Peter Gizzi |
Jack Spicer, Bruce Conner and the Art of the Assemblage |
Emotion and innovation is something I’ve thought a lot about relative to
my own writing but it’s also something I’ve confronted in very concrete
ways in the writing of Jack Spicer, and I thought I would focus here on
Spicer’s work, specifically the affinity between his poetry and West-Coast
assemblage art, and in particular the film work of Bruce Conner. I am
interested in the ways both Spicer and Conner use history as a material texture
while leaving gaps within their work to draw the reader into an intimate
and emotional engagement with these materials. 1
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 him; who insisted he 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 bridging these competing demands, he created
one of the most indelible and enduring voices in American poetry.2
To begin with a brief sketch, Spicer was born in 1925 in Los Angeles,
though he claimed his birth year to be 1946, when he met the poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser at the University of California, Berkeley, where
he was taking classes with the German medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz and
the poet Josephine Miles. Out of Spicer’s intense fraternity with Duncan
and Blaser, the Berkeley Renaissance was born. Spicer spent most of the
rest of his life in the San Francisco Bay area with only a few brief departures.
But his excursion to New York and Boston in 1955–56 proved to be a
defining moment in the development of his poetic vision.
Ultimately his year on the East Coast further solidified his allegiance
to the American West and his identity as a California poet. Both before and
after his stint on the East Coast, he was deeply involved in a community of
San Francisco-based poets, artists, and bookmakers. In his life, Spicer saw
seven small books to press, worked as a researcher in linguistics at UC
Berkeley, and in 1965 gave four important lectures shortly before his death
from alcoholism at the age of 40. His legendary last words were “My
vocabulary did this to me.”
Spicer is known to many as an erudite poet, with a knowledge of
Latin, German, Spanish, French, Old Norse, and Old English, but he is
also one of our great poets of heartache and abjection. Although he could
be foul-mouthed and cranky, and was certainly alcoholic, he may also be
characterized as a late devotional poet who wrote from a mix of doubt,
irreverence, and belief. He delighted in organizing and presiding over
“Blabbermouth Night” at his favorite local bar, an event at which poets
were encouraged to speak in tongues or to babble and were judged on the
duration and invention of their noises. He was deeply committed to the
depth and authenticity of sound. He worked for years on a linguistic project
that mapped slight changes in vowel sounds from town to town in
northern California, a project that would profoundly inform his later
poetry, in particular Language and Book of Magazine Verse. He hosted
Harry Smith on the first radio show devoted to folk music at KPFA in the
late 40s, where he also troubled the folk movement’s quest for the authentic
by presenting his own fake versions of songs he claimed his friends
had just heard down on the pier.
Spicer was one of the original “6” of the 6 Gallery, a poetry and assemblage-
oriented gallery that opened in September 1954 as an extension of a
class Spicer had been teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. (Some
will remember that the 6 Gallery was the site of Allen Ginsberg’s first public
reading of “Howl” in 1955—a reading that marked the resurgence of
poetry as a public, countervailing, oral force. But I should also mention that
Spicer was on the East Coast at that time and that he didn’t like what he
considered the Beat invasion of his home territory.)
The 6 Gallery created an environment of “neo-dadaist” experimentation
and genre-bending conceived in resistance to mass cultural trends
and the increasing commercialization of the art world. In a parallel gesture
that would seem counter-intuitive to most writers, Spicer restricted the distribution of his publications to his immediate surround, the San
Francisco Bay Area. This rethinking of audience not in terms of numbers
but in terms of the direct engagement of the viewer/reader is in keeping
with the specifically West-Coast underground aesthetic manifest in George
Herms’s “secret exhibition” or Wallace Berman’s Semina. In his lifetime,
Spicer’s published books were released in small editions of 500 to 1000
copies or even fewer by small local presses: White Rabbit Press, Enkidu
Surrogate, and the Auerhahn Society.
The 6 Gallery was an early manifestation of what would come to be
known as California “junk” or “funk” art, sometimes called “neo-dada.”
