by Jack Spicer
Dressed like the Antichrist is in first to come out of the bushes or whatever jungle.
“Pacem in terris,” he shouts as if he were singing “The Eyes Of Texas Are Upon You.” He is immediately shot in the head by a loud revolver.
There are so many of them in the bushes or Whatever Jungle (St. John’s) that they are hardly worth killing. They are snipers disguised with the faces of the land we ought to be protecting. Their gooks look like our gooks. Pope John
Looks dead even when his costume has fallen off.
4.
Mechanicly we move
In God’s Universe, Unable to do
Without the grace or hatred of Him.
The center of being. Like almost, without grace, a computer center. Without His hatred
A barren world.
A center of being—not the existence of robots.
If He wanted to, He could make a machine a Christ, enter it in its second person which is You.
Why he bothered with man is a mystery even Job wondered.
God becoming human, became a subject for anthropologists, history, and all the other wretched itchings of an animal that had suddenly (too suddenly?) been given a soul.
When I look in the eyes and the souls of those of those I love, I (in a dark forest between grace and hatred) doubt His wisdom.
Cur Deus Homo, was the title of St. Anselm’s book. Without question marks.
Grace!
FOUR POEMS FOR THE ST. LOUIS SPORTING NEWS
1.
Waiting like a trap-door spider for a rookie sell-out. Baseball or the name game?
When I was a catcher, you came to them. You said “Gee, Mr. Whilikers, I’d like to be a catcher.” You worked out
With other unassigned players.
You had to make it or be signed down to Shenandoah or Rockport. Them
Was the days. Like
Now: the tigers treat the pigs real fine before they eat them: there is a pension for almost everything: very few and old pitchers throw screwballs. By request of the management.
Like kid, don’t enter here or you’ll become like a pop fly I lost in the sun but went back in the stands anyway. Foul.
“Learn
How to shoot fish in a barrell,” someone said,
“People are starving.”
2.
I would like to beat my hands around your heart.
You are a young pitcher but you throw fast curve-balls, slow fast balls, change-ups that at the last moment don’t change. Junk
The pitchers who are my age call it. And regret every forty years of their life when they have to use them.
If I were a catcher behind you, I’d make you throw real fast balls and a few sliders to keep them honest. But you’re not on my team and when I face you as a pinch-hitter, I strike out.
Somebody so young being so cagy, I
Got three home-runs off of Warren Spahn but both of us understood where the ball was (or wasn’t) going to go. You
Are a deceit and when you get to the age of thirty (and I live to see it) you’re
Going to get knocked out of the box,
Baby.
3.
Pitchers are obviously not human. They have the ghosts of dead people in them. You wait there while they glower, put their hands to their mouths, fidget like puppets, while you’re waiting to catch the ball.
You give them signs. They usually ignore them. A fast outside curve. High, naturally. And scientifically impossible. Where the batter either strikes out or he doesn’t. You either catch it or you don’t. You had called for an inside fast ball.
The runners on base either advance or they don’t
In any case
The ghosts of the dead people find it mighty amusing. The pitcher, in his sudden humaness looks toward the dugout in either agony or triumph. You, in either case, have a pair of hot hands.
Emotion
Being communicated
Stops
Even when the game isn’t over.
4.
God is a big white baseball that has nothing to do but go in a curve or a straight line. I studied geometry in highschool and know that this is true.
Given these facts the pitcher, the batter, and the catcher all look pretty silly. No Hail Marys
Are going to get you out of a position with the bases loaded and no outs, or when you’re 0 and 2, or when the ball bounces out to the screen wildly. Off seasons
I often thought of praying to him but could not stand the thought of that big, white, round, omnipotent bastard.
Yet he’s there. As the game follows rules he makes them.
I know
I was not the only one who felt these things.
SEVEN POEMS FOR THE VANCOUVER FESTIVAL
1.
Start with a baseball diamond high
In the Runcible Mountain wilderness. Blocked everywhere by stubborn lumber. Where even the ocean cannot reach its coastline for the lumber of islands or the river its mouth.
A perfect diamond with a right field, center field, left field of felled logs spreading vaguely outward. Four sides each
Facet of the diamond.
We shall build our city backwards from each baseline extending like a square ray from each distance—you from the first-base line, you from behind the second baseman, you from behind the short stop, you from the third-baseline.
We shall clear the trees back, the lumber of our pasts and futures back, because we are on a diamond, because it is our diamond
Pushed forward from.
And our city shall stand as the lumber rots and Runcible mountain crumbles, and the ocean, eating all of islands, comes to meet us.
2.
The Frazier River was discovered by mistake it being thought to have been, like all British Columbia,
Further south than it was.
