Image taken from here.
Choice Quotes from a Choice Text: 2008’s My Vocabulary Did This To Me
Everything posted below, taken straight out of Jack Spicer’s collected poems, My Vocabulary Did This To Me, which I read straight through from cover to cover last week, was chosen to be posted below because it’s very difficult to get a good judge of a book nowadays from the cover alone. Though it’s probably true that Spicer is popular enough in the university and underground lit-circles that many people will get exposed to him in one way or another, what about the skeptics? Read on, I say!
From After Lorca (1957)
“Some poems are easily laid. They will give themselves to anybody and anybody physically capable can receive them. They may be beautiful (we have both written some that were) but they are meretricious. From the moment of their conception they inform us in a dulcet voice that, thank you, they can take care of themselves. I swear that if one of them were hidden beneath my carpet, it would shout out and seduce somebody. The quiet poems are what I worry about–the ones that must be seduced. They could travel about with me for years and no one would notice them. And yet, properly wed, they are more beautiful than their whorish cousins.” (138)
“Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry.” (150)
“It was a game, I shout to myself. A game. There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows. It was a game out of summer and freedom and a need for ap oetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim.” (153)
From Admonitions (1957)
“Muses do exist, but now I know that they are not afraid to dirty their hands with explication–that they are patient with truth and commentary as long as it doesn’t get into the poem, that they whisper (if you let yourself really hear them), “Talk all you want, baby, but then let’s go to bed.” (157)
“But what, you will be too polite to ask me, is the point? Are not these poems all things to all men, like Rorschach ink blots or whores? Are they anything better than a kind of mirror?” (157)
“Mirror makers know the secret–one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror.” (157)
“The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us–to to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is–but not in relation to the single poem. There is really no single poem.” (163)
“The poems belong nowhere.” (163)
“Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can. (163)
From A Book of Music (1958)
“Poetry ends like a rope.” (178)
From Billy the Kid (1958)
“The word steals from the word, the sound from / the sound. Even / The very year of your life steals from the last one.” (192)
From Fifteen False Propositions Against God (1958)
“Even in a poem / One forgets the real world.) / Fuzzy heads of fuzzy people / Like the trees Williams saw. Drop / The words drop / Like leaves from a fuzzy tree” (197)
From Letters to James Alexander (1958-59)
“There are people that talk about poetry like tired insurance clerks talk about baseball. They must be destroyed by our silence. ven the hatred of them interrupts the conversation that our poems wish to continue. even the mention of them makes it me talking, crashes into paradox that was their truth.” (209)
From “A Textbook of Poetry” in The Heads of the Town up to the Aether (1960)
“Surrealism is the business of poets who cannot benefit by surrealism. It was the first appearance of the Logos that said, ‘The public be damned,’ by which he did not mean that they did not matter or he wanted to be crucified by them, but that really he did not have a word to say to them. This was surrealism.” (299)
“To be lost in a crowd. Of images, of metaphors (whatever they were), of words; this is a better surrender. Of the poet who is lost in the crowd of them. Finally.” (299)
“Or as if all our words without the things about them were meaningless.” (299)
“The wires dance in the wind of the noise our poems make. The noise without an audience. Because the poems were written for ghosts.” (300)
“The poet thinks continually of strategies, of how he can win out against the poem.” (301)
“All that we do in bed, or sleep, or sex is limited by this circle which can only be personally defined.” (303)
“On the outside of it is what everybody talks about. On the outisde of it are the dead that try to talk.” (303)
“Boredom is part of the Logos too.” (304)
“Every city that is formed colelcts its slums and the ghost of it. Every city that is formed collects its ghosts.” (305)
“The city redefined becomes a church. A movement of poetry. not merely a system of belief but their beliefs and their hearts living together.” (306)
“Surrealism is a poem more than this. The intention that things do not fit together.” (306)
“Magic, which is trying to hold onto people with your own hands, is funny while surrealism is not funny. There is a place where we can talk and we cannot talk. Both of us.” (309)
“To create the beautiful again. It is as if somehow the lovers of postage stamps had created an image of themselves. A red wheelbarrow or a blue image of the unknown. And each stamp we put on the letters they send us must be cancelled, heartlessly. As if its delivery, the beautiful image of it, were a metaphor.” (310)
“We are all alone and we do not need poetry to tell us how alone we are.” (311)
From Map Poems (1963-64)
“Love makes the discovery wisdom abandones.” (369)
From “Sporting Life” in Language (1963-95)
“The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios / don’t develop scar tissue.” (373)
—
So buy the book here.
gbem1