Nomad Codes

actively (and fractiously) cultivated a highly social circle of poets and artists and influenced writers like Jack Gilbert and Richard Brautigan, who dedicated Trout Fishing in America to him. Spicer was so committed to the local that he insisted on limiting the distribution of his publications to the Bay Area, as if poetry were a kind of community-supported agriculture. (He also, presciently, refused copyright.) But though he cofounded the “6” Gallery, the site of Allen Ginsberg’s legendary howl, Spicer was no Beat—he disliked pot, thought Zen was stupid, and made fun of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “Be bop de beep / They are asleep,” he wrote in 1960.
    The young Spicer proclaimed that he wanted to write a poem “as long as California,” but the state he rendered into verse was more than a place of fogs and cliffs or even “The sea- / Coast of Bohemia.” California’s geography also staged a liminal poetics, what Robinson Jeffers—the brooding and misanthropic poet of isolated Carmel, whom Spicer very much admired—called “the verge extreme.” Spicer stalked that verge, loosing the discourses that bind the self. Though his early lyrics are well wrought and often disarmingly beautiful, his mature writing is a vexed threshold of sense and nonsense, a jagged, pun-strewn, and sometimes harrowing crossroads of romance and straight talk, machines and the voices of the dead. “Fifteen False Propositions Against God,” written in 1958, contains a striking example of Spicer’s skittering play of interruptions and arresting images:
    Beauty is so rare a th—
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card.
    Poetry with such cross talk asks a lot of the reader, of course, and Spicer—who dismissed poems that easily please their audience as “whorish”—is a notoriously tough nut to crack. Much of this difficulty is both explained and illuminated by his peculiar poetics. Unlike his Beat peers, Spicer did not believe that poetry should be the expression of an inspired and uncorked self. Instead, he reduced the poet’s work to an almost mechanical act of listening to and receiving what Spicer called the Outside —an almost Lovecraftian field of forces that invade rather than inspire, and before which the poet is little more than a secretary taking dictation. In a fascinating series of lectures that he gave in Vancouver shortly before his death, Spicer explains that the poet’s task is to get himself—his loves, his plots, his beloved meanings—out of the picture, so that what he only half-humorously calls “spooks” or “Martians” can enter. The content of the poet’s mind, his memories, lore, and language, is just “furniture” that the Outside arranges into a poem, a process that Spicer compares to a Martian arranging a kid’s alphabet blocks to form a message.
    Spicer’s concept of poetic dictation, not to mention the word puzzles it catalyzed, owes a great deal to the poet’s formal training and occasional research in pre-Chomskyan linguistics. At the same time, the Vancouver lectures make clear that Spicer approached poetry as an effectively spiritual practice, one that demanded both an ascetic erasure of the personal and a practical engagement with the tradition of spiritualist poetics. Spicer begins his first lecture with a description of the spirits that, in addition to inspiring W. B. Yeats’s A Vision , brought the aging Yeats “metaphors for [his] poetry.” Tellingly, Spicer places Yeats and his wife, George Hyde-Lees, on a train from San Bernardino to Los Angeles when she first establishes contact with the spirits through automatic writing. Spicer is probably bullshitting here—there is no evidence for the claim—but his desire to establish a West Coast tradition of oracular aesthetics is palpable.
    Spicer’s own initiation into occult poetics occurred when he met Duncan at Berkeley in 1946, a year Spicer once proclaimed as that of his real birth. A native Californian whose adoptive parents belonged to a Theosophical order, the older Duncan introduced Spicer to a nuanced but overtly magical approach to poetry—a literate and deeply aesthetic hermeticism that also cast a glamorous light on the gay demimonde that surrounded Duncan and drew the awkward Spicer out of his shell. Along with Blaser and others, the young men experimented with parlor games, spiritual dictation, and bibliomancy, and began developing the sort of esoteric poetics