currently at work digitizing a workshop lecture, "Beat And Other Rebel Angels," given by Joanne Kyger at Naropa October 1991.
...Kyger's speaks a bit about Spicer's "recognition of disgust." that is, a poem's trancendence (beit beauty et al.) being explicitly bound to a recognizing of the un-beautiful, or disgusting qualities imbued in the work...or perhaps imbued in the practice of working...
...i'm not sure how to enter Spicer's "disgust" outside of thinking Spicer disgusting...which is clever but probably not what he was getting at...i need to hear more...can anyone find material regarding Spicer's "disgust...?" i've read the biography, criticism and poems but don't recollect a thing...
associations...which led me to Alan Gilbert's notion of the "grotesque" in poetry citing the Canadian Rapper Buck 65's song "The Centaur" as a primary example...if you've never heard "The Centaur" you're missing out...basically a ditty about the bane of being endowed with a huge centaur penis..."of couse my cock is bigger than your's i'm a centaur for Christ's sake..."
a lovely quote from Kyger regarding the Spicer circle "the poetry politics of those groups was excitingly back stabbing..."
anyway...i love my job...
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8 comments:
John,
Jen Rogers, Jared Hayes, Joe Cooper, Andrew Peterson and myself had a similar conversation a few weeks ago...more focused on Spicer's bitterness and where we thought it was present/absent...
Here's an example Andy brought up: The reading of "For Joe" at a party that was to honor Denise Levertov (and I think Helen Adam) in 1958. What do you think, is this a bad joke or outright disgust? Not sure if this is quite what you or she (Kyger) were getting at, but I leave you with Spicer's poem anyway.
Apologies for the linebreaks that aren't true to the poem...these fuckin text boxes screw everything up!
For Joe
People who don't like the smell of faggot vomit
Will never understand why men don't like women
Won't see why those never to be forgotton thighs
Of Helen (say) will move us into screams of laughter.
Parody (what we don't want) is the whole thing.
Don't deliver us any mail today, mailman.
Send us no letters. The female genital organ is hideous. We
Do not want to be moved.
Forgive us. Give us
A single example of the fact that nature is imperfect.
Men ought to love men
(And do)
As the man said
It's
Rosemary for remembrance.
no, i think you're partly right in bringing up this poem ("For Joe" was also the first poem i thought of re: disgust)...but i think Spicer was displaying a sort of vitriol rooted in the moment of the event rather than the movement of disgust (if such a thing exists...)...meaning, Spicer wrote "For Joe" with Joe Dunn in mind yet read "For Joe" that night with Levertov in mind...Spicer's outspoken (mostly) misogny was a well known defect that in this instance was explicitly (bitchly) directed at Levertov...in part because of a growing resentment for Duncan and Levertov's friendship, in part because of Spicer's distrust of the poetry "cable cars" (the tourist attractions) that Levertov (AND Duncan) represented to him...
...from Blaser's quote it would seem the crux of disgust (according to Spicer or Blaser?) lies in the "transformation of sensuality" into a kind of "longing..."
which i think we can rewrite as "a translation of poetry into a kind of existing..."
...i say the Love Poems most superficially because they were dedicated to Larry Kearney...a young heterosexual poet newly arrived in Northbeach who respected and loved Spicer paternally but never sexually...
Well... I'd put For Joe on the plane of outright misogyny. Something an admirer of Spicer's work has to deal with, and combat, is his misogyny and his anti-Semitism. Those things I don’t think can be easily passed over and they disturb me in Spicer’s work. The same way Pound’s anti-Semitism and racism bother me. I don’t think what’s going on in For Joe is necessarily “disgust”. Stephen Fredman has an interesting take on WCW’s disgust in his book “The Grounding of American Poetry”, in his chapter on Williams and H.D. Fredman says it was a sense of disgust that got Williams over his early sentimental poetry and into poetry like Kora in Hell - one of my favorite books by him. Disgust was a liberating force that allowed Williams to write something radically new, possibly disgust with himself as poet, and poetry in the world. But that's Williams, not Spicer. Hope this helps a little.
MS
At the same time, I think Jack thought he was being kind of funny.
As George Stanley said in a panel on Jack Spicer in the early 80s (and I'm paraphrasing): "Jack hated everybody... or more importantly, he didn't like people calling themselves a "group" of so and sos... but his 'hate' was never seriously applied to individual persons as he was friends with all types..."
Of course, that's kind of funny because he definitely segrated himself and his circle from everybody else, forming a "group".
I think Spicer thinking he was being funny (though i haven't seen the evidence to back this assumption) in "For Joe" is tantamount to Pound thinking his Facist politics right-minded in The Cantos...
the point being...who cares what THEY as the writer thought they were doing...what does the work SAY/ PROVE they were doing?...another example...what to do with Spicer's brief anti-semitic period ostensibly "brought on" by his friendship with the African-American poet Steve Jonas during his stay in Boston...? Slosek's right, as an "admirer" of Spicer's work what can we do but deal...? or compromise...or we don't. i remember Sarah Menefee's comments regarding Pound after Benjamin Hollander read at Zeal in SF a few years back...Brandon Brown was saying something regarding the "Pisan Cantos" when Sarah interupted him with "i don't know how you read him knowing his politics...he's impossible for me..."
regarding the "mostly" in my original post regarding Spicer's misogny... only because of the four or five female poets who were dear friends of Spicer's...namely, Fran Herndon (firstly and most dearly), Joanne Kyger, Jaime Macinnis and Joe Dunn's wife who's name i can't think of right now...so do what you will with that...
5:09 PM
I hope that we don't get too far afield by brining up all of Spicer's mysogeny and anti-Semitism, b/c the idea of disgust is central to Spicer's poetics. Disgust for both Williams (since I brought him up earlier) and Spicer is something transgressive - it effaces a boundry btw poetic convention and other possibilities for poetry. For Spicer, what I think disgust was able to efface was the ego, interiority, subjectivity. What you get instead is his famous "poetry of the outside". What makes his love poems so strange and creepy is that they are love poems that are not the manifestion of the poet's interiority - as we've always had loves poem - but an "I" that is constituted by the outside, which is constructed by social praxis. His "I" is the locus of "I's" in his community - and his sense of disgust, as I take it, was what was able to transgress that boundry of interior subjectivity. At least that's how I can explain why his love poems strike me so strangely - imagine love poetry that is center on others, and constituted by others, rather than on the ego of the poet, and there I think you have your hand on what is wonderfully strange about these poems.
M.Slosek
i'm not sure that disgust is central to Spicer's poetics...i would argue that Spicer's very idiosyncratic idea of community is central to his poetics...
...though the way we've been discussing Spicer's "disgust" has definite correlatives in Spicer's "magic" which in turn had a lot to do with his "community..."...so...
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