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" in Thing Language from 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! Naturally, like the ghost imprint of any language, the thing still haunts!

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 to listen 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 sound of the poem. We stood across a few feet from each other. Maybe like two clumsy kids, we gently tossed the radio back and forth to each other while the white band-aids caught and reflected  the overhead light. 

        ...The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
 
                counter-punching radio....

When the poem came to its inevitable end, I turned on the radio. Quite accidentally a voice was calling the night's ball game at Candlestick Park. "The count is 3 & 2." We kept tossing the radio back and forth while the announcer's voice punctuated the room's absolute quiet darkness. You could hear the crack of the bat strike the ball. "Foul out of play into the stands." 

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. 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, other plays unfolding, the night resumed.

Elusive as ever, Jack!

Stephen Vincent
 http://stephenvincent.net/blog/


Stephen Vincent