Graham Foust

Resisting Print:

Jack Spicer’s Lecturature

As thrilled as John L. Spicer’s readers may be about a more-or-less definitive, university press edition of his collected poems, we can’t deny that the poet himself would likely have sneered at the very thought of such a project. Throughout his life, the poetry quality control expert known as Jack Spicer fought — as best he could — what he called “the fix,” and while even a cursory examination of Spicer’s biography would cause one to take note of his fear of fixedness with regard to certain institutions (e.g., major league baseball and the verse cultures — however official — of his time), a closer look reveals a potentially important fear of — and a general tendency toward destabilizing — poetry’s more general mode of distribution, which is to say that Jack Spicer resisted print.

When he read aloud from typewritten manuscripts, Spicer was prone to attacks of blindness, and it may be that he couldn’t see these almost fixed versions of his work precisely because he didn’t see his poems as fixable. He used his typewriter as an ashtray, a place for unwanted ends, and he more often than not let other people (like his friend and fellow poet Robert Duncan) do the typing. Spicer’s spook-guided and child-like hand gripped a pencil instead, thus both personalizing the work and distancing him from the fused means of production and distribution created by the typewriter. Deep in the age of print, an age of uniformity and perfection, Spicer asked that his publishers not correct the grammatical errors in his poems, and the unmistakability of his mistakes — what reader of Spicer’s Language can forget his “sylabbles”?—works against Martin Heidegger’s insistence that “The typewriter makes everyone look the same…” (qtd. in Kittler Gramophone 199).

With Spicer’s work in mind, we might do well to revisit Walter Ong’s notion of the printed word:

Print creates a sense of closure not only in literary works but also in analytic philosophical and scientific works. With print came the catechism and the “textbook,” less discursive and less disputatious than most previous presentations of a given academic subject. Catechisms and textbooks presented “facts” or their equivalents: memorizable, flat statements that told straightforwardly and inclusively how matters stood in a given field. By contrast, the memorable statements of oral cultures and of residually oral manuscript cultures tended to be of a proverbial sort, presenting not “facts” but rather reflections, often of a gnomic kind, inviting further reflection by the paradoxes they involved. (134)

Those familiar with “A Textbook of Poetry” can certainly see that the numbered prose sections of Spicer’s serial poem are far from the closed circuit envisioned by Ong; to be sure, this is one of the most discursive and disputatious “textbooks” ever written. Moreover, those aware of Spicer’s method of composition will recognize that his poetic practice more closely resembles the residual orality that Ong ascribes to manuscript culture rather than the “secondary orality” of the postmodern era. While his poems are certainly applicable to what Peter Gizzi calls our “post-Desert Storm, Deep Space, X-Filed age,” Spicer’s small-group mentality, his taking of “dictation,” and his “glossing” of his poems all point to what might be called a “manuscriptive” poetics. As he states in his lecture on “Poetry and Politics”: “The idea of making things last is something which just has to be conquered” (166).

Marshall McLuhan’s definition of invention and his summation of its relatively recent literary history are helpful with regard to thinking through Spicer’s process:

[Invention] is, quite simply, the technique of beginning at the end of any operation whatever, and of working backwards from that point to the beginning. It is the method inherent in the Gutenberg technique of homogenous segmentation, but not until the nineteenth century was the method of extended from production to consumption. Planned production means that the total process must be worked out in exact stages, backwards, like a detective story. In the first great age of mass production of commodities, and of literature as a commodity for the market, it became necessary to study the consumer’s experience. In a word it became necessary to examine the effect of art and literature before producing anything at all. This is the literal entrance to the world of myth.

It was Edgar Allan Poe who first worked out the rationale of this ultimate awareness of the poetic process and who saw that instead of directing the work to the reader, it was necessary to incorporate the reader into the work. (276)

It is Poe, too, with whom Spicer begins 1958’s A Book of Music—a line from Poe’s Marginalia, “Indefiniteness is an element of the true music,” is the first line of the first poem — and although he read and greatly admired Poe, Spicer’s method is quite different. Instead of working backward from effect to cause, as in a detective story, Spicer The Kid shoots first and asks questions later: “[What happens in a serial poem is that] the murder being committed in front of you” (House 56). It may be worth noting here that Spicer abandoned his detective novel in 1958 — the same year he wrote A Book of Music and just shortly after giving himself over to the process of dictation.

