Jack Spicer

Dear Robin,

Enclosed you find the first of the publications of White Rabbit Press. The second will be much handsomer.

You are right that I don’t now need your criticisms of individual poems. But I still want them. It’s probably from old habit - but it’s an awfully old habit. Halfway through After Lorca I discovered that I was writing a book instead of a series of poems and individual criticism by anyone suddenly became less important. This is true of my Admonitions which I will send you when complete. (I have eight of them already and there will probably be fourteen including, of course, this letter.)

The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us - not 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 by 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 a single poem. There is really no single poem.

That is why all my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus) looks foul to me. The poems belong nowhere. They are one night stands filled (the best of them) with their own emotions, but pointing nowhere, as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath. It was not my anger or my frustration that got in the way of my poetry but the fact that I viewed each anger and each frustration as unique - something to be converted into poetry as one would exchange foreign money. I learned this from the English Department (and from the English Department of the spirit - that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us) and it ruined ten years of my poetry. Look at those other poems. Admire them if you like. They are beautiful but dumb.

Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.

So don’t send the box of old poetry to Don Allen. Burn it or rather open it with Don and cry over the possible books that were buried in it - the Songs Against Apollo, the Gallery of Gorgeous Gods, the Drinking Songs - all incomplete, all abortive - all incomplete, all abortive because I thought, like all abortionists, that what is not perfect had no real right to live.

Things fit together. We knew that - it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is nver to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone.

This is the most important letter that you have ever received.

Love,
Jack

JS : I’m interested in being a conveyor of messages, whether they’re the truth or not. There’s no reason to suppose that a message necessarily because it’s conveyed from an outside source to a poet is true. As far as not being interested in language, it’s probably because I’m a professional linguist.

As far as the business of reading – education – I think that unfortunately the universities hinder it rather than help it usually because they make reading and education a chore rather than something that you enjoy doing. But certainly I think that any poet who is going to write decent poetry in this modern age where we don’t have the ballad tradition anymore, where you could get by with practically no furniture, and let’s squat on the floor, ma’am, and that sort of thing – I do think that just the average young poet ought to read as many books as he can and they ought to not be in paperback. They ought to be books that nobody’s read and that aren’t fashionable, and things which are about animal husbandry or what saline solutions are like with octopuses or something like that. It doesn’t really matter too much. But he certainly ought to have more stock in his mind than he has.

I mean, things that you ought to be suspicious of are things that you can use for your own personal interests rather than anything else. I wouldn’t worry about if something appears. It’s like an epiphany. Well then, use the epiphany, but just realize that there could be about twenty-seven other epiphanies which would be just as good, if they’d happened.

Yeah, except when he decided that he was a solid receiver, then he started writing those damn prophetic books which I have gone through two, three times, and I can’t make any poetry out of them whatsoever. I mean, I can make poetry every once in a while, see it happening. But when Blake really was sure that the angels were speaking to him, they stopped speaking.

The point is that words are not something which in themselves are anything but Lowghosts, instead of the Logos. Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else’s head, just like memories are, various other pieces of furniture in this room that this Martian has to put the clues in.

Q : Getting back to this idea of the creative insights being isolated from the medium. Are you saying that all poetry has to be written this way, or that some poetry is written this way, or what ?

JS : Well, I certainly don’t know. If you mean it as a recipe for baking a cake, obviously no. If you mean believing in all of this, obviously no. But it’s my firm conviction that all poetry, good poetry, is written this way, in spite of the poet.

You see, the Word, the Logos is – and this is impossible to read out loud, just like the whole personification thing is – the word is half the time with capital W, uppercase, and half the time with the lowercase w, you see. And so Lowghost then becomes Word. In other words, the words which are being used are simply a reflection of the Word, with the capital. And the pun doesn’t get as funny when you have him pinned to the cross, and the business of the shadow—which was written, incidentally, on Good Friday, for some obvious reason.

JS : You mean can we take credit for our poems? Well, is a radio set a creator of the radio program ?

Q : No. Well, that’s what I mean.

JS : Yeah. But at the same time you don’t get the radio program if the radio set has static in it.

Q : Oh no, no. But the poet is an agent then, or…

JS : Well yeah, like a mother is, yeah. But you know, it’s pretty hard for a father to have a baby. I mean, good agents are kind of hard to find these days. I don’t really see that it’s anything less to be proud of to be a good agent.

Well, what I’m trying to say is if you have an idea that you want to develop, don’t write a poem about it because it’s almost bound to be a bad poem. You can have an idea that you want to develop, and the poem develops an idea which is a little bit different. Say, like Pope’s « Essay on Man » which was supposed to please Bolingbroke enormously and didn’t, and didn’t please Pope. I’m using just about the so-called most disciplined poet there.