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.
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