·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

If you are drawn here by Ron Silliman’s review of Exploring The Bancroft, welcome! And thanks to Ron for the lovely celebratory review! The book can be had for a steal on Amazon ($26.50 plus postage for the cloth, and probably $10 less for that in paper.) 196 pages, 155 illustrations; 9.25 x 11″, vertical. Normally I do not forsake my love of bookstores for Amazon, but Signature Books, the copublisher with the Library, sadly, has done a mostly terrible job of distribution. Yes, for reasons not to be explained here, it should have been a UC Press book.
Over the last six months I have been writing a worked called, Jack Spicer in Glasgow which includes both ‘transversions’ of the poems in his book, Language as well as most recently including, Letters to Jack, picking up on Spicer’s letters to Lorca in his book, After Lorca Three of these letters can be found via the adjacent calendar on 11- 07, 11-05 and 10-13. The poems for Jack Spicer in Glasgow are variegated among other calendar entries input since August - too time consuming to enter here. (The limits of indexing blog entries!). If you want to get in contact with me, I am at: steph484 at pacbell dot.com

As I often do, I spelled my brother, David, to take care of my 90 year-old mother on Saturday evening. After dinner in the kitchen, we went to the back room. Once she was comfortably seated on the couch, a thick red woven blanket around her, I read her Kenneth Rexroth’s Signature of All Things and then Robert Creeley’s Matzatlan:Sea. These both long poems, and unlike her usual penchant to make a critical comment on what I have read, in response to both poems, she says only that they are “beautiful”, as if it is quite enough that she has listened and engaged each image, and floated right along with the rhythm of both works. I then asked her if we could start with her saying something about what it was actually like to be ninety years old:

Ninety

It all depends on where you are
And what you want to be.
Mostly people get pretty wound up
And ready to take off
But there are lines ahead of them.
They are not really lines
But indications of experience
That might be quite interesting
For those in line ahead of them.

“I guess you are still in line,” I joke with her.
“Yes, I guess you can say that!”
I read the piece back to her from where I have written down in my journal. Since I want to keep things moving along, I do not ask her for more comment. Instead, I find myself fishing around for something else to spark some writing, until, quite by accident, I hit on a rhyme:
“Mom, I will say ‘Blackberry, blackberry’ and then you start a poem.” She tilts her head in ascent and we begin; she speaks and I write down what she says. When she exhausts a particular idea, I repeat, “Blackberry, blackberry”. Similar to music, it’s a creative form of “Call and Response,” one that keeps her imagination improvising and moving forward, as if she going from invisible target to the next, looking for the right words:

Blackberry, blackberry
Tell me a story
When to begin
And where to go in:

Blackberry, blackberry
What are you doing?
Are you waiting in the corner
In the shade of the moon?
You and I know
That life is short
We don’t want to waste our time
One or the other on a broken heart:

Blackberry, blackberry
It’s just as hard
For that blackberry
To find his place to be
Loved and hated in the world about:

Blackberry, blackberry
Some of us are too full of words
The words that keep us from saying
What’s wanted to be said:

Blackberry, blackberry
Full and juicy
Just like the thing we like
Most about the kitchen
But it’s hard forever for these things
To come out in words
That are natural
That are not like we want them to be said
But there they are
And what are want to do?

Blackberry, blackberry
Come look at my heart
It’s bleeding, it’s hating
And nothing seems to stop:
Are you so unable
To stop by this corner
To tell me a thing or to:

Blackberry, blackberry
Let me go to sleep in your heart
You may have found a secret
You did not know
But then again your days
May just be unfolding
To find the outside world
That tells you that you may not have
The things you want:

Blackberry, blackberry
Tell me your tales
I have shouted my story
And there’s nothing left:

Blackberry, blackberry
Give me your heal
I will roast it for supper
I will make the story clear:

Blackberry, blackberry
Tell the world about
Tales still out there
To find and to be told.

++

At last she says, “I think that’s all,” and we stop.

