·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Jack Spicer in Glasgow is the current title of a book of poems in progress. The manuscript also includes various letters to Jack, of which this is one:

Dear Jack:

Language, your book arrived on my dining table in Nsukka, Nigeria in March, 1966. It was the end of Harmattan. The new Atlantic winds had stopped the flow of Saharan white dust down across the University campus. Massive thunderbolts and stiff showers signified the start of rainy season. A Pogrom was in progress in the north. Haussa tribesmen were slaughtering Ibos who were fleeing homeward to the east. Lorries and trains were filled with desperate refugees. The air and newspapers were full of terrible stories. In an overcrowded train, a teenage girl with a decapitated head was held-up standing between her family for hours as the slow train made its way south. The campus was fired up with calls for succession and the creation of a new state. The arrival of your new book from a friend in San Francisco was both an obsessive refuge and a mirror. One that I could not explain to anyone, much less myself.

With some pride, over the years, I have said, “I was the first person to read Jack Spicer in Africa.” This may or may not be true. Why, I still want to ask, did your poems hold up like fresh, raw studs on the walls of a new house? Beats me, Jack! My friends who took a look could neither understand the poems, nor my obsession. We were on a train going north. From Jos onward, at each station, under low-hanging cloudbanks, frightened men, women and their shocked, wide-eyed children waited on open platforms, soaked and oddly mute - singular, flowered parasols barely protecting their heads. We were going to visit a friend. Ironically – in the middle of what became the start of a Civil War - we were in Nigeria as ‘United States Peace Corps Volunteers.’

“Yes,” he said, when we arrived in his town - an arid one with rows of low, one-story sandstone buildings amongst an horizon of several tall, neighborhood mosques – “Yes”, he repeated, though he had stayed inside the house, he had “seen some of it.” A body left alongside a curb, a crashed car, broken windows. The Ibos were the shopkeepers and Civil Servants – considered more powerful and wealthy by comparison to the Haussa, most of whom were of Muslim faith. A coup had taken place in Lagos, the country’s capital, and Haussa political leaders had been killed by Marxist oriented rebels, many of them Ibo. In May and June, murderous and popular revenge became common in many cities and villages in the north.

“Get down, get down,” my friend spoke – practically hysterical - when he came outside and found that I had used a ladder to climb up his interior patio wall and on to the flat roof. Each house in the neighborhood, including this one, had a little dome on the roof over the front entrance. The domes were like an echo to the large domes that crowned the City’s mosques. When I stood up, my figure rose higher than the small dome that was the height of my hip. “Get down,” he repeated. There was nothing between the profile of my body and the much higher dome of the local mosque. Through his eyes - or more importantly in the eyes of any neighbor who might see me - my heightened figure had thrown the city – its architectural hierarchy – out of proportion. I was violating the religious order of things.

“The neighbors will be very upset,” he explained, as I got down to the bottom of the ladder. To be standing on the roof, looking over the City, I had broken a taboo, I had broken the city’s strict sense of proportion.

I went back inside the house and sat down with your book. In each poem, I read each word, in fact, each syllable closely, often several times. The poems were so solid I could have tapped my fist on the wooden table. There was still much of it I could not understand at all. I was attracted to the weight, the confidence of the language. Within the curious façade of each poem – no matter the spiraling or unexplained twists of logic - the words were as strong as bricks. No matter how fractured the world, the poem still exposed a commitment to architecture, a proportion. Against the world impinging on the house - split between the Hamitic north and the Bantu south, in the crossfire of Muslims, Christians and Pagans - each poem waged its own presence, a vocabulary, a bas-relief, a topography in which one could sustain a measure both with and against terrible odds.

