B: I think poets always have to fail the test! [laugh] G: Or if you were someone like Ebbe Borregaard then you would just crumple the whole thing up into a wad of paper and say, "I'm not going to do any of this bullshit!" and then you would get into the workshop. B: The test is the test! What were your first feelings about Spicer? G: I admired him immensely and got drawn in by Spicer into these wars that he would have with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser where I was always on the wrong side, the losing side. B: Was there some kind of test of loyalties that had a dimension in poetic thinking? Fights over theoretical matters? G: Well, yes, they were fights over ... I can't remember. I mean one time I know that Spicer was accusing Duncan of having sold out to New York, and another time he was accusing him of having too may Egyptian gods in his poems and these things were very very serious to Spicer. Robin would tend to feel aggrieved and Duncan would simply dismiss the whole thing and joke about it, but for Spicer these were deadly serious issues . Spicer wrote about the human crisis in one of his poems. I mean, Spicer really did see what was happening to our species. B: You see amazing risks in his lines, a kind of seriousness--his life was on the line. G: Yes, with every poem. Once we had a poetry meeting and he read some poems, and I think it was Joanne Kyger who said, "well Jack those are pretty good poems, typical Jack Spicer poems" and he immediately wadded the whole thing up and threw, no it wasn't Joanne who said that, I think it was Duncan, and Jack just wadded the thing up and threw it in the waste basket, and Joanne went to grab them out of the waste basket and said, "Jack these are beautiful poems, don't throw them away" ... but Jack would do that . The least hint that he was doing anything that would be immoral--of course he hated the whole concept of morals so that wouldn't be the word he would use--something "whorish" , that was a word he would use , anything that was whorish that was in some ways selling out to the English Department of the soul or to New York, he would say, "alright that's it, destroy that." B: So he was tapped into some notion of the purity of the act of writing poetry? G: Ya and he came to believe that there were forces outside the poem, outside our universe perhaps that were giving him poems. It's important that he did not identify those with language. B: No, his source, he might say was the radio, or the martians. G: And various people such as Creeley had said something about the poem coming from language--I believe Creeley said that at one point and Spicer rejected that. The language is just the furniture in the room. But this is all on record in some interview that Spicer did-- the Vancouver Lectures.