Oh, well! I am so grateful to still be able have these creative encounters with my mom. Clearly a both rewarding and curious way to come home again, if just for a visit!

from a series, Letters to Jack, in progress. Entry #1 starts on October 21

Dear Jack,

Why am I writing a book called, Jack Spicer in Glasgow? Why not?
This past summer I was not only sure, but convinced that I saw you in that City. No. It was not up the hill of the Necropolis. Not under that daunting dark 40-foot high figure of John Knox, the Calvinist, his hand reaching out from the dead to the City.
In fact, it was not you, but the Scottish Spicer root of you. Correction. It was not a root. It was a presence. A spirit presence. Tangible and intangible.
Which is not to say anything I saw had an alchemical bearing. No way.

It was sheer violence.

Let me explain. I was walking with my friend Alan. We were alongside an outer wall of the University of Glasgow. Which was first built in the 12th century. We were on the side that overlooks the river x. I was not looking in that direction. I was looking at the empty niches on the wall. All along the row and inbetween the stain-glass windows, there was a uniform series of these empty spaces – each one the height of a person and each one over an empty plinth. At the top of each space, there were uniform branches of thin strips of useless, rusty metal. These were curved outward, like the inside ribs of a large, protective helmet.
“What was there, Alan? What’s missing?”
“Oh, those were for the Saints.” He mentioned it, as if it was casual, common knowledge. “They pulled them down and smashed them to pieces. The Protestants and the Reformation.”
“When was that?”
“That was 1575.”
Jack, I am Protestant and partly Scottish. Those were my ancestors. Anti-Papal to the core. I think I know them too well. But that’s not the point. The site grieved me. Those once undoubtedly beautiful, hand-chiseled, sensuous, beatific Saints. Under a full moon I bet they glowed in the dark. Angels, men, women, and children. No doubt once modeled from the local, the villagers. How could Calvin and his followers have done that? Pulled them down and smashed them. Right! Iconoclasts to the core.

Jack, no matter how capable of love or loss, your poems, one upon one, are those of an iconoclast. What do you not strip bare? What do you not take down to the Invisible? Where do you not throw out the Saints? Where do you not insist on the disclosure of the Invisible. Where did you not empty the Temple of the Poem? Where did you not insist on the manifestation of the Real?

I did see you there. Bottle of beer in the grip of your hand, walking with your buddy, Graham, the man who put your work into metal type, who built your books, who pulled the rabbit out of your hat, who sprang like a ghost, both of you, invisible rabbits, magically visible: poems. Whatever rises from ashes, chipped stone, to make those funny, compelling, God awful powerful, little structures. Icons of another, Protestant, sort. Poems.

You were drunk as skunks, your feet swaddling across wet, gray rounded cobblestones, little fractures of blood on the cheeks of both your faces. Somebody, or many, had already kicked you out of somewhere: the neo-sacrosanct who refused to listen or took a mighty offence at your printed books and poems. Obviously, neither one of you can go home again, either.
Jack, I think I now know your problem with Robert Duncan. You thought his face looked like that of a Cherub. His face, you imagined, in fact, insisted, looked like that of a Church Cherub. No. More than that. A Saint. If Duncan had not typed the manuscript for your letters to Lorca - acted as your devoted cleric - you would have wrecked him. Too.

What I learned in Scotland, Jack.

Stephen

If you are in the Bay Area, please come to the ARTIFACT reading. My work will be introduced by Stan Schaeffer. If or if not, drop down an entry to read the latest addition of “Letters to Jack” (Spicer).

ARTIFACT presents…

Amanda Davidson
Rodney Koeneke
Stephen Vincent

Saturday, Nov. 18, 2006
7:30PM, reading begins at 8PM

$5 donation will benefit the Artifact Reading Series, Press, & Public Writing Projects

byob kids!

2921B Folsom St. @ 25th St. SF 94110
www.artifactsf.org

#2 in a series of letters to Jack Spicer, the late poet. To read #1 go down two entries to October 20.