As in a detective story, the reader is incorporated into Spicer’s poems, and it seems that Spicer’s ideal reader is one who is able to rewrite, recreate, and continue the textbook rather than follow it to the letter. Spicer’s electric poetics aren’t a power trip, as he maintains that even the poet herself remains only a co-author. This process is impersonal, as is Poe’s, but Spicer’s impersonality goes one step further into the Outside by insisting that metaphors are not for readers or writers, that they are not, in fact, “for humans” (Vocabulary 300). Spicer does not seek to predetermine his effects, but rather is affected and afflicted by ghostly figures; in turn, he sounds the stories of these invasions. However, this is not to say that Spicer’s work is based on non-communication: A radio isn’t wireless; rather, its wires just aren’t so obvious.

Time can be thought of as decay, but Spicer, a “time mechanic,” doesn’t so much repair decay as he maintains or keeps time (Vocabulary 122). His primary concern is the moment of writing, its movement or event rather than its monumental or eventual placement. “Time,” writes Friederich Kittler, “determines the limit of all art, which first has to arrest the daily data flow in order to turn it into images or signs” (Gramophone 3). “What is called style in art,” he continues

is merely the switchboard of these scannings and selections. That same switchboard also controls those arts that use writing as a serial, that is, temporally transposed, data flow. To record the sound sequences of speech, literature has to arrest them in a system of 26 letters, thereby categorically excluding all noise sequences. Not coincidentally, this system also contains as a subsystem the seven notes, whose diatonics — from A to G — form the basis of occidental music. (3)

The last poem in Spicer’s A Book of Music, which shares its book’s title, makes the claim that “Poetry ends like a rope” (Vocabulary 178). The poem makes use of “coming” in the sexual sense, and yet it also speaks of our ability to both come together and come apart in language: Same bed, different dreams. Unlike a rope’s ends, which even in a knot are always visible, our limits and our demises, tangled within us, are only ever made present by way of our imagination, and this being-at-a-distance from our defining characteristics is, for Spicer, what makes language beautiful, necessary, and terrifying. Said rope reappears in “A Textbook of Poetry” as an Indian rope trick, a disappearing act built for two in which the magician’s assistant (the reader, the second person to climb the rope) is hacked to bits while the magician (the poet) simply vanishes. Spicer writes:

It is the definition of the rope that ought to interest everyone who wants to climb the rope. The rope-dance. Reading the poem.

Reading the poem that does not appear when the magician starts or when the magician finishes. A climbing in-between. Real. (Vocabulary 303)

“If writing proceeds from reading and reading proceeds from listening, then all writing,” writes Kittler, “is translation” (Discourse 97). This assertion shines all the more brightly in the darkness of Spicer’s poetics, which, as Gizzi outlines and explores so adeptly in his afterward to Spicer’s lectures, concentrates on and proceeds from “the practice of reading.” With regard to that practice, it’s also useful to think of Spicer’s “climbing in-between” as a restatement of Walter Benjamin’s notion that “all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines” (82). Spicer’s disdain for finish echoes the Poe quotation that begins A Book of Music. He aims for “true” music, for indefinition — for starts and fits rather than beginnings and ends — which is almost to say that he doesn’t aim at all.

Spicer sees the reader as central to any and all poetic practice, and Heads of the Town up to the Aether, with its built in “textbook” and its “explanatory notes,” is somewhat akin to a medieval manuscript in that the production of the text is meant to take place, as John Dagenais writes, “in that same ethical world to which it also points” (18). In Spicer’s aesthetic, writing is reading, and this reading is, in Dagenais’ sense of the term, “ethical,” in that it “links reading to… the reading subject via an interplay of systems of values between reader and text” (21). Reading poetry — or a reading of poetry — is “an ‘event’ that actualizes the ethical behavior of a reader, absorbs the reader into its own ethical system, and stimulates, among other ethical acts, its own reenactment” (21).

During his first Vancouver lecture, Spicer — perhaps remembering that students respond negatively to teachers who simply read or lecture straight from the textbook — both reads his poems and talks off the top of his head, always making the distinction between the two very clear: A bright light is turned on during his reading of “A Textbook of Poetry” and off during his lecturing and extemporizing. Between sections of the poem, he adds comments, allows questions, and so the textbook expands into its own margins to become a living notebook of sorts. It may be that Gizzi’s edition of Spicer’s lectures is slightly mis-named: These are not simply lectures, but instead are instances of what Dagenais calls “lecturature,” a practice in which “the impetus for producing texts moves from reading and is conditioned by reading” (24). Spicer’s message is its medium, which is to say that poetry, an initially oral art — and so, perhaps, a residually ephemeral one — demands that we continually “define the air” we talk in.

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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Tr. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968.

Dagenais, John. The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Kittler, Friederich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. 1985. Trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

———. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. 1986. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 1982. London: Routledge, 1989.

Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

———. The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Ed. and with an Afterword by Peter Gizzi. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.