This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
(Jack Spicer)
*
Just read Language right through.
Smitten.
3 comments:
It's marvellous stuff, isn't it? 'We make up a different language for poetry / And for the heart -- ungrammatical.' I also like the lectures....
Yet Spicer still doesn't have the profile he deserves.
Walrus
Marvellous & disorientating ... (why does Blogger not like the double 'l' in marvellous?) ...
... I'd like to do a saturation job on this one - close reading, poem by poem, (while knowing this is probably a text that'll sabotage such approaches) ...
Are you up for it? I reckon you're better versed with Spicer than I am.
Could be fun?
The C.
I'm up for reading your close reading, definitely. As for being better versed, I doubt it very much!
What I will say is that his love of baseball ('Baseball Predictions' etc) oddly allies him with Marianne Moore ('Baseball and Writing' etc). And I think I'm right in saying that Spicer was the only poet singled out for praise by Moore in her review of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960). 'Jack Spicer is not indifferent to T. S. Eliot and is not hackneyed,' she said, 'his specialty being the firefly flash of insight, lightening with dry detachment.'
So a clandestine sporting link between two unlikely literary allies...
W.
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