In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

VANCOUVER LECTURE 2 The Serial Poem and The Holy Grail JUNE 15, 1965 i*$ In Lecture 2, Spiccr continues his discussion of poetic dictation, proposing that the larger scaffolding of hooks can also he dictated. Spicer uses the term "book" in this lecture to mean a measure of composition, as opposed to a "collection" of poems. The Holy Grail is an intricate assemblage of seven "books" (chapters) of seven poems each.' For Spicer, the order of the poems is crucial since the overall structure of the book is dictated just as the lines of individual poems are dictated, and according to Spicer it should not be read out of sequence. The Holy Grail is an assemblage of narrative fragments from Grail legend, popular culture, folk song, etc., composed in such a way that what it narrates is not just a "legend " but also the process of poem-making out of multiple sources. This discussion of seriality is the most lecture-like of Spieer's presentations , with the last third of the lecture taken up in a debate with Elliott Gose,2 an English professor at UBC, who pushes Spicer on to a further discussion of other poets who are significant to his practice, particularly Hart Grane, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. Spicer is also drawn into a comparison between poetry and other arts like music, and he clarifies his view that poetry is neither for entertainment nor for individual betterment , ultimately agreeing with Gose that composition by dictation is a form of spiritual exercise or a meditativediscipline. The confusion among the audience members during the lecture makes apparent how unusual Spieer's insistence on dictation —the literally de-authored status of the dictated poem and its necessary waiting for alien intervention—must have been within the world of sixtiesself-expression , confessional poetry, and the emergence of identity politics. In contrast to the freedom discourses that were particularly intense and determining on the Berkeley campus (as evidenced in Lecture 4), Spieer's 50 V A N C O U V E R L E C T U R E 2 poetry reveals a distrust of all liberation narratives as merely replacing one form of tyranny with another. In fact, part of what makes Spicer's work move so compellingly against the grain of his time is its resistance to issues of personality and identity and its placement of the poet in the frankly clerical position of a fatigued copyist or, at most, a translator. One of the signatures of Spicer's work is its disruption of self-driven narratives and rhetorical structures even in a seemingly narrative poem like The Holy Grail, in which the tendency toward dramatic monologue is overturned through an overall aesthetic of assemblage and a character's self-expression is disrupted through the linguistic manipulation of puns. More than any other art form, poetry "riddles " us. We are intellectually stumped and physically shot through, to quote just one of the puns that run haywire through Spicer's poems. As a serial poem, The Holy Grail is unlike other serial projects like Pound's Cantos in the sense that it docs not arise out of a planned system. Spiccr explains that a true serial poem moves forward without looking back. Although Spiccr implies that The Holy Grail might be read as a "novel" (II, 73), the individual "books" are not organized according to a narrative progression, and all its books are contemporaneous. Seriality, then, is not just a manifestation of temporal sequence, and it does not serve any overarching narrative or rhetorical concern. For Spicer, serial composition is the practice of writing in units that are somehow related without creating a totalizing structure for them. Their connection is purely poetic. That is, the poet must ignore the poem's progress in order not to unify its content into a message she or he can control. Like Orpheus , the poet is instructed not to look back. But the rules of the serial poem —and of poetry generally —are not in themselves absolute. Being human, the poet does look back, and the rules only generate more imaginative forms of evasion. Spicer's terminology of the "boojum" and of aliens, radio, and Martians, is in itself an evasion or substitution. Such terms are like the device of the "McGuffin" in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, in which the action turns on the chasing of a clue that has nothing to do with the "real" story but serves to bring the...

Share