A few folks wanted to see a sample excerpt from:

After Language / Letters to Jack Spicer  
         Stephen Vincent     (BlazeVox)

http://www.blazevox.org/index. php/Shop/Poetry/after- language-letters-to-jack- spicer-by-stephen-vincent-255/

I have been thinking what might work  best. The poem - in most cases - that precedes each letter is a transversion from one of Spicer's poems in the book he called "Language." And sometimes these poems work as a foil to a particular letter. The letters themselves are a kind of extended meditation on "Language" , as well as  Spicer's biography as a poet, and my autobiography in interpreting and relating to that work to my own life during for the last 45 years! Without saying more, here is a sample letter, one that echoes off some of the current issues of the role and potential of poetry in the current OW demonstrations around the world. Here goes - tho the lines in the quoted Spicer poem ae not of their original shape, indentations et al: 

Dear Jack, 

 

While we have, at least,
a faint signal—as you and Lorca would have it—I am haunted by wanting to pose
several questions. 

 

Did you ever think of
the poem, or of using any of your poems, as a public act of intervention? I am
talking politics here. Did you ever imagine a way in which you could stick one
of your poems into a public space—or what some would call “the street”? Where
the poem works like a lighthouse to keep the ship of State from roaring through
the fog or darkness to crash blindly into some disastrous rocks? Where the poem
is a broadside tacked on the public wall, the telephone pole or—in the middle
of a public demonstration—given out hand-to-hand for close reading, pleasure
and investigation? Or, even with all your political thoughts, would that
prospect bore you? 

 

Jack, without your permission or that of anyone
else, I once used one of your poems in the middle of a real and major battle.
In 1969, in Berkeley—already four years after your death—huge street
demonstrations supported the battle to save People’s Park. The City and State,
including the combined forces of the police and National Guard, were trying to
close down the demonstrations that had closed down the streets and local
businesses. The aim of the protest was to stop the university from plopping
down yet another building—a dormitory, a parking lot—on the last remaining
piece of local open space. In our eyes it was the People and the Earth versus
the abstract, corporate power of the State.

 

When something is so
close to your heart, along with demonstrating, what else does a poet do? With
what poem does the poet do it, and where and how does the poet stick the poem?
And does it—in the light or darkness of warring powers—make one bit of
difference? 

Unconsciously I was drawn back to
your book, Language.
In

a coincidental way, the book had
already spoken:

 

       A redwood forest is not
invisible at night. The blackness

covers it but it covers the blackness.

 

              If they had turned Jeffers into a parking
lot death would

have been eliminated and
birth also. The lights shine 24 hours

a day on a parking lot.

 

              True conservation is the effort of the
artist and the private 

man to keep things true. Trees and the cliffs in
Big Sur breathe

in the dark. Jeffers
knew the pain of their breath and the pain

was the death of a first-born
baby breathing. 

 

           
Death is not final.   
Only parking lots.

                                —from
Language, Jack Spicer (untitled)

 

Curious, Jack, how the
real poem knows the game ahead and the game behind. Curious, too, how we, the
poets, take a poem from one generation, or even another century, and replant it
into the next. To be precise, that’s what we did! In San Francisco, across the
Bay from the ongoing demonstrations, Clifford Burke—the poet and letterpress
printer, whose shop was in the Haight—and I printed one thousand copies of your
poem on squares of a rich green, thick-stock paper. You could even see the
strong stamp of the metal type on the other side. The poem would be that
tangible, that insistent. A green beacon in streets saturated with tear gas. 

 

Jack, I have a fear of
crowds—especially when demonstrations become violent. Already so many had been
injured; one young man, James Rector, about my age, was killed, shot by the
police while he sat atop a building overlooking the crowds through the thick
teargas haze that covered Telegraph Avenue. Instead of going across the bridge,
Clifford and I sent the poems in small brown paper packets by way of
emissaries, those who had already been on the streets. From the City, I could
only imagine the poems joining the crowds, passed hand-to-hand, the green
papers perhaps flapping up like leaves on a tree, then read individually, while
people marched, or later, off the street in the comfort and safety of their
rooms.

Whether or not the
people—whose hands held the gift of the broadside—knew what hit them, whether
the poem put a window, a kind of clairvoyance, on the intention and meaning of
what was at stake in the battle for People’s Park, whether the imagination of
the poem’s language made a large or a small historical difference, I will never
know.  Wasn’t it Rimbaud who folded
a poem into a small paper boat to float away on a river without either control
or direction?  Its release, too, a death and a birth. 

 

We do know,
astonishingly, through ups and downs, the Park, like a poem with multiple dents
and scars, still manages to survive, neither parking lot nor dormitory. 

 

Jack, I sent the
broadside to Graham Macintosh in Santa Barbara. Funny man, he wrote back and
said that you would have “hated Street People.” Demonstrations, he implied,
were not your thing. Even though you loved volatile argument—the more intense
the better—demonstrations, whether for trees or civil rights, were definitely
not your way to knock things about, to make things right. No matter how just the
cause—and in your writing, many will point out you were not always just or
noble, in fact, you could be anti-Semitic, misogynist, and so on—you preferred
to take it out in a chess game or baseball. There had to be some decorum, a
container, a strategy. The smart knight’s move to take out a bishop, or a
Willie McCovey line-drive ball over second base into the Giants’ center field
bleachers. A street without authority or pattern—the absence of form or
language, book or poem—beleaguered not only your imagination but The
Imagination. In fact, who can imagine you, Jack Spicer, probably half drunk,
walking down Grant Avenue in your worn-out, unpressed, threadbare,
once-academic coat on the way to the East Bay Terminal to catch a bus to
Berkeley to join the crowds in a possibly volatile street demonstration? 

 

Unlike some of your
poems, Jack.

 

Or, some might say, 

Don’t confuse the
Poet with the Poem

Or you will lose them
both.

 

By the way, Jack, thanks for extending the
permission—though you did not know it—to reprint the poem! In my book, and
maybe in the book of the world, the poem will always be, hands down, a winner.

 

But I suspect you always
knew that, Jack. 

 

Stephen


**



The test of a true poem, Stephen Vincent writes, is how not to die for 
it.  How can a book that chills you to the bone — As Jack Spicer’s 
Language surely does — become a structuring, challenging, politicizing 
and even comforting recurring presence through forty years of a life 
lived under its spell?  With a hard-won, contrarian patience, Vincent 
applies the test, and the hope he finds at the end is all the more 
convincing for the precariousness of the path it takes through the 
silent gap between No and One listens to poetry.

—Peter Manson




Stephen Vincent's engagement with Jack Spicer's poetry goes arguably 
farther back than anyone who wasn't a friend or acquaintance. What is 
not arguable is the generative richness of that engagement. Having been 
sent Spicer's Language by a friend while serving as a Peace Corps 
volunteer in a Nigeria poised on the brink of civil war, he finds in its
 "uncomfortable music" a poetry uncannily expanding the borders of 
meaning. Cast in the creative-epistolary form of Spicer's own After 
Lorca, this book is a tactful searching: it respects the intransigence 
of the poems, and tries, in the gentlest of ways, to understand the man 
who wrote them. After Language is a meditation on interpretive 
migration, on the troubled paths of poetic inheritance, and on the 
tangled, fraught (and yes, magical) ways that poetry survives it makers.



—George Albon94 pages; $16. 


To order, go here: 



http://www.blazevox.org/index. php/Shop/Poetry/after- language-letters-to-jack- spicer-by-stephen-vincent-255/

  




To get a book sense, feel welcome to request (from me) an email of a sample "letter". 



Stephen Vincent