You are going south looking for a drinking fountain
I am going north looking for the source of the chill in my bones.
The three main residential streets of Los Angeles were once called Faith, Hope, and Charity. They changed Faith to Flower and Charity to Grand but left Hope. You can sometimes see it still in the shimmering smog of unwillingness Figueroa
Was named after a grasshopper.
You are going south looking for a drinking fountain
I am going north looking for the source of the chill in my bones
Our hearts, hanging below like balls, as they brush each other in our separate journeys
Protest for a moment the idiocy of age and direction.
You are going south looking for a drinking fountain
I am going north looking for the source of the chill in my bones
3.
Nothing but the last sun falling in the last oily water by the docks
They fed the lambs sugar all winter
Nothing but that. The last sun falling in the last oily water by the docks.
4.
Wit is the only barrier between ourselves and them.
“Fifty four forty or fight,” we say holding a gun-barrell in our teeth.
There is still a landscape I live on. Trees
Growing where trees shouldn’t be. No trees growing where trees are. A mess
Of nature. Inconvenient
To the pigs and groins and cows
Of all these settlers.
Settling itself down
In a dirt solution
In the testube
The water still not alive
5.
The Beatles, devoid of form and color, but full of images play outside in the living room.
Vancouver parties. Too late
Too late
For a nice exit.
Old Simon Fraser, who was called Frazier in an earlier poem
Played with it
Pretended not to discover a poem.
The boats really do go to China
If one can discover what harbor
Far, far from any thought of harbor<
br />
Seagoing, grainy.
6.
Giving the message like a seagull scwaking about a dead piece of bait
Out there on the pier—it’s been there for hours—the cats and the seagull fight over it.
The seagull with only one leg, remote
From identification. Anyway
They’re only catching shiners.
The Chinamen out there on the pier, the kids in blue jeans, the occasional old-age pensioner.
The gull alone there on the pier, the one leg
The individual
Moment of truth that it cost him.
Dead bait.
7.
It then becomes a matter of not
Only not knowing but not feeling. Can
A place in the wilderness become utterly buggered up with logs? A question
Of love.
They
Came out of the mountains and they came in by ship
And Victoria fights New Westminster. And
They’re all at the same game. Trapped
By mountains and ocean. Only
Awash on themselves. The seabirds
Do not do their bidding or the mountain birds. There is
No end to the islands. Diefenbacker
Addresses us with a parched face. He
Is, if anything, what
Earthquakes will bring us. Love
Of this our land, turning.
TEN POEMS FOR DOWNBEAT
1.
“The dog wagged his tail and looked wonderfly sad” Poets in America with nothing to believe in except maybe the ships in Glouchester Harbor or the snow fall.
“Don’t you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike,
She crossed the big mountains with her lover Ike.”
No sense
In crossing a mountain with nobody living in it. No sense
In fighting their fires.
West coast is something nobody with sense would understand.
We
Crossed them mountains, eating each other sometimes—or the heathen Chinee
Building a railway. We are a coast people
There is nothing but ocean out beyond us. We grasp
The first thing coming.
2.
Redrock Canyon the place between two limits
East or west or north or south if you go down seaward. Or even if you don’t
The appalling thing about Red Rock
Canyon is that its name is Red Rock
Canyon. No oysters, no butterflies, no names other than
Its.
3.
“With two yoke of oxen and one yellow dog, with one Shanghai rooster and one spotted hog.” Light baggage. Pike
County music.
What we carry with our bones is much like that. Light baggage that no unfriendly Indian can take from us.
Ourselves. Yet pointed to like the compass of the needle. “Don’t you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike?”
Don’t.
4.
Well Dennis you don’t have to hear any
Of the mountain music they play here.
Telling the young lies so that they can learn to get old.
Favouring them
With biscuits. “It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville, declension on a three mile grade.” In either case collision course. You either pick up the music or you don’t.
British Columbia
Will not become a victim to Western Imperialism if you don’t let it. All those western roads. Few of them
Northern.
5.
For Huntz
I can’t stand to see them shimmering in the impossible music of the Star Spangled Banner. No
One accepts this system better than poets. Their hurts healed for a few dollars.
Hunt
The right animals. I can’t. The poetry
Of the absurd comes through San Francisco television. Directly connected with moon-rockets.
If this is dictation, it is driving
Me wild.
6.
The poem begins to mirror itself.
The identity of the poet gets more obvious.
Why can’t we sing songs like nightingales? Because we’re not nightingales and can never become them. The poet has an arid parch of his reality and the others.
Things desert him. I thought of you as a butterfly tonight with clipped wings.
7.
It’s going to be around here for a hundred years or so. The surf, I mean, breaking noise through my windows at Stinson No gook with an H-bomb in his hot hands is going to kill it.