In retrospect it seems exotically strange that I was carrying your book – so secular, yet like a lamp - between and among the various peoples who could no longer trust and/or speak to each other, who, in fact, were about to enter a deadly war. Yet, perhaps, given the history of poetry, these migrations of poems, from one hot spot to another, are not so unique, yet continuously fraught with the potential dangers that might come from a ‘misunderstanding.’ An acceptable poem in one land might kill you another. I was spared, Jack. No one - not even my friends - was in a rush to understand or interpret your poems. Though others come to suffer from not listening - whether to poems or anything else - sometimes it is an invisible code that saves us.

It is said – on your deathbed in the hospital – you claimed it was your “vocabulary” that killed you. Ironically, in Nigeria – about to suffer a major implosion, genocide, civil war et al – it was your vocabulary, those poems, those structures, that were the things that compelled my attention, that, indeed, saved me.

Must I say thank you?

Stephen

No intimidation here says the cow

The eye white rising hemispherical

The cow-paddy - a circle, too – sweetly risen

Among white, nameless petals. Together

The ancient calf and the belligerent mother

The kick and temporal protection:

You and I are as absent as the solid ghost:

The whiskey bottles as dark as petroleum

Lined-up, vertical - hand-priced - on the white countertop:

Yurok territory. What breaches the fissure?

The bronze flash on the wing of the horse fly

A bang and a whisk off your wrist:

Restoration is a bleak and sorrowful business

The cow’s head rubs the barb on the wire fence

The ghost is a fissure born in the accurate book:

This is a poem about much death

Active and present in and around Humboldt County.

***
from “Jack Spicer in Glasgow.”

In the previous post - in relation to “sorrow” I did not include this quote of my mother:

“The members of my family did not really like me. I liked them.
But they said they didn’t. I would not put it down on paper. ”

I don’t know if her statement was or was not true ‘in fact.’ But it is the refusal to put the story ‘down on paper’ that interests me. The way in which the history of novels of family either get written or do not. When people are in the last episode of their lives, there is - obviously in my case - a curiosity about the nature and the story of the life. A desire particularly to know the family secrets - why someone went one way, or another with their life. Were there acts of infamy, theft, abuse or murder? Were their major moments of love and/or love lost? Divorces or separations that led to great or disastrous adventures? Probably, in the cases of many, our questons are impelled by the desire to unveil the life of the world inside the shadow of Thoreau’s observation that “most men live quiet lives of desperation.”

My mother’s instinctive - if that’s what it is - refusal to put the story down on paper, I suspect is rooted in some ancient taboo, or, more simply put, an admonition “to not hang dirty laundry out in public,” and, the perhaps implicit implication there that there will be vengeance of a major sort if such and such a story gets out. Don’t we see this as a daily practice in the Bush Administration which comes close to saying that they will practically kill anyone who leaks ‘their’ secrets? Aren’t some families any more or less threatening, if ‘their’ story is told?

I grew up thinking my family had such a secret. I am not sure, if that’s the case. But my mother’s apprehension to ‘write it down’ may suggest such. And that secret may just be a micro-moment of many within my family’s history as pioneers in the west - violence and violation fills a space within our collective bones.

Yes, isn’t this maverick desire to unveil whatever may be among those dark, or even joyous truths, one of the major reasons one writes? By taking the manhole cover off the repressed goods, a family and/or culture can be released to begin to fully breathe again.

This is a continuation of an on-going series of poems dictated to me by my 90-year old mom. I usually sit with her on Friday evenings after dinner. I call it our Poetry Party. I read her a few poems, and then ask to write, actually dictate poems, in response to the poem(s), or to respond to exercises that I kind of create on the spot. Lately I am partial to Kenneth Rexroth’s Love And The Turning Year : 100 more poems from the Chinese. Many of the pieces have a clarity, indeed, a quality of sincerity that match my mother’s awareness of her advanced age, which is now combined with the current local condition of an early, cool autumn (here in the San Francisco Bay Area.) For example:

To An Old Tune

In my young days I never
Tasted sorrow. I wanted
To become a famous poet.
I wanted to get ahead
So I pretended to be sad.
Now I am old and have known
The depths of every sorrow,
And I am content to loaf
And enjoy the clear Autumn.