Dear Jack:

Now that I grow older and literally sheaves of poetry have passed before my eyes - let alone hundreds of public and private readings by poets filling my ears with their works - I am struck by the question of what survives. That is what makes one poem endure – one that we come back to again and again over a life time – and those poems that disappear like old fashioned printed data, the shredded pieces that used to fall like snow from windows in the financial district on the afternoon of New Year’s eve.

What makes a poem bang and resonate for years? And when it no longer resonates, why is it still possible to go hit it again and the thing keeps resonating? Or, to change metaphor, what makes a certain poem become like perpetual butter in a churn, the cows milk turned into a rich gold, those cubits on our platter?

Row row your boat

Live is ‘bout a dream.

We learn that one early as a child, singing it over and over, even though the boat is leaky, there is nothing gentle about the stream, and merrily happens most often only when we sing. Yet the song survives in perpetua! Some things endure, I suspect, because they are the opposite of what we know to be true. The verity is in the music, the way it rises and mocks the lie. Simple as that.

Yet, what is it about a real poem, one that does not mock, but endures whatever beauty or trash we throw at it?? I have walked around Language for over 40 years. It is as disturbing as ever. Perhaps the sculpture – a David Smith - in the park is the metaphor. The way one keeps returning and walking about it. One day a wheel barrow, another day the spare, crude metal letters - particularly an A a B and an & - attached at odd angles to the barrow’s rim, another day the thin dark wheel with its luminescent, dark spokes: the sequence and absence of sequence. Particulars compel an eye to mix the angle of light with whatever combination of objects into what stands – at whatever point in time – to be true. The way that one senses that wheel - no matter how stationary – will keep rolling. Forever.

Jack, that is the way I have been reading you. A ring around the poem. It does not fall down. A ring around the poem. The dance the eye makes. The ear. Sometimes you are obnoxious and terrible. Sometimes hopelessly bittersweet. A self-loathing you do go. Other times, the transparency, the made poem with an utter, overwhelming clarity. The you is way gone. Plato’s figures illumined. Not a shadow on the wall. No wonder you got more than your fingers burnt. Those messages.

The test of a true poet is to correspond.

The test of a true poem? You got me, Jack.

The test is how not to die for it. Believe me.

Stephen

On Thursday I had surgery to straighten out a couple of curled toes. They had become so painful that I could no longer walk comfortably. Here, my brief account, one that says probably not so much about the actual surgery, but of the time in which we live. O yes. I will be hobbling for a while through November, but then I should be back, gratefully, in full stride.

So far, so good. Dr. declared success at 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon.
At 1:40 (approx), I asked “How are things going, Doctor?”
“Very well. Very well.”
“Good. If those toes are not flat at the end of this, I will vote for George Bush.”
“That’s even more incentive,” he calls back. The Rolling Stones and Mick are singing “Honky Tonk Woman” on the sound system.
Then there is a little quiet and mumbling from two of the nurses.
Each has a nephew in Iraq.
“I hope they come back safely,” I assure them (i.e. that I am not an all ‘bad, flip-mouth San Franciscan’!) This operation is happening in Daily City.
“We hear they are both working ‘inside’,” one says, and things relax and I let my consciousness float with the absurdity of Jagger’s dance music and god knows what that little buzzing razor sound is doing to my once dancing, walking toes.

But, though I appear a little bizarre, those two toes barely sticking out from the bandages, no pain, a little post-op exhausted, reading away and, of course, keeping up on CNN with weird woe of the Colorado gay marriage bashing evangelical trying to explain himself out of a once a month weekend meth and homoerotic sex habit/spree with a prostitute in Denver, while Bush speaks to the masses in Elko, Nevada because he ain’t acceptable company in most states of this Union these days, and wow, on top of that Mr. Bush, how do you explain Bechtel cuttin’ and runnin’ out of Iraq (albeit with much profit in their pockets and not much to show). Indeed our weird country that seems all falling apart at the ideological seams of that other party. I think that show is about to be over, and we be facing picking up after a bunch of bad ruins for the foreseeable future - if I can be a little optimistic.

Boy, does the mind ramble in recovery from a little surgery
shock!