Its national emergence as “assemblage” was marked by the 1961 exhibition
The Art of Assemblage at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For most
art viewers, including the national arts magazines, this constituted an
introduction to little-known West Coast artists like Bruce Conner and
George Herms. But California assemblage already had a long history in
both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Simon Rodia worked essentially in
isolation on the Watts Towers from 1921 to 1954, and by the early fifties,
artists like Wallace Berman and George Herms began to gather at small
galleries like Syndell Studio and Ferus. In San Francisco, Jay De Feo and
Wally Hedrick were practicing a similar aesthetic, and Jess (Collins) had
established himself as a collage artist. By the late fifties, Bruce Conner had
made his way to San Francisco, and Berman and Herms had moved up the
coast to join the Bay area scene.
We should remember that San Francisco was more or less off the grid
of the burgeoning New York art market at the time and was ruled by something
closer to a frontier sensibility. The interest in magic and the occult
within the North Beach poetry and art scenes might be best captured by L.
Frank Baum’s description of Oz as a place that “has never been civilized,
for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have
witches and wizards among us.”3
In a 1967 California Funk exhibition catalog, Peter Selz wrote that
when the elements of a funk assemblage are examined closely “they do not
read in a traditional or recognizable manner and are open to a multiplicity
of interpretations. … Funk is visual double-talk, it makes fun of itself
although often . . . it is dead serious.”4 It is, as Spicer writes of Dada “not
funny” but “a serious assault / on art” (“Poem For Dada Day at The Place,
April 1, 1958”).
Spicer’s outrageous literary debut After Lorca exemplifies the macabre
humor, serious gamesmanship, anti-commercial status, and destabilized
voicing of poetic assemblage. After Lorca was published in 1957 by White
Rabbit and illustrated by Jess. The book can be read as a dadaist send-up of
the venerable Yale Younger Poets Series, for which W. H. Auden served as
judge in the 1950s, selecting work and writing introductions. For his own
book, Spicer adapted the format of the established older poet vetting the emerging poet, turning to Federico García Lorca to introduce him even if
the martyred Lorca had to do so from the grave. Understandably put out,
Lorca begins: “Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to
write an introduction for this volume.” And thus begins Spicer’s provocative
poetics of engaging the dead in his literary practice.
After Lorca is ostensibly composed of translations of Lorca’s work, the
faithfulness of which even Lorca questions. There are also nearly a dozen
original Spicer poems masquerading as translations, combined with six
now-famous programmatic letters to Lorca in which Spicer articulates his
poetics and his sense of personal woe with respect to poetry, love, and his
contemporaries. With these letters, translations, and fake translations,
Spicer established a unique correspondence with literary tradition, one that
would further evolve into a resonant intertextual practice of assemblage.
In fact, a number of Spicer’s books, especially Language and Book of
Magazine Verse, are in themselves art objects. In the manner of Duchamp,
they are copies of other “original” documents; they announce themselves
as not merely functional objects but as sculptural assemblages. The cover
design of Language is a facsimile of the cover of Language: Journal of the
Linguistic Society of America (July-September 1952). The issue included
Spicer’s only published academic article in linguistics, co-authored by
David W. Reed. The White Rabbit Press cover features the title, author, and
press information written over the journal’s cover in red crayon (or lipstick)
by Spicer. The cover design for the Book of Magazine Verse simulated an
early issue of Poetry magazine. Book of Magazine Verse contains poems
written to venues that Spicer anticipated would not print his work. The
paper for each section of the book was chosen to simulate that of the
magazine to which the poems were directed.
Within his work, Spicer delighted in provocative and incongruous
combinations. His poems make use of a life-long fascination with games
and systems: bridge, baseball, chess, pinball, computers, magic, religion,
politics, and linguistics. Even though he loved to dissemble—using misunderstanding,
misdirection, puns, or counter-logic—his poems leave us not
with a lack of meaning but rather an excess of meaning, with figures echoing
and bumping against each other from widely disparate places and
times. His poems repeatedly disrupt even their own procedures by jamming
the frequencies of meaning they set up. John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot presidency”
becomes a grail circle; and in the then-nascent computer age, the Tin
Woodman’s heart is made of silicon. His poetry engages in conversations
with other texts, both high and low, often invoking works that have already
been widely retold and transformed, and are thus already “corrupt”: The
Odyssey, grail legend, bible stories, Alice in Wonderland, the Oz books, the
legend of Billy the Kid, nursery rhymes, and the evening news—the H
bomb, the deaths of J. F. K. and Marilyn Monroe, even the Beatles’s U. S. tour.
