from After Language /
Le
from After Language /
Letters to Jack Spicer
******
The
trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios
don't develop scar tissue...
from "Sporting Life." Thing Language, Language
Dear Jack:
That line, that thing
of a line, has never failed to elude me! In fact, for a long time, it hung like
an "audio vice" tightened about my head. Once, with the help of a
friend, I went theatrical to try to - if not expose it for what is - get rid of
it!
Perhaps for your
benefit, and maybe for mine, let me tell you the story. Back in the summer of
1977, the Grand Piano, a coffee house in the Haight, hosted a weekly series of
what some might call "conceptual poetry readings". One thick foggy
summer night, several of us were asked, or invited ourselves to do short
theatrical pieces. I made a cassette tape in which I read- quite slowly - the first few sections of
"Sporting Life". Then I put three white band-aids around the sides
and edges of a small, black leather encased transistor radio. I suspect it was
the same kind you carried to Aquatic Park on summer afternoons to listen to the
Giants’ baseball games.
When my friend, Hal Hughes and I, went to face the full & darkened
audience, I turned on the recorder to the voice of the poem. We stood a few
feet across from each other. Maybe like two clumsy kids, we gently tossed the
radio back and forth into each others hands while the white band-aid surfaces
caught and reflected the overhead light.
...The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
counter-punching radio....
Half
way through, as the poem worked towards its inevitable end, I turned on the
radio. Quite accidentally, if not astonishingly, a voice was calling out the
night's ball game at Candlestick Park. "The count is 3 & 2." We
kept tossing the radio back and forth while – over the poem- the announcer's
voice punctuated the room's darkness. You could hear the crack of the bat
strike the ball. "Foul. Out of play into the stands. He gets one more
pitch."
The
Grand Piano audience - many of them your readers, if not young contenders -
were stunned, as I was. For just those few moments, there you were, poem and
game in hand, the outside speaking to the inside. I do not necessarily believe in magic, Jack,
but that was magic. Then it was over. Hal and I joined our arms in a two-step
dance across the front of the audience and, with plays unfolding, the night
resumed.
I
met a man my age who was friends with you before you died. When we talked of
you I looked into and between his eyes. It was as though a bullet had passed
through there. You could see its tunnel way back into a slightly luminous
darkness. It was, indeed, as though both of you had been taken into a place
where most do not and fear to go. A place without a vocabulary, not one word. Awesome
or terrifying I cannot say. There was something there that chilled to the bone.
Like Orpheus – refusing all admonitions - it pulled you in, then pushed you
back. Scar tissue no alert against the real, no stop to the facts, those poems.
Elusive as ever, Jack!
Stephen Vincent
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