I wish
I were like an ocean, loud, lovable, and with a window.
It is not my ocean. It was called the Pacific
By various conquerors that never hurt it.
It makes its noises surfacing while I and everybody make mine, only
Its beaches we’ve starved on. Or loved on. It roars at me like love. And
Its sands wet with the new tide.
Automatic
Only, for Christ’s sake, surf.
8.
“Trotskyite bandits from the hills,” Churchill called ’em long after Trotsky had been assinated.
A long life.
Not for the bandits, naturally, but for their namesake. Name sook, name not sought. That ax killed them all (if it was an ax) and his name killed them all (if it was his name) Trotsky-Ite bandits from the hills. If they didn’t
Know about Trotsky his name was there.
Dead certain. Certain anyway
To die anyway. The runner
From the battle of Marathon has no name either. And you can’t remember what he yelled or if he went to Athens or Sparta.
It is all preserved for us somewhere in excellent Greek. Their long hair blowing in the wind (nameless) an excellent target for bazookas. Name-
Less figures, T. and Churchill called them.
9.
They’ve (the leaders of our country) have become involved in a network of lies.
We (the poets) have also become in network of lies by opposing them.
The B.A.R. which Stan said he shot is no longer used for the course. Something lighter more easy to handle and more automatic.
What we kill them with or they kill us with (maybe a squirrel rifle) isn’t important.
What is important is what we don’t kill each other with
And a loving hand reaches a loving hand.
The rest of it is
Power, guns, and bullets.
10.
At least we both know how shitty the world is. You wearing a beard as a mask to disguise it. I wearing my tired smile. I don’t see how you do it. One hundred thousand university students marching with you. Toward
A necessity which is not love but is a name.
King of the May. A title not chosen for dancing. The police
Civil but obstinate. If they’d attacked
The kind of love (not sex but love), you gave the one hundred thousand students I’d have been very glad. And loved the policemen. Why
Fight the combine of your heart and my heart or anybody’s heart. People are starving.
Spicer’s collage announcement of the publication of Billy the Kid. (Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.)
CHRONOLOGY
1925: Born, January 30, John Lester Spicer in Los Angeles, California.
1941: Attends Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. High school friends include future folk-song parodist Allan Sherman and the screenplay guru Syd Field; he publishes poems in school literary magazine “Colonial Voices.”
1943–44: Corresponds with novelist and critic Aldous Huxley. Graduates from Fairfax High. Attends the University of Redlands, where he befriends future Secretary of State Warren Christopher, with whom he serves on the debate team. Declared 4-F in draft status. Spicer’s odd jobs include working in a defense plant and toiling in Hollywood studios as an “extra.” Spicer can be spotted briefly in the op
ening scene in a football stadium in 20th Century Fox’s biopic Wilson.
1945: After two years at Redlands, moves to Berkeley from Los Angeles to continue work on a B.A. degree at the University of California. Meets Idaho-born poet Robin Blaser. Practices as a private detective.
1946: Frequents the anarchist/art/music/poetry circle of Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco. First encounter with California-born Robert Duncan, already twenty-seven. The “Berkeley Renaissance” begins. Spicer studies with Ernst Kantorowicz, initiating an important apprenticeship. With Josephine Fredman, Hugh O’Neill, and Robert Duncan, writes a “Canto for Ezra Pound” and mails it to him at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. Spicer compiles a booklet of “Collected Poems 1945–6” as a Christmas gift for his teacher, Josephine Miles.
1947: Joins Duncan’s roundtable at 2029 Hearst Street. In April, visits Big Sur coast of California with Hugh O’Neill, meets folklorist Jaime de Angulo. Receives bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley; continues studies towards a Ph.D. June 20, mob hit of Bugsy Siegel in Los Angeles; Spicer claimed to be peripherally involved in the investigation. In autumn, Charles Olson visits Berkeley and meets the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance (except Spicer). Duncan publishes his first book, Heavenly City, Earthly City. Spicer lives at 2018 McKinley St., a boarding house in Berkeley, where his fellow tenants include poets Philip Lamantia, Gerald Ackerman, George Haimsohn, Robert Duncan, and the teenaged prodigy Philip K. Dick, later a noted science fiction novelist and visionary.
1948: Duncan writes The Venice Poem. Spicer begins work on his “Imaginary Elegies.” Spicer’s work as a graduate student expands to include research for English Department staff: with Robin Blaser, he researches early interactions between Native American and colonial settlers for Roy Harvey Pearce (they are thanked in Pearce’s study The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization). On his own Spicer prepares a large bibliography of D. H. Lawrence for Professor Mark Schorer.