Dear Kent,
I am moved by your eloquent account of the ghostly “reverberations” running through/ between the works of Walter Benjamin and Jack Spicer. However, I find myself puzzled at your reading of my reference to Benjamin’s differentiation between translator and poet: “when you quote Benjamin on the differing qualities of “intention” at work for the poet on the one hand and those at work for the translator on the other (with a view to drawing a basic difference of disposition between WB and JS) I can’t quite agree.” Neither can I; for it is not such a binary split between the two that I was or am interested in expressing. Let me see if I can make my view clearer: when I quoted Benjamin on the distinction between the poet and translator— a view with which I sympathize, incidentally—it was to suggest that, in After Lorca, Spicer renders such distinctions moot, in effect articulating a “middle path” between the poles ascribed by Benjamin. That is, in fact, a large part of the singular brilliance of Spicer’s book—that in After Lorca he changes the rules of the game, in effect striking an “impossible” position which he carries off against all odds. And so, like you, I would insist that Benjamin’s “differentiation” is not at odds with “Spicer’s oscillating, ‘centaur’ text.” Rather, I would argue that After Lorca is balanced precisely (precariously) on such a theoretically “pure” distinction as Benjamin marks. (Once again, I don’t think it matters much whether Spicer actually read Benjamin: I hope you won’t think me cynical when I point out that a notion such as the contrast between the poet as “primary” and the translator as “derivative” was hardly unique to Benjamin, and certainly not by 1957). It is between these opposites—literally, mirror images of each other, to return to the trope of my first letter—that Spicer tautly draws his highwire, upon which he then prances drunkenly, risking all. No, Spicer’s book is very much in debt to Benjamin’s essay; for nowhere else that I know are the stakes of such a game so profoundly, hauntingly set forth. If in fact, as you suggest, Benjamin is one of the original “ghosts” whispering in Spicer’s ear, and Spicer’s ghost repaid the favor, this would make Benjamin what the Oulipians call an “anticipatory plagiarist” of Spicer. With Federico Garcia Lorca, he is in good company.
Still, it is true that I would ultimately reject a purely Benjaminian reading of Spicer, much less one poised solely on the metaphysical. “In After Lorca, Spicer clearly yearns for... some kind of Pure or Platonic state, what he calls the ‘Perfect poem.’” I am not sure that I get what you mean here by “some kind of Pure or Platonic state.” I think you mean something like a transcendental (state of) language—and here we come back to Benjamin’s “Pure” language, and to the Platonism it suggests. This is certainly something for which it sometimes seems like Spicer yearns (the famous passage about wanting to put “real” lemons in his poems being one example). Yet “seeming” can be illusory, as Spicer knew, and I don’t finally think this poet’s “yearnings” are quite so translatable for us across a span of nearly a half-century. One doesn’t ironize what one truly yearns for, unless one realizes it can’t be had; whereas “seeming” to yearn is a well known lyrical tactic, which Spicer himself used on more than one occasion. Yet I am uncomfortable even with the assertion that “Jack Spicer,” the poet who lived from 1925 to 1965, “yearned” for such a highly rarefied parole, especially since we seem to be basing this largely on what he wrote in his poems. Speaking of the Platonic, Plato of course considered poets to be notoriously unreliable sources of information. Spicer would have agreed—and After Lorca seems in part a vigorous demonstration of that very point.
Let’s assume, though, that Spicer did yearn for something like a Benjaminian “Pure language,” and then let’s ask ourselves why, for Spicer, is the “Perfect poem” ironized at precisely the moment that the poet, entering the height of his powers, realizes his impotency to achieve such perfection. The answer: because the “Real” of language is at odds with the purity for which Spicer longed, so Spicer posited an alien language instead in order to allow him to continue writing in an earthly one. If it is true for the author of The Holy Grail that “The alien language against which we echo our ‘translation’ is something much more than linguistic,” then it is also true that the “real” of such a meta-linguistic is, at best, allusive. Spicer seems to recognize this, in the lectures, where one often finds him resisting the efforts of his interlocutors to pin these matters down:
Please don’t get me wrong. Martian is just a word for X, you know. I am not saying that little green men are coming in saucers and going into my bedroom and helping me write poetry. And they ain’t.
