Nomad Codes

On a broader level, Duncan believed his writing was part of a “grand collage” of aesthetic and imaginative life, a belief reflected not only in the numerous citations he weaves into his verse, but also in his poetry’s almost Borgesian ambiance of allusion, reference, and bibliomania. His long series of “Passages” poems cite Emperor Julian and Ezra Pound, and occasionally simply list cool books like The Aurora, The Secret Book of the Egyptian Gnostics, and The Princess and the Goblin . “Apprehensions,” perhaps his single most haunting and convulsive work, weaves quotations from Marcilio Ficino and Bruno of Nola into a poem that reads like the tendrils of a fast-fading revelation tickling you from the far sides of dream.
    Duncan’s citations and allusions are hardly bubblegum cards found at the side of the road, but his work is still an extension of the Californian alchemy of trash—the “midden heaps” of its pop occulture, the ugly bric-a-brac of a mercantile frontier awaiting transformation. In “Nel Mezzo Del Cammin Di Nostra Vita,” written in 1959, Duncan reflects on this alchemy in his praise of the Watts Towers, built in the flats southeast of downtown Los Angeles by the untrained Italian tilesetter Simon Rodia:
    scavenged
from the city dump, from sea-wrack,
taller than the Holy Roman Catholic church
steeples, and, moreover,
inspired; built up from bits of beauty
sorted out—thirty-three years of it—
the great mitred structure rising
out of squalid suburbs where the
mind is beaten back to the traffic, ground
down to the drugstore, the mean regular houses
straggling out of downtown sections
of imagination defeated.
    Nothing shocking here: these are good old twentieth-century bohemian values. Duncan praises the outsider artist, who goes against the grain, risks height, ignores dogma. This is all part of our alternative myth these days, but it remains to be seen whether the margins still exist—culturally, economically, spiritually—that could allow such creative feats to flourish. Juxtaposition has become an advertiser’s art. Trash is not the same thing today, in our belated self-conscious world of thrift-store savvy, mediated hipster rebellion, and omnivorous collector mania. Before you know it, it’s on eBay. Many of us still hear the spiritual call of redemptive refuse, of glimmers, junk, and “bits of beauty.” But it remains to be seen whether we can join the ranks of those who, in Ginsberg’s howling words, “dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed ...”
    2005

JACK SPICER’S GHOSTS

    In the summer of 1965, the poet Robin Blaser discovered his friend Jack Spicer lying comatose in the poverty ward at San Francisco General. The forty-year-old Spicer had passed out drunk in the elevator of his North Beach flat a few days before and was wheeled in, without ID, in a torn and befouled suit. When an attending doctor suggested to Blaser that Spicer was just your typical middle-aged alcoholic, Blaser grabbed the fellow’s shirt: “You’re talking about a major poet!” This was as true then as it is now. But in that moment, Spicer was also a dying poet. After days of fever and mumbling, he managed to shape what would be, more or less, his last coherent sentence: “My vocabulary did this to me.”
    These final words serve as an apt title for Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian’s 2008 Spicer collection, my vocabulary did this to me , the first thorough gathering of the poet’s extraordinary and challenging writing to appear since the ’70s. The phrase itself could be a line from one of his mature poems: matter-of-fact and bleakly funny, like the recoil from some inconclusive blow in a verbal joust. A similar voice closes one of Spicer’s best-known poems, an invocation of the ocean that crowns the late sequence “Thing Language”:
    Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
    Spicer wrote from that pounded shore, a site as geographic as it was Orphic. Born in Los Angeles to midwestern stock, Spicer was a fiercely regional writer, a proud habitué of Berkeley and North Beach who hated New York and loved loved loved the San Francisco Giants. With Blaser and Robert Duncan, two other homosexual poets he met at UC Berkeley in the late ’40s, Spicer helped establish one of the most thriving communities within the motley fabric of the San Francisco Renaissance. In bars and in his beloved Aquatic Park, Spicer