Nomad Codes

that Charles Olson later attacked, in his essay “Against Wisdom as Such,” as an “école des Sages ou Mages as ominous as Ojai.” But though Spicer later taught a workshop at San Francisco State called “Poetry as Magic,” he never confidently embodied the magus the way Duncan did. Linguistically sophisticated, a lover of puzzles, Spicer was content to treat the occult as another game, a contest of signs playing hide-