Hsin Ch’i Chi

When I ask my to speak of sorrow, she says and I write down:

I have discovered as I have become older
it is difficult to talk about things like sorrow
or where my best friends are going to be next.

I ask her to make a poem in which she imagines Autumn as a figure to whom she will ask some questions. She goes right into it:

Autumn
What color do you have in your hair?
What are you planning to do now that the summer season
has gone away?
Will there be new games for little boys?
Quiet murmurs of the world around us?
A strange odor in the air?
Can life itself become much different
as a result of the change from the move
from summer wildness to my aching back?

On impulse I change the subject to the Biblical start of the world.
“Can you ask some questions of Adam? The first man on earth? ”

Adam
“Who is going to be here to help you?
A well-fitted male, a squeamish female
or somebody hardly able to fill the whole?”

Adam is in a terrible fix for himself.
He cannot figure out what comes next
or should come next. Or will his life
be litteredd with unsavory ‘talk-walk.’

When my mother speaks in this way, I become conscious that she is constantly in a major conflict between words and words for her thoughts. She wants to speak with confidence and authority - right or wrong - that has always been her nature. Now the language that emerges often betrays her. Different words come up because she can no longer instantly grab the one she wants. Her inside world of thought can no longer be accurately mirrored as she would want it.
She cannot, for example, make it clear what she means by “talk-walk” and or why it might be be “unsavory.” Ironically sometime she knows she is confusing and sometimes not.
Often, before I even read a poem back to her, she will say, “That’s not right or that’s not very good.” On the other hand, she can either often say things that are exactly what she wants, or, if not, she will still have managed to compose something interesting, even if employing an eccentric logic. It’s a little like walking on one leg and still getting to some kind of acceptable destination.

As I often do - partly because the results are interesting - I ask her to write about a particular number or a series of them.

Nine

Nine is so full of sories and remembrances of the past, one can’t forget what Manson (her grandfather) wanted to say but never got around to completing it. We all have historic parts to fill into everybody’s bit of extra space.
Manson could not find his way into the world about him
and when he did, he did not know what to make of it.
But that’s the problem of many men.

In the past I have let it all float past,
thinking the inner-tales of fairness or worse
would qualify, but, of course, they wouldn’t,
they couldn’t.

She comes to a stop and looks up. “That one has something of value, not everything.”

“What do you think you are trying to say,” I ask her.

“I don’t know.”

It’s the end the evening’s Poetry Party. I tell her she’s looking tired, and it’s probably time to go to bed.

“Do you think the house where I am supposed to be staying will be available before long?”

“That I cannot tell you, Mom.” Nor is it an expectation that I want to dwell upon.

from Jack Spicer In Glasgow, an on-going series:

Michael before Stephen before David

Chris the afterthought. Brothers kept separate

The salt in Tebtunis* about the mummy’s mouth

The Civil Service circa 242 BC stuffed

Into the belly of the once crocodile. An homage

To the god (Crocodile). The Civil Service

Taped shut its own papyri. The proper burial

Of proper verdicts. Who lost, who regained

Such and such property. Who made the suit

And who paid the fine. Unrolled, the crocodile god

Spoke, still speaks through the lips of the judges:

The bookkeepers own no genders

The Pacific breaks up. Those waves go flat

Under the basalt bluff. He climbs under with his camera:

An acknowledgement of curves, the disturbance

In the lava, the salt in the enduring crust:

The Civil Service rarely pleasures the curve

Nor the sad divisions, even a death

Among the brothers. I am here where

The Columbia bends wide into the Pacific.

Awe struck, Lewis and Clark did not live long enough

To fathom loggers, mills, those shredded forests

The long saw, truck, track and flatcar:

Decade by decade into this moment

Those brothers - the fallen - one by one, after them.

