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VANCOUVER LECTURE 1 Dictation and "A Textbook of Poetry' JUNE 13, 1965 t% Given on the hundredth anniversary of William Butler Yeats's birth, the first of the Vancouver lectures begins with a mixture of humor, tension , and seance-like charm. The structural correlation of Yeats's being visited by spooks and Spiccr's being visited by Yeats takes on a magical significance in the context of a lecture about poetic sources, voices, and ghosts: Spicer introducesYeats as his poetic precursor—his ghost father— and his poetics perform a kind of serious play (like Hamlet) in which the living are responsible for carrying out the desires of the dead. Spicer presents his poetic practice as an act of "dictation" that engages the dead in the economy of the living. He describes it as both a "dance" and a "game," but the dance is a danse macabre and the game is a ball game in which you play for more than your life. In the course of the lecture, Spicer places himself in opposition to both Romantic and symbolist poetics by disavowingthe notion of the poet as a "beautiful machine . . . almost a perpetual motion machine of emotion until the poet's heart broke or it was burned on the beach like Shelley's"(I, 5). Spicer insists that the poet docs not drive the poem; the poem drives the poet. Instead of becoming a master of words, the poet is mastered by words, which "turn mysteriouslyagainst those who use them" (HC,125). The lecture also providesa useful account of Spicer's sense of his own immediate context and perhaps for this reason it has been the most quoted of the four lectures, thanks to the printing of an earlier version in Caterpillar rz (July 1970). Instead of focusing on poetic invention, Spicer introduces an idiosyncraticgenealogy of poetic reception beginning with Yeats's automatic writing on a train ride through California in 1918; backtracking to Blake; whistlestopping with Pound, Williams, and Eliot; moving on to Spicer's contemporaries Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert 2 V A N C O U V E R L K C T U R i ; 1 Creeley, and Robin Blaser; and arriving at Spicer's reading from his own "A Textbook of Poetry." But the genealogy of poetry presented in the lecture is not simple, and Spicer uses the work of his peers to further define his own practice by negation. The only poet who escapes Spieer's thorough critique is Robin Blaser, with whom he seems to be in such agreement that at times he speaks for both of them. It is important to note, however, that when Spieer spars with his contemporaries it is not to denigrate the work of his peers. His poetry and letters repeatedly make it clear that an exchange of poetic judgment is also a way of expressing respect and reciprocity. In this light, one of the interestingmoves in this lecture is Spicer's identification of Olson as someone whose practice is closer to his own than Creeley's or Duncan's —an unusual assertion since in Lecture 4 he identifies Olson as one of the "bosses" of poetry, corresponding to President Lyndon Johnson. Likewise, while Spicer expresses dissatisfactionwith Denise Levcrtov's writing of poems around a "great metaphor," he says so within the context of seeing her as a "good poet." And his sparring with Creeley comes in the context of their common ground: they both use the same term —"dictation"—to describe their writing experience in different ways. In discussing the poetics of his contemporaries, Spicer reveals the differences and affinities within their practices but keeps his own model of composition open and even contradictory. According to Spicer's motley procession of metaphors, the poet is a host being invaded by the parasite of the dictating source of the poem; this source is "Martian"; the poem is the product of a dance between the poet and his "Martian" source; the poet is like a radio receivingtransmissions; poets exist within a city of the dead; "spooks" visit poets with messages from hell; and the poem itself becomes a hell of possible meanings. Within this agglomerate of multiple figures, Spicer opens the discourse of poetic composition by placing dictation outside of any fixed taxonomy and by refusing to claim his practice as an incontrovertible or absolute good. What distinguishes Spicer's model from the "English department" version of poetic composition is in part its disruption of the hierarchy of inspiration. Kor...

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