T H E D I S T A N C E S and / or C I T I E S (3)

Innumerable poets have used the concept of working or communicating with the dead as a stand-in for the business of poetry. To speak of "the dead" these days is often to speak in terms of horror films and television shows, such as the zombie series "The Walking Dead." Horror film metaphors are in fact fantastic to use for talking about poetry. After all, one of the lessons taught throughout every horror film is that you must pay attention to what's happening around you. For the characters in the story being told, a disciplined observance is a must or else it's "bye bye"; while among enthusiastic viewers paying close attention plays a key role in demonstrating exactly how dedicated a fan you might be. This is not so different from what it takes to make it as a poet. As Blackburn's pal the poet Joel Oppenheimer was fond of remarking, one of the golden rules for writing poetry is to "be there when it happens and write it down." Poetry, too, demands you pay attention.

Spicer's dalliance with ghosts, or spooks as he was fond to referring to them, is well known. As he recalls in his "dictation" talk, when Irish poet W.B. Yeats found his wife taking down notes from voices which he could not hear, he asked her to ask the voices what they wanted and "the spooks replied, 'We’re here to give metaphors for your poetry.'" The business of talking with the dead in such a fashion wasn't at all unfamiliar to Spicer. He insists that he heard from Spanish poet Federico García Lorca after death. Writing from "Outside Granada, October 1957," Lorca sent him an introduction to use for his first book of poems, wherein appear as well a number of letters from the dead poet, After Lorca. Near the end of his introduction, Lorca attests "The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy." I woke up the other night thinking about this. Suddenly lines from the country and western star Kenny Rogers song "The Gambler" began drifting through my mind.

During my childhood Rogers became a cultural mythic hero-figure of sorts with this song, which has inspired no less than two made-for-tv films with him in the starring role. In the song, the narrator describes how he once came across an old gambler aboard a train. It's late at night, "we were both too tired to sleep," so they share some whiskey and over a lengthy game of cards, "until the bordeom overtook us," the gambler imparts his wisdom: "you've got to know when to hold them / know when to show them" etc. One reading of the tune is most certainly valid as a sort of ghost story. After all, the gambler's death is recorded within the song, "...somewhere in the distance, the gambler he broke even." Without doubt, as became increasingly clear to me as I thought it over, the song is also a concise accounting of discovering a poetics and details the relevent acts of discipleship pertaining to its practice.

As I lay in bed reeling along through the resonances I've always felt called by in the song, I also couldn't stop feeling how elements of Spicer's poetry merge with Rogers' song providing a kind of side duet in my personal cosmology of influence. I not only recalled how lines from Spicer's heavily Western-themed Billy the Kid evoke the game of cards metaphor at the center of the song:

Back where poetry is Our Lady
Watches each motion when the players take the cards
From the deck.
The Ten of Diamonds, The Jack of Spades, The Queen
of Clubs. The King of Hearts. The Ace
God gave us when he put us alive writing poetry [...]

But also the scene Spicer describes, again from his "dictation" talk, of Yeats on his honeymoon tour with Georgie and the arrival of the voices of dictation. "He was on a train back in, I guess it was 1918. The train was, oddly enough, going through San Bernardino to Los Angeles when his wife Georgie suddenly began to have trances, and spooks came to her." It's classic ghost story stuff and Spicer's retelling of what is Yeats's story after all central to his own later poetics as explicated in the standard poet-as-seer text A Vision, echoes "The Gambler" a bit. There's a train, a mysterious meeting of sorts, and life-altering exchange of information. I've always been immediately attracted by how Spicer, as a poet ever seeking The Real within the real, immediately realizes himself on that train when he reads Yeats's version in A Vision just as now when I read Spicer I place myself beside him. His struggles with The Poem become my own, swapping perspectives and learning my own manner of entrance into the business of writing poetry, just as he did with Yeats, I retell his story on my own terms.

If relating Kenny Rogers to Jack Spicer seems too fanciful a suggestion and the corollaries I've drawn merely personal and nothing more, maybe that's so. My associating the two together is certainly demonstrated by the fact that in our hallway at home on the wall next to the bookcase on top of which I have propped up an 8-track of Kenny Rogers' Daytime Friends, there's a framed poster of Spicer.