His goal was nothing short of building from these disparate narrative threads “a whole new universe”—albeit a universe in which things do not
fit seamlessly together. As he puts it, “Things do not connect, they correspond.”
Later, in his Textbook of Poetry, we find:
It does not have to fit together. Like the pieces of a totally unfinished
jigsaw puzzle my grandmother left in the bedroom when she
died in the living room. The pieces of the poetry or of this love.
For Spicer, reading and writing are repeatedly associated with a loss of
boundaries. Spicer makes what the film critic Manny Farber has called
“termite art,” an art that eats its own borders.5 As the poem just quoted
continues, this aesthetic is literalized:
As if my grandmother had chewed on her jigsaw puzzle before she
died. // Not as a gesture of contempt for the scattered nature of
reality. Not because the pieces would not fit in time. But because
this would be the only way to cause an alliance between the dead
and the living.
As his work matured, Spicer turned more and more toward an aesthetic
of assemblage, where the “pieces of the poetry” are less blended and more
arranged. Rather than reworking the poem to produce a seamless surface,
Spicer allowed for the semantic and narrative gaps within a poem to
remain. Holes appear within the text, and the surfaces of Spicer’s poems
are literally riddled with logical and temporal gaps, non-sequiturs and
puns. Instead of hearing a line from “O Suzanna” (“I come from Alabama
with a banjo on my knee”) we get “I Arthur, Rex Quondam et futurus with
a banjo on his knee”—a king turned into a minstrel, the medieval
reframed within the folk revival.
In “The Book of the Death of Arthur” section of The Holy Grail
(1962) you can hear Spicer’s recasting of narrative content and his use of
slippages between some of the different narrative or lyric gestures:
1.
“He who sells what isn’t hisn
Must pay it back or go to prison,”
Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, or some other imaginary
American millionaire
—selling short.
The heart
Is short too
Beats at one and a quarter beats a second or something like that.
Fools everyone.
I am king
Of a grey city in the history books called Camelot
The door, by no human hand,
Open.
2.
Marilyn Monroe being attacked by a bottle of sleeping pills
Like a bottle of angry hornets
Lance me, she said
Lance her, I did
I don’t work there anymore.
The answer-question always the same. I cannot remember when
I was not a king. The sword in the rock is like a children’s
story told by my mother.
He took her life. And when she floated in on the barge or joined
the nunnery or appeared dead in all the newspapers it was
his shame not mine
I was king.
3.
In the episode of le damoissele cacheresse, for example, one
stag, one brachet, and one fay, all of which properly belong
together as the essentials for the adventures of a single hero,
by a judicious arrangement supply three knights with
difficult tasks, and the maiden herself wanders off with a
different lover.
So here, by means of one hunt and one fairy ship, three heros
are transported to three different places. When they awake
the magic ship has vanished and sorry adventures await
them all. Not one of them is borne by the boat, as we should
naturally expect, to the love of a fay
Plainly we are dealing with materials distorted from their
original form.
4.
The faint call of drums, the little signals
Folks half-true and half-false in a different way than we are
half-true and half-false
A meal for us there lasts a century.
Out to greet me. I, Arthur
Rex quondam et futurus with a banjo on my knee.
I, Arthur, shouting to my bastard son “It is me you are trying to
murder!”
Listening to them, they who have problems too
The faint call of them. The faint call of
(They would stay in Camelot for a hundred years) The faint call of
Me.
1. Versions of this piece were given at The Lamont Poetry Room at Harvard University,
Poet’s House of New York, The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, The Art Institute of
Chicago, Kenyon College, University of Southern California, and Columbia University.
Thanks to all involved.
2. For more information about dictation and serial poetry see Spicer’s lectures and my
afterword, “Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading,” in The House That Jack Built: The
Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998). For more about Spicer’s life see Lewis
Ellingham and Kevin Killian’s biography, Poet Be Like God (Wesleyan, 1998). All poetry
of Jack Spicer’s quoted in this essay is from My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected
Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008).
3. See Bruce Jenkins’s essay “Explosion in a Film Factory” in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner
Story (Walker Art Center, 2000).
4. See Peter Selz’s catalog essay in Funk (University of California Art Museum, Berkeley,
1967).
5. See “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the
Movies (Praeger Publishers, 1971).
—
PETER GIZZI’S books include The Outernationale (2007), Some Values of
Landscape and Weather (2003), Artificial Heart (1998), and Periplum (1992).
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