[“Vancouver Lecture 1: Dictation and ‘A Textbook of Poetry,’” HJB, 29]
In fact, Spicer often undercuts any coherent reading of his work, including any predicated on a notion of the metaphysical—so much so that your take on him strikes me as just a bit too earnest. Notice that it is not god or some (necessarily) “higher” power who “arranges the furniture,” as Spicer puts it. It is as if, in trying to explain his poetics of dictation, Spicer deliberately chose the one metaphor that wouldn’t be taken too seriously. (And remember, this was well before fields like ufology infiltrated the academy, in hindsight lending theoretical “credibility,” if that’s what it is, to Spicer’s “Martians”). Spicer’s metaphysical, while certainly not disingenuous, strikes me as containing more than a bit of high camp—much like those ’50s sci-fi films which surely inspired it. A not too far-fetched analogue, I believe, might be the jazz composer/musician/bandleader Sun Ra’s claims to have been born on Saturn.
Yes of course intentionality is a suspect category, for Benjamin as for Spicer. I find your suggestion of an intentionality inside language pleasing—and perhaps this is the “Pure or Platonic state” which is ultimately the object/Outside of Spicer’s desire. Yet I think it is hardly so pure as you suggest, and I can’t quite agree either that its imperfections, which both Spicer and Benjamin recognized, are gestures toward a Platonic meta-language so much as reflections of language’s own limits. (I might also point out that, while Benjamin saw imperfection as at least unavoidable, as part of the fabric of writing, Spicer actively sought out imperfection in his own work, which seems, if nothing else, a healthy and logical development, and one which Benjamin would surely have welcomed).
Language’s intentionality reminds me, in contrast to your view, of the sea in the climactic chapter of Moby Dick— capable of an almost whimsical brutality. I’m not sure how Spicer would have conceived it, but I am fairly certain that his conception of it evolved between the writing of After Lorca and the writing of Language and Book of Magazine Verse. Contrast the tranquility of one of the Spicer originals in the early book, “Aquatic Park”—
A green boat
Fishing in blue water
The gulls circle the pier
Calling their hunger
A wind rises from the west
Like the passing of desire
[After Lorca, 32]
—with Spicer’s signature poem from Language, with its “crash of water” which “aimlessly... pounds the shore.” The “ocean” of Language ultimately belies the transcendent, Benjaminian After Lorca, in which, echoing Baudelaire’s echo of Swedenborg, “Things do not connect, they correspond.” Such pastoral correspondences exist in a very different landscape than Spicer’s “ocean” which, with its “White and aimless signals,” “Does not mean to be listened to.” This not meaning to be listened to, of course, CORRESPONDS to Benjamin’s suggestion that literary works are not “intended” for the reader, as you point out. But once we make this connection, we find ourselves in a trap it would appear that Benjamin (or Spicer’s ghost) has carefully set for us: for if we join Benjamin and Spicer in rejecting the centrality of intention, then it cannot matter to us whether poems are intended for their readers or not—and in fact, following this logic we might just as easily privilege the reader/listener in the artistic equation, something Benjamin’s famous statement would seem otherwise designed to preempt.
I hope I have explained now that I was not attempting to “oppose” Spicer to Benjamin (to get back to this “disagreement”). However, as this conversation progresses I find it more and more useful to set forth some points of contrast—however permeable—between these figures. Benjamin, as you note, does not intend to set up an absolute and intractable “opposition” between poetry and translation. He was, as his essay makes abundantly clear (albeit in an impure, “translated” state), much too aware of the transigent particulars of words themselves—the imperfections at the core of language—to have much use for such unassailable categories. Still—and Kent, you must admit—he put more space between them than Spicer, and stopped short of conceiving such a “corrupt” and regenerative conflation of the two as it fell to Jack Spicer to put into practice. I do not claim that Benjamin would have thought After Lorca “corrupt,” but I admire the book for its corruptions just the same.
“to identify yourself with the landscape is as stupid as identifying the Grail with purity, I think.”3
Mark.
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