My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

INTRODUCTION

Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page xiii xiii INTRODUCTION In 1965, when Jack Spicer wrote “get those words out of your mouth and into your heart,” he voiced an imperative to both poet and reader addressing the perilous honesty that the lived life of the poem demands. This admonition is startling coming from a poet who claimed that his poems originated outside himself, who insisted that a poet was no more than a radio transmitting messages; a poet who professed an almost monkish practice of dictation, from “Martians” no less, who rejected what he called “the big lie of the personal”; and yet in the process he created one of the most indelible and enduring voices in American poetry. This voice, and its appeal, are all the more notable since Spicer was never fully embraced within either the official culture or counter-culture of his period. Still, in the past forty years, Spicer has had a broad and lasting effect on a diverse range of writers nationally and internationally; his impact on contemporary writing will undoubtedly be felt for generations to come. Born John Lester Spicer on January 30, 1925, in Los Angeles, Jack Spicer was the elder of two sons. His parents, Dorothy Clause and John Lovely Spicer, were Midwesterners who met and married in Hollywood and ran a small hotel business. He attended Fairfax High School and, when ill health gave him 4-F draft status, he worked variously as a private detective, a defense worker, and an extra in Hollywood studio films.1 Spicer spent two years at the University of Redlands in San Bernardino before transferring north to the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1945. He had started writing poetry at fourteen, and at Berkeley he summarized his poetic influences for his professor, Josephine Miles. His parents, he told her, had been (“though naively and uncritically ”) fond of the early Imagists—Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, H.D., Pound—and had, he claimed, taught him to recite Vachel Lindsay’s “The Chinese Nightingale” (1917) by the time he was three: “How, how,” he said. “Friend Chang,” I said, “San Francisco sleeps as the dead— Ended license, lust and play: Why do you iron the night away? Your big clock speaks with a deadly sound, With a tick and a wail till dawn comes round. While the monster shadows glower and creep, What can be better for man than sleep?”2 He knew the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear “from childhood up”—all his life he was to remain devoted to so-called children’s literature—and at fourteen he discovered the Uranian mysteries of Oscar Wilde and A. E. Housman. Rimbaud and Dickinson, he wrote, “burst upon me like a bombshell when I was fifteen.” The astonishments kept coming: by the time he was twenty-one he knew the masters of modern jazz as well as he knew the new romanticisms of T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Stefan George. Nights spent listening to Billie Holiday and Art Tatum on Central Avenue or the Sunset Strip fueled Spicer’s intimations of an international modernism centered in California, and gave heft to his 1949 manifesto, “The Poet and Poetry,” in which he avowed, “We must become singers, become entertainers. [. . .] There is more of Orpheus in Sophie Tucker than in R. P. Blackmur; we have more to learn from George M. Cohan than from John Crowe Ransom.”3 Spicer spent five years at UC Berkeley, receiving his B.A. in 1947 and his M.A. in 1950. He studied Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and German to prepare for a career in linguistics, and took a course or two in playwriting , adapting Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown and Mary Butts’s modernist grail hunt Armed with Madness to the stage. While taking classes with the German medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz and the poet Josephine Miles, Spicer quickly met other gay male poets, including Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Landis Everson. Spicer would later cite his birth year as 1946, the year he met Blaser and Duncan; out of the intense fraternity of these bookish young men was born the “Berkeley Renaissance,” as they sometimes called it, half in irony, half sincerely. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page xiv xiv Introduction His poetry of this period is, by turns, elegiac, lyrical, modernist, and intensely homoerotic. Spicer’s best...