Helen Adam and Jack Spicer: Birds of the Fifties

Poetry of the 1950s has added some rare notes to its scale the last year or two thanks to two badly-needed editions , Kristin Prevallet's A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation) and Peter Gizzi/Kevin Killian's My Vocabulary Did This to Me: Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan)

A Helen Adam Reader is a necessary book.  Helen Adam an important poet; in fact, she rocks. And until this book, her work was almost impossible to find.  I can attest to this since when I first decided to read Adam several years back (inspired, I think, by a conversation with Ron Silliman), I had a tough time locating any of her books—though it was worth the effort.  Born in Scotland, memorizing Milton at an early age, Adam wrote traditional ballads so skillfully, courageously creepy  that, after moving to the West Coast, she captivated Robert Duncan and Spicer and ended up playing a key role in the San Francisco Renaissance.

This book collects all Adam’s published poetry, some of it not included even in the out-of-print books. It also includes drama and fiction by Adam; correspondence with Duncan; biographical and critical introductions; several fascinating interviews with Adam (she sometimes composed on a bicycle, had tunes in mind for her poems, thought Blake was definitely not insane, and once had a job sweeping up gold dust); a facsimile of a book-length ballad illustrated by Duncan’s partner Jess; a collection of Adam’s poems with accompanying musical scores; and a great DVD with facsimile manuscripts, images of her gruesome collages, film clips, and recordings.  No wonder Don Share singled this one out for a Poetry Foundation 2007 pick when it came out.  And it all hangs together.  As Ange Mlinko wrote (in a review in The Nation, here) “Adam may not have invented a new form, but she did create a world.”

Duncan described the effect of Adam’s poetry on him as “the wonder of the world of the poem itself, breaking the husk of my modernist pride and shame.”  Adam seems to have had a similarly liberating effect on Jack Spicer, another poet whose densely wrought, often highly metrical lyrical power belies the casual, sprawling stereotype of 1950’s Beat poetics.  In an interview in A Helen Adam Reader, Adam claims that Spicer’s poetry workshop was one of the most interesting she ever took, and describes how adeptly he chose the Two of Swords to represent her during a Tarot exercise.

Gizzi and Killian’s collection (reviewed at length here) is the first edition of Spicer's poems in almost 30 years and the first to collect all his published work in one volume.  It shows Spicer as an eclectic poet trained, like Adam, in ancient languages and traditions (he studied Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, among other languages); driven, like Adam, by inner certainties and the demands of a poem’s rhythm and imagination; and devoted, like Adam, to bridging warring forces of poetics through a singular magic.  Seemingly inhabited by hosts of voices, from Yeatsian to Frank O'Haraesque, Spicer is compelling in the juxtaposition of his simplicity and innocence with his openness to pain and cynicism.   Like the Adam volume, this book will add to the current reexamination of received poetic traditions and complicate the raw/cooked dichotomy that has dominated our idea of the poetry of this era.

Jack Spicer, from “A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance”:

What have I lost?  Spook singer, hold your tongue.
I sing a newer song no ghost bird sings.
My tongue is sharpened on the iron’s edge.
Canaries need no trees.  They have their cage.

----Helen Adam,  from “The Birkenshaw”:

The harp stands in her hollow mountain,
And whiles the harp will sing,
Pure and strong is the harp’s voice
With none to plck a string.

The harp utters the truth o’ love,
And tae a’ the host that hears
A thousand years are but as a day,
And a day a thousand years.

Jack Spicer:
The Song of the Bird in the Loins

“A swallow whispers in my loins
So I can neither lie nor stand
And I can never sleep again
Unless I whisper you his song:
“Deep in a well,” he whispers.  “Deep
As diamonds washed beneath the stone
I wait and whisper endlessly
Imprisoned in a well of flesh.

“At night he sometimes sleeps and dreams.
At night he sometimes does not hear my voice.
How can I wound you with my well of sound
If he can sleep and dream beneath its wounds?

“I whisper to you through his lips.
He is my cage, you are my source of song.
I whisper to you through a well of stone.
Listen at night and you will hear him sing:

“A swallow whispers in my loins
So I can neither lie nor stand
And I can never sleep again
Unless I whisper you his song.”

Helen Adam:
The Chestnut Tree

I caged my love in the early spring.
He beat his cage with a broken wing.
He beat his cage with a broken wing
Through the languid nights of summer.
Beside my window a chestnut grows,
A chestnut tree with its towering snows,
Where a breeze from Paradise gently blows,
And joy is the next new comer.

I’ll hang his cage in the chestnut tree,
In the chestnut tree, in the chestnut tree,
Among the haunts of the drunken bee,
‘Mid a fragrance overpowering.
Those bees are drunk with the honey wine,
With honey wine and the hot sunshine.
They’re raving drunk with the honey wine
In the chestnut flowering, flowering.

Oh! Then, perhaps, he may sing to me,
In the chestnut tree, in the chestnut tree,
May sing as loud as a drunken bee,
Down the green and golden gloaming,
When royally drunk with the honey wine,
With honey wine, and the hot sunshine.
He’ll sing, and swear he is mine, mine, mine,
While the bees are roaming, roaming.

The body caged, but the heart gone free,
I want his wild heart singing for me
In the chestnut tree, in the chestnut tree,
With a music fierce yet tender.
I want his song while the sunlight flows
Through the chestnut tree with its towering snows,
While a breeze from Paradise softly blows
And sighs for the heart’s surrender.

Hush, hush, the chant of the roaming bee.
I know he never will sing for me,
Though I hang his cage in the chestnut tree
Where joy is the next new comer.
For my sweet sake he never will sing.
He beats his cage with a broken wing.
He beats his cage with a broken wing
In the bee-hive house of summer.