The poster and 8 track were each gifts of poet/artist friends. Obviously my friends are witness to the fact of how pivotal each artist has always felt to me, destined to serve as influential markers of poetry's course throughout my life.

At any rate, in the course of composing this bit, I came across a rather terrific remix of "The Gambler" done by Wyclef Jean, with Kenny Rogers singing updated lyrics:

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In the new! verses Rogers in part reminds listeners

you've got to count your dub-plates
before you touch that turntable
if you run out of big tunes
that means your sound is done

Once more, as poets listening in to dub culture we're reminded to always be prepared, that is, always be attentive.

You never know where material for poetry will appear. Just as the poet's ear is always attentive to hearing in casual speech the arrival of the poem's occasion, so too is the poet forever searching printed texts for other flashing moments of discovery. The poet, like any master dub dj, is ever building up and maintaining this vast inventory of poem-appearances and drawing upon them to create. The ongoing mining is both monumental and inconclusive with nothing but poems left in its wake.

Words are nothing but material, grist for the mill. Any text in the hands of a poet is similar to a zombie, supposed "dead" material brought back flashing into life. For instance, take the following paragraph:

I've meant to tell you many things about my life, and every time the moment has conquered me. I'm strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of this, to my intense sorrow, pain to you must grow. The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain---a curious wild pain---a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite---the beatific vision---God---I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found---but the love of it is my life---it's like a passionate love for a ghost. At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work, it fills every passion that I have--- it is the actual spring of life within me.

This is the philosopher Bertrand Russell writing to his lover Constance Malleson on October 23, 1946. I came across these lines haphazardly reading a recent biography of Vivienne Eliot, wife of the poet known as T.S. They sounded oddly familiar. Russell, who died in 1970, and was Eliot's academic mentor in his pursuit of Philosophy in England, later on had an affair with Vivienne. This paragraph is readily found as well in a portion of Russell's correspondence to be found within a volume of his Autobiography first published in 1967. In 1973 poet Alice Notley published Phoebe Light (Big Sky) containing her poem "To My Father" which is a near verbatim transcription of Russel's paragraph. This was where I recognized the passage from. Notley of course gives no indication of having borrowed the language. Why would she? Poetry is nothing but the business of borrowing from and re-illustrating the actual world to further the interests of The Real itself.

Notley vastly improves the powerful impact of Russel's words. She imposes line breaks to great effect:

I'm strangely unhappy
                          because the pattern of my life 
is complicated, 

also "and" always becomes "&." In addition, Notley removes the following phrases: "a mass of contradictory impulses"; "for something"; "the beatific vision--God--"; "--but the love of it is my life--"; "it fills every passion that I have--- it is the actual spring of life within me." Thereby transforming "[...] something transfigured and infinite---the beatific vision---God---I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found---but the love of it is my life---it's like a passionate love for a ghost." Into:

               [...] something
transfigured & infinite--I do not find it, 
I do not think it is to be found.

It's like a passionate love for a ghost.

Notley also ends the poem with the stunning and startling statement: "it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work." She leaves upon the page nothing less than a finely distilled expression of the conflicted drive central to the nature of being a poet or anybody else practicing a craft in pursuit of attaining the unattainable. She also makes it clear that poetry is "work" like any other, the poet makes the same sacrifices to "the job" as any other worker. Wear and tear to both the body and the imagination, along with all the accompanying personal damages inflicted upon family and friends, accompany one's dedication to the practice.

Notley herself is well acquainted with the hazards evoked within her work. Her book At Night the States (Yellow Press, 1987) is a distressed lament for her deceased husband the poet Ted Berrigan. In the title poem, Notley attests to the heartache in which she was submersed using vigorously experimental poetic language of clarity and precision.

At night the states
you who are alive, you who are dead
when I love you alone all night and
          that is what I do
until I could never write from your
          being enough
I don’t want that trick of making
          it be coaxed from
the words not tonight I want it
          coaxed from
myself but being not that.

In this line of work, against the logic of reason and verifiable certainty, death is explored within an intended subversion of natural forces. Poets witness continual magicking and rebirth of colossal yet nevertheless ordinary manifestation. This is the ultimate story. The creation of The Real from without the delicate interplay of the personal with the universal. The poem is left as statement of witness. Identity is subsumed within the poem's avalanche of detailed and exact assertion.