all the messages my body sends my brain of him. And he is human. I cannot proclaim starlight for it is never in the same place.
I can write a poem about him a hundred times but he is not there. The mere numbers precent his appearance as the names (Eros, Amor, feely love, Starlight) for his fame is as the fame of What. I have not words for him.”
—
“If you see him everywhere or exactly nowhere, he becomes as it were the circumference of a circle that has no point but the boundary of your desire. Coming to a point.
And the human witness of this passion is rightly stunned by the incongruity of it. Lifting a human being into a metaphor.
All that we do in bed, or sleep, or sex is limited by this circle which can only be personally defined.
On the outside of it is what everybody talks about. On the outside of it are the dead that try to talk.
Once you try to embrace an absolutely geometric circle the naked loss stays with you like a picture echoing.”
—
“Being faithful. And you are only being faithful to the shadow of a word. Once lost, once found—in the horny deeps below finding. Once cast ashore upon me like the heart’s cargo.
And this is the system of metasexual metaphor. Being faithful to the nonsense of it: The warp and woof. A system of dreaming fake dreams.
Being faithful to it. All the ache of remembering the past, what the body doesn’t know—the ache that isn’t really there.
Sorry for themselves, the Words beckon terribly to me. They wave past out the door: ‘Goodbye, I love you.’
Being faithful. I pray hope to it. Not them. Not even the words.”
—
“It is not unfair to say that a city is a collection of humans. Human beings.
In their municipal trust they sit together in cities. They talk together in cities. They form groups.
Even when they do not form groups they sit alone together in cities.
Every city that is formed collects its slums and the ghost of it. Every city that is formed collects its ghosts.
Poetry comes long after the city is collected. IT recognizes them as a metaphor. An unavoidable metaphor. Almost the opposite.”
—
“The city redefined becomes a church. A movement of poetry. Not merely a system of belief but their beliefs and their hearts living together.
They are angry at their differences—the dead and the living, the ghosts and the angels, the green parrot and the dog I have just invented. All things that use separate words. They want to inhabit the city.
But the city in that sense is as far from me (and the things that speak through me) as Dante was from Florence. Farther. For it is a city that I do not remember.
But this city that we create in our bartalk or in our fuss and fury about each other is in an utterly missed and mirrored way an image of the city. A return from exile.”
—
“Wanting to explain. It is wanting to explain. And all through it burrows of rabbits hover like mice in chimneys or metaphors in the middle of a gingerbread cake.
The poet wants to take up all the marbles and put them in his pocket. Wants marbles. Where the poem is like winning the game.
It is so absurd that the rats calling, ‘Credo quia absurdum’ or the cats or the mountain lions become a singular procession of metaphors. Each with their singular liturgy.
These are words and their words holler hollowly in the rabbit burrows, in the metaphors, in the years of our life.”
—
“Like love being made between fire-engines the poets talk to each other. To put out the fire—not in each other but the fire the poems made.
To feel sorry for the bastard. Us. Who walk through hell’s fire without moving (quickly) listening to seashells while in our ears there is its real roar.
Quickly. And then the sea moves toward us conveniently. As if death were an excuse for all of our sorrows.
The birds fly away. The surf breaks on the shore, on the rocks, on whatever the ocean, being ocean, is conscious of. Deliberately.
And the tides pull back against the very bones we have let them.”
Read
July 9, 2024This is the letterpress original edition, printed in monotype Caslon, and in a fairly small font size. There's no double spacing between poem title and body of poem. Titling isn't bolded, and isn't in a larger or different font. The book's dimensions are City Lights small, printed by Auerhahn Press. Stiff paper. There isn't use of a screen to make the "Explanatory Notes" of the first part dimmer, as is done in the Black Sparrow edition of The Collected Boks of Jack Spicer (I don't have the New Directions edition handy to compare them).
Graham Mackintosh designed and typeset the Black Sparrow collected books. In Lew Ellingham and Kevin Killian's book on the Spicer scene, Mackintosh tentatively offers that Jack Spicer's dictation includes printer errors. There are different printer errors in the original edition.
Graham Mackintosh designed and typeset the Black Sparrow collected books. In Lew Ellingham and Kevin Killian's book on the Spicer scene, Mackintosh tentatively offers that Jack Spicer's dictation includes printer errors. There are different printer errors in the original edition.
January 17, 2022
The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether is composed of three texts: "Homage to Creeley", "A Fake Novel About The Life of Arthur Rimbaud" and "A Textbook of Poetry".
The full title of "Homage to Creeley" is actually:
"Homage to Creeley
Explanatory Notes"
The title is arranged according to the layout of the text: poems on top, explanatory notes on bottom, divided by a line. The poems and explanatory notes may be the best example of Spicer's sense of humour. In this case taking the form of parody, parody of old poetic forms (rhyming is otherwise uncommon for Spicer) and academia...
