The Heads of the Town up to the Aether

by Jack Spicer

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

Genres: Poetry

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

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

[Scott Holstad · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite Spicer collection.

[Louis Cabri]

This 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.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

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...

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

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nathaniel Klaung · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.