> Jack Spicer in Glasgow sounds like a terrific new series, Stephen. I
> like the odd shifts here.
>
> Doug
>
Thanks, Doug. "Jack Spicer in Glasgow" is a working title. Courtesy of Mark
Weiss' step-son poet, Carlos Blackburn, son of Paul Blackburn, poet - and
certainly one of my mentors - I recently stayed in Carlos' room in Glasgow -
while he is visiting here in the States. Upon his mantle there was a the
old, well read Black Sparrow paperback of Spicer's Collected Poems (which,
now with the recent discovery of much more work is only a partially
Collected, and Wesleyan U Press will be doing a three or volume set of his
poems, further essays and correspondence in the near future!).
Anyway, to the degree that I know, at least part of Spicer's family was
Scottish in origin and his poems in part - among much much more - carry that
Calvinist judgmental inheritance.
One of my shocks in Glasgow was to see the way the Reformation, 1575,
banished the Saints from the Cathedral and the University - immediately
noticeable on the outside walls, those now long empty architectural niches
where you can only now imagine the ghost of the original saintly occupants.
Even though Protestant in background, and not to disposed to Rome by reflex,
I found it pretty appalling - the destruction of sculptures something akin
to book burning. I am afraid I love graven images!
But, indeed, Spicer is something of an iconoclast - he certainly does not
suffer fools gladly.
Yet this exercise of 'translating' Language makes me doubly aware of the
richness of his intelligence and imagination - a multiple pronged education
that can float between classical lit, medieval romance, metaphysical
conceits, modern linguistics, metalurgy, etc. into extraordinarily rich and
compressed architecture - the tone of which can vary between richly
rapturous and (iconoclastic) sardonic.
Putting Jack Spicer back in Glasgow seems about right.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>> In Pinole she went unborn
>>
>> An ugliness inhabited, abundant
>>
>> We make the same language for hate
>>
>> And for the loss. Nouns in agreement
>>
>> We change the name of the City:
>>
>> Pinole becomes Richmond but not Oakland
>>
>> There are no good singers on 23rd Street
>>
>> There are several cities inside San Pablo Avenue
>>
>> It is harmful (always) to negate a pluralist
>>
>> Freud adds frost to syntax. What is cognitive
>>
>> Does not alter the daughterıs beautiful auburn hair
>>
>> The mother at ninety alters sentences
>>
>> This may be the real mother
>>
>> Genealogy sweats in the darkness
>>
>> The sentence has no thought of right or wrong
>>
>> My mother has no idea of what hit her
>>
>> The rose is oblivious to the concept of life:
>>
>> Believe her.
>>
>> *
>> from a new series, Jack Spicer in Glasgow
>>
>>
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>
> Historical imagination gathers in the missing
>
> Susan Howe
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