Spicer's "Fake Novel about The Life of Arthur Rimbaud" is misleading. Is it the novel that is fake, or the life of Arthur Rimbaud? In face, both are fake. Although it borrows the novelistic form (Chapters, etc.), it is more accurately a work of prose poetry. The life of Arthur Rimbaud is entirely fabricated. If any factual detail exists, it is lost in the proliferation of fabrications...
"A Textbook of Poetry" is the most difficult of the three to define. Suffice to say that if Jack Spicer had written a textbook (of poetry, or anything for that matter) it would look something like this...
The full title of "Homage to Creeley" is actually:
"Homage to Creeley
Explanatory Notes"
The title is arranged according to the layout of the text: poems on top, explanatory notes on bottom, divided by a line. The poems and explanatory notes may be the best example of Spicer's sense of humour. In this case taking the form of parody, parody of old poetic forms (rhyming is otherwise uncommon for Spicer) and academia...
Dante would have blamed Beatrice
If she turned up alive in a local bordello
Or Newton gravity
If apples fell upward
What I mean is words
Turn mysteriously against those who use them
Hello says the apple
Both of us were object.
____________________________________________
There is a universal here that is dimly recognized. I mean everybody says some kinds of love are horseshoe. Or invents a Beatrice to prove they are.
What Beatrice did did not become her own business. Dante saw to that. Sawed away the last plank anyone he loved could stand on.
- Sheep Trails Are Fateful To Strangers
Whispers -
Eurydice's head is missing
Whispers -
Get out of hell -
Whispers -
You big poet
We soldiers from hell's country
Here
Safe as you are
You write poetry
For dead persons
____________________________________________
This is definitely a warning to Orpheus which he does not understand - being an asshole. This is too bad because there would have been just as much poetry if he had understood it.
The definition of warning has been given constantly. The fact, alone, that Eurydice's head was missing should have warned him.
- Elegy
Be bop de bop
They are asleep
There where they like us
It goes
From nose to nose
From stop to stop
Violations are rare
And the air is fair
It is spring
On the thing
We sing.
Beep bop de beep
They are all asleep
They're all asleep.
____________________________________________
The car is still travelling. It runs through the kingdom of the dead picking up millions of passengers.
Like most motorists, the Princess is bored on the road she is going.
Ferlinghetti is a nonsense syllable invented by The Poet.
- Ferlinghetti
A white rabbit absolutely outlined in whiteness upon a black background
A ghost
The most
We can say or think about it is it stays.
Not as a memory of something that happened or a symbol or anything
We loved or respected or was a part of history
Our history
It stays
In a closet we wear like a ring on our fingers
The rabbit
Ghost of them
Most of what we knew.
____________________________________________
"They ran through the briers and the yuan through the bushes, and they ran through the brambles where the rabbits wouldn't go."
Rabbits do not know what they are.
Ghosts are very similar. They are frightened and do not know what they are, but they can go where the rabbits cannot go. All the way to the heart.
- Partington Ridge
Spicer's "Fake Novel about The Life of Arthur Rimbaud" is misleading. Is it the novel that is fake, or the life of Arthur Rimbaud? In face, both are fake. Although it borrows the novelistic form (Chapters, etc.), it is more accurately a work of prose poetry. The life of Arthur Rimbaud is entirely fabricated. If any factual detail exists, it is lost in the proliferation of fabrications...
BOOK I
Chapter I
The Dead Letter Office
"You can't close the door. It is in the future," French history said as it was born in Charlieville. It was before the Civil War and I don't think that even James Buchanan was president.
There was a dead-letter office in every French village or town or city the size of Paris. There still is. Rimbaud was born in the Charlieville post office. He was a big child.
Apollinaire used to play gold while other people were shooting machine guns. Big butterflies tries to liberate him from the liberal minded. But Rimbaud crawled to the page that lifted him up from his nephews.
That was born.
- A Fake Novel about The Life of Arthur Rimbaud
"A Textbook of Poetry" is the most difficult of the three to define. Suffice to say that if Jack Spicer had written a textbook (of poetry, or anything for that matter) it would look something like this...
1
Surrealism is the business of poets who cannot benefit by surrealism. It was the first appearance of the Logos that said, "The Public be damned," by which he did not mean that they did not matter or he wanted to be crucified by them, but that really he did not have a word to say to them. This was surrealism.
But even the business of ignoring the public is the business of the poet and hot the surrealism of the poet. The surrealism of the poet could not write words.
To be lost in a crowd. Of images, of metaphors (whatever they were), of words; this is a better surrender. Of the poet who is lost in the crowd of them. Finally.
- A Textbook of Poetry
December 18, 2008
One of the great treasures of my library...found in a used book shop in Oxford. I always wonder how it got there. Was there some don, recently deceased, who was into American avant-garde poetry? (I also got a copy of Coolidge's Space there.)
You can read my comments on Spicer at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/schwabsky.
You can read my comments on Spicer at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/schwabsky.
October 26, 2018
In no other work is it so clear that Spicer was light years ahead of his time. The poems are annotated in a strange way: as though the speaker, the author, both, or neither, are antagonizing the poem. Moving, hilarious. Experimental.
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