**
(Tebtunis was the name of a community in Egypt. The Crocodile was considered a god. The local mummy makers would stuff crocodiles with old papyrus court and other records that they bought from the offices of the Civil Service. In the early 20th century, an archelogical expedition sponsored by Phoebe Hearst - partly in association with the University of California at Berkeley - would bring back several thousand parpyri pieces from unwrapped crocodile mummies. Occasionally the pieces were literay in nature, a fragment of a lost play by Sophocles, for example. Mostly, however, they are records of land disputes and such. More about this collection can be found at The Bancroft Library website under Center for The Tebtunis Papayri).

Excuse my absence from this site. In the last two weeks, two of my uncles, both 88, passed away. Hank Libby and J.D. Vincent. Hank was my mother’s brother-in-law by marriage to Charlotte, who was originally married to her brother Joe - who passed away quite young, not long after World War II, possibly of a War related infection. J.D. was my late father’s brother.

They both had interesting stories, one a Jew - a child of one of he legendary, socialist Petaluma chicken farmers; the other a child of Okie migrants to California in the early 1920’s. One fought in North Africa, the other piloted military transport planes over the South Pacific. One became a chemist and eventually created the formula for the colorful translucent glycerin soaps that put The Body Shop on the map in the late Sixties. (My aunt Charlotte created that name when her partner Jane got the lease for the first shop in a hippie mall inside a former auto body shop in Berkeley, near the corner of Derby on Telegraph. In the eighties the name was sold to the English woman (Brocerick??) who made it even more famous.
J.D. went back to the Phillipines where he became a pilot for the fledgling Phillipine Airlines. Baptist by birth he married my aunt Ditas, a Catholic, which caused some consternation for both sets of parents. J.D.’s airline boss was man named Hagedorn. Ironically, I would publish his daughter Jessica Hagedorn’s first two books under my Momo’s Press imprint, his daughter’s first two books : Dangerous Music (poems) and Pet Food & Tropical Apparitions (a novella and poems). For a long time I had no idea of the connection until chancing on it in a conversation with Jessica’s late Aunt Pearl, who also knew “Captain” J.D. from the Phillipines. .
J.D., not a literary man, never read a word by Jessica. However, he was a terrific story teller, as well as a sailor and competitor on San Francisco Bay. At my father’s memorial, he could remember in quite specific detail of images of growing up at Ferry Point (Point Richmond) - regaling the gathered of the differences, in close detail, between living in “Box Car 1″ and “Box Car 2″ over an eight year period. His father, my grandfather, worked for the Sante Fe Railroad and was in charge of the terminal’s Ferry Operations whose barges took box cars back and forth to San Francisco. Those box cars were their early California living accomodations.

Hank left an 800-plus page unplished autobiography, of which I have only read a segment of his experiences in North Africa. I recently recorded J.D. give some of his life story, as well as we also recorded his contribution to my father’s memorial.

Hank remained politically progressive his entire life, no matter how successful he became. A genuinely upbeat man, he was sorrowfully depressed by the destruction by the Bush regime to much of what had been accomplished during his life time. J.D., on the other hand, kept constant to his Republican views, to which I never gave much of an ear.

Telling a little of their different stories helps. As I get older, and more in the family begin to fall, it’s very uprooting, the loss of these roots into the foundation of my childhood and growing up - the stories amassed and so long apart of the internal dialog that forms the sense of my origins and presence in the world.
I am sure it’s the same experience for many - but when it’s your own, it’s naturally special, a treasure ripped up and given back into whatever one calls the mystery of living and dying.
Or as my mother, inveterate poet accounts it the other evening when I asked my mother to make up a poem about a “Frog,” or, as she recounted:

There was a little frog
that got mixed up in the bog
and when he came to
he had lots to laugh about
and lots to say:
I loved that little frog.
I hated to see him go
but that happened on every level.
There’s not much more to say.

The clarity, her sense of finality, is sometimes refreshing, its bluntness is a breath of fresh air.
Nevertheless, I am not always sure what I am willing to breathe.