House That Jack Built: Preface to the collected lectures of Jack Spicer, The

Although the American bard Jack Spicer was born in 1925 in southern California, he claimed his birth year to be 1946 when he met the bards Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser at the University of California, Berkeley. on the outside of the intense fraternity of these three eccentric young men dubbed the "museum poets" for their bookishness, was born the "Berkeley Renaissance." Spicer would part with the rest of his life in the San Francisco Bay area with alone a few brief departures. greatest in quantity notably his excursion to novel York and Boston in 1955-56 would demonstrate to be a defining second in the development of his poetic vision, as it further solidified his allegiance to the American West and his identity as a California author of poems He lived in San Francisco and worked as a researcher in linguistics at UC Berkeley until shortly before his death by means of alcohol poisoning in 1965 at the age of forty. He is survived by dint of roughly four hundred pages of metrical composition some still unpublished; a detective novel; a handful of essays; a certain number of two hundred letters; at least three plays; four prelections which were given shortly before he died; and a legacy of author of poemss and readers to whom these discourses were and are delivered.

The four prelections took place within a 30-day period from June 13 to July 14 1965 The casual seriousness of these talks is typical of Spicer's public phraseology and should not be interpreted as offhand; they are the sole authoritative account of his poetics outside of his metrical compositions and letters. Although Spicer was noticeably intoxicated and disheveled, he took these facts seriously and made sure that they were being taped. As transcriptions of oral true copys recorded at the end of the poet's life, the discourses gain a certain oracular power and finality: Spicer's statements are not prophetic on the other hand contrary, allusive, and purposeful. His humor or "wicked wit," as Warren Tallman bring it, is charismatic. He has that particular gift of being the two irreverent and to the point. As a public speaker he is not the "roman candle" mark as he disarmingly claims in the first lecture; instead, he says, he simply wants to be open and this struggle sometimes ties his judgments in knots. He writes to Graham Mackintosh before giving a prelection in 1954: "There's a big difference between talking as a teacher, which is easy, and talking as a author of poems which is heartbreakingly difficult if you want to talk honestly" Because of the difficult fidelity of their pitch, these talks are also riddled with disappointment and uncertainty about the futurity of the poet-that is, the author of poems as a cultural figure in general and the bard as Jack Spicer in particular, a highly intelligent, isolated middle-aged, gay, baseball-loving alcoholic, single of the great poets of his time, newly unemployed, dying, and at the height of his poetic powers.

The first three of these talks, which have draw near to be known as Spicer's discourses were announced in Vancouver as "semi-public readings with commentary," and formally they retain the quality of talking marginalia upon Spicer's own poetry as he attempts to discuss his poetic practice and life experience with his audiences. While Spicer foregrounds the practice of writing poesy there is an avuncular tone from one extremity to the other of that shows Spicer's deep bear upon with the business of being a bard particularly a young poet, who must learn in what way to manage the destructive force of the metrical composition

At times the surface of the talks strike one as beings resistant to both newcomers and initiates. Because they are proffered as "readings," some familiarity with Spicer's work-particularly the metrical compositions he reads-is necessary to grasp the extensive network of respects he enacts within the course of the talks. As he says in discourse 1, the poems are right where the commentary is inequitable It becomes clear by the final Vancouver talk that he is at times les interested in delivering an bare of his practice than in getting a certain quantity of feedback about his poetry from the audience. As a beneficial teacher he wants to diocese whether or not they've "got" it, and as a bard he wants to begin to establish a vocabulary [i]or[/i] part of to the other which to discuss it.

The spirit of the talks is essentially that of Spicer's "letter to a young poet" He is sympathetic to the affects of the young and is aware of their do one's best for reality. In Fifteen False Propositions Against the author of all things he writes from an abiding bear upon for the community of youth:

Tree in their youth gaze younger

Than almost anything

I mean

In the spring

When they deposit forth green leaves and test To look like real tree

Honest to the infinite my heart aches when I diocese them trying.

It is well documented that Spicer worn out much of his last decade with younger poets; he held court through day at Aquatic Park and through night at the various local bars in North Beach. He was not overly encouraging to young race who wanted to be author of poemss One of the repeated statements in discourse 3 is his line from work of Magazine Verse: "kid, don't go into here," echoing

Dante's inscription above the gates of Hell (III 172) The statement functions as a warning to the young about the practical dangers and uncertainties of choosing a life in poetry-a life that, Spicer admits, can not at any time live up to the expectations of popular fable or Romance and like a Grail search is bound to end in failure or in a succes in the way that limited that it amounts to failure.