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AFTERWORD: Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading
- Wesleyan University Press
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AFTERWORD Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading Mechanic!)' we move In God's universe — JACK S P I C E R I. An Occult Circuitry In the post-Desert Storm, Deep Space, X-Filed age of human and electronic viruses, chip architecture, information webs, and ether nets in which we live in the 19905, it may finally be possible to imagine the extent to which Jack Spicer anticipated our poetic and political worlds and the extent to which he composed beyond or "outside" his own. The future, that is, has finally caught up with the dark vision of his poems, which in his time must have often seemed odd, anachronistic, paranoid, and as genuinely alien as his description of his writing practice. The recent increase of interest in Spiccr's poetry substantiates his currency, but Spicer's poetic concerns have always been strikingly ahead of his time, as if he lived within the mechanistic and degraded future articulated in his poems, where computer stands in for God (BMV, 254), silicon inhabits the heart (I,, 224), politics are informed by bombs (TP, 178; HG, 205; etc.), popular consciousness is preoccupied by outer space (L, 231; BMV, 253), the death of the author is an accepted trope of literary practice (AL, 34), and the social matrix of nation and community has collapsed into slums under the bosses of multinational self-interest. And with the advent of globali/ecl electronic networks (the "information superhighway"), regional communities are finally being effaced. Truly "where we are is in a sentence" (TP, 175), as poets caught in a language game between marginality and pop-confessionalism and as political subjects facing the narrowing limits of democratic possibility. 174 A K T K R W O R D While this book does not propose a prophetic Spicer, it takes as a given Spiccr's sophistication, self-awareness, and social and political understanding , all of which give his language games an added darkness and his sampling of other texts an added seriousness and depth beyond their comic or disruptive effects. Much useful work has been written about Spicer in his historical context and about his practice of dictation and seriality .1 But the significanceof his various models of composition, the extent of his visual imagination, the sophistication of his reading practice, his program of intertextuality— the texts to which he refers as part of the available material or "furniture" of his assemblages —and its effect on the practice of reading Spicer's poems have yet to be elucidated.2 Spiccr's intertextuality plays itself out through his strategies of quoting and misquoting, copying, punning, and the enactment of send-ups or jousts with other poets. Spiccr's extrapoetic texts—his letters and lectures—offer a glimpse into his reading practice and the extent to which it informs, corresponds with, and is reflected in his poems. In short, he is a "mirror maker" (A, 55). Deeply embedded in these strategies is an imaginary reader who at times shares in the various jokes and correspondences within the poems and at times remains outside their oblique or hermetic meanings. Given Spicer's view of the communal aspects of composition on every level —of poems, magazines, cities, and finally some larger community of the dead —it would be almost impossible to overestimate the importance of reception within his practice, especially since for Spicer the traditional roles are reversed: the poet is essentially a passive receiver of messages from beyond, which he copies or translates. The reader, on the other hand, is engaged intellectually and physically —even erotically—in the creative act, and is the necessary supplement allowingthe occult circuitry of the poem to perform. Ironically, Spicer's poems often play hard-to-get. Not only are they clas1 . See, for instance, Robin Blaser's touchstone essay "The Practice of Outside" for both historical context and discussion of Spicer's work in terms of contemporary poetic theory and practice. See Michael Davidson's San Francisco Renaissance for a broader discussion of Spicer's regional context. See Lew Fllinghani and Kevin Killian's biography, Poet Re Like God, for an in-depth account of Spicer's life and times. Kor further discussions of his poetics and various formal concerns , see especially the work of Joseph Coute, Maria Damon, Clayton Fshleman, Ross Feld, Norman Finkelstcin, Fdward Foster, John Granger, Burton Hatlcn, Stephanie Judy, Jerome McGaun , Miriam Nichols, Jed Rasula, Peter Rilcy, Ron Silliman, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Acrs, Boundary 2, Caterpillar, Change, and Ironwood have all...