What I tried to say to Michael

I don't think Jack Spicer was "hermetic" in the usual sense: there are lots of quotes and misquotes from the canon and nursery rhymes and folk songs, but knowing where they came from doesn't explain them, it's more the opposite: they show up because they're catchy tunes and they're winnowed till all that's left is catchiness.

But it's true, there is a kind of sealed-off quality to his writing, and I can understand how someone might want to open the window after a while. Most blatantly, Spicer waves the word "poetry" around a lot more than I can usually stomach. It's not like he's a snob: we get baseball games and walks by the ocean and JFK's assassination and sick horniness. But every whiff of fresh air gets processed and reprocessed into the same characteristic funk.

The thing is, though. A lot of writers, maybe most writers, not just poets, sometimes sense a material force, intuit some structure that pre-dates us, which can derail or at least side-track us towards some destination that seems to be waiting there with its own integrity, with almost its own rights. Last week, for example, I read this from Rae Armantrout:

Who are we talking to when we write? I don't really think, in my case, that I'm talking to a specific audience; I think I'm talking to myself, but when I'm talking to myself, who am I talking to? It feels very much like when I was a child and I prayed, so it's not that I actually believe there is an entity called God who hears what I say, but there is this desire to somehow perfect utterance. But make it perfect for whom, you know? I think in a way we are making something for the gods that we don't believe in.

I don't mean sabotage, although it can turn out that way, more of a grip-hold on artifactuality. Most writers treat the intuition in a practical way, as incitement, to distract us from self-consciousness, or as an uninspected justification of last resort.

If you start behaving as if there really was some unsurfaced connection between verbal structure and worldly business, you get what's called "magic." You get poets like W. B. Yeats and Robert Duncan. But their magic is a self-inflating and semi-deniable fantasy, dressing up and feeling slick, a boost to get the job done. Maybe more sexual aid than sex toy, but still basically utilitarian.

What would it be like to honestly follow through on our when-it's-convenient lip-service? To drop the playacting, and take "this horseshit, this uncomfortable music," seriously and take the intellectual, spiritual, and practical consequences?

That wouldn't be fancy-dress Magick but the daily, nightly, and eternal grind of religious duty, of a particularly dour sort, a dutiful homespun Protestant...

Very Protestant...

He was an atheist.

Nah, not really. He deploys the word "God" almost as often as the word "poetry," more often than any other twentieth century English-speaking poet I know. But not a "personal God." Gods don't manifest just so you can drop God's name and get waved into the club. If God's there, God's there, and you take God on that basis, and from your base. Spicer doesn't lose himself in religion, we're all grown-ups here. The Poet is a beat-up receiver of God's Martian radio signal (or an aching catcher of baseball God), fully responsible for any transduction and traducement (or pick-off attempt and error), and that's where the personal begins and ends and bends: as the characteristic funk of modulation. A radio tuner works within its range, a radio speaker works within its range, and Spicer's exploratory theology works within the voice of a resentful impoverished well-educated alcoholic gay mid-century American. No escape from our home in the range.

And when our voice is given over to the music, what does the music have to tell us? Get lost.

If Spicer's the only writer who can make me swallow a punch-line like "Poet, // Be like God," it's because first he defined his terms: God sees everything that we have lost or forgotten. God is a cannibal that only eats itself. God is gone.

And I suppose you could say the experiment's results were negative. There was no (commercially viable) Northwest Passage. The patient died. But for those stuck in these experimental conditions, the operation itself was a triumphant success, something to celebrate and dwell on. The experiment had been waiting to be made, and now none of us have to make it.