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

NOTES TO THE POEMS

NOTES TO THE POEMS Spicer Manuscripts The Bancroft Library began collecting Spicer’s papers in the 1970s, and we have relied heavily on four large manuscript collections, beginning with MSS 71/135C, which includes Spicer’s letters to the artist and printer Graham Mackintosh and to the poet James Alexander. In Robert Duncan’s papers (MSS 78/164C) there are dozens of Spicer’s poems and letters. More recently, the Library purchased Fran Herndon’s Spicer files, including the holograph manuscripts for The Holy Grail and Golem (MSS 99/94C). In 2004 Robin Blaser (representing the literary estate of Jack Spicer), made a gift of MSS 2004/209, including the papers left in Spicer’s hotel room trunk at his death in 1965, and a number of other manuscripts and letters collected by Blaser in the years after Spicer’s death in preparation for Blaser’s own edition of Spicer’s poems (The Collected Books of Jack Spicer) in 1975. The manuscripts of Spicer’s final books, Language and Book of Magazine Verse, are owned by Simon Fraser University in British Columbia (Jack Spicer fonds, MsA 20, Contemporary Literature Collection , Special Collections and Rare Books, W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University). Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 437 Notes to the Poems 437 Abbreviations in the Notes ms Refers to both typed and holographic manuscripts. CP 45– 46 Collected Poems 1945–1946, in an edition of one, was handmade as a Christmas gift (1946) to his Berkeley poetry teacher Josephine Miles. The manuscript of Collected Poems is at the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Library at University of California, San Diego (MSS 397). After Spicer’s death, the book was printed in facsimile by Oyez/White Rabbit Press in 1981. ONS One Night Stand & Other Poems, ed. Donald Allen, San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1980. CB The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser, Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975. WRP White Rabbit Press. JSP 2004 Jack Spicer Papers MSS 2004/209, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. JSP 99 Jack Spicer Papers MSS 99/94C, The Bancroft Library. JSP 71 Jack Spicer Papers MSS 71/135C, The Bancroft Library. JSF 20 Jack Spicer fonds, MsA 20, Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University. * Previously uncollected in CB or ONS. Berkeley in Time of Plague (p. 5). ONS used as copytext. First privately published in CP 45– 46. First published in Evergreen Review, 1.2 “The San Francisco Scene” (1957): 52. A Girl’s Song (p. 5). CP 45– 46 used as copytext. Homosexuality* (p. 6). JSP 2004 ms. used as copytext. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Landscape* (p. 6). First appeared in Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, edited by Timothy Liu (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2000): 75–78. That version of the poem was prepared from a typescript Robert Duncan gave to Lewis Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 438 438 Notes to the Poems Ellingham in 1983, the original of which is in the Duncan papers at SUNY Buffalo. The present version of “Portrait” incorporates Spicer’s holographic revisions; JSP 2004. An Apocalypse for Three Voices (p. 10). ONS used as copytext. One Night Stand (p. 13). ONS used as copytext, except where punctuation and stanza breaks diverge from original JSP 2004 ms. Ms. variant: One Night Stand Listen, you silk-hearted bastard I said to the boy in the bar You flutter well And look like a swan out of water. Listen, you soft wool-feathered bastard I myself am more or less like Leda. I can remember pretending That your red silk tie is a real heart That your raw wool suit is real skin That you could float beside me with a swan’s touch Of casual satisfaction. But all deity leaves that bird after the swooping Waking tomorrow I remember watching Somebody’s feathers and his wrinkled heart Draped loosely in my bed. In spring of 1958, Spicer revised the poem again, giving it a new title, while writing Chapter 6 of his incomplete detective novel. Here is “Leda”: Leda I can remember pretending That your red silk tie was a real heart That your raw wool suit was real flesh That you could float beside me with a swan’s touch Of casual satisfaction. Waking tomorrow I remember only Somebody’s feathers and his wrinkled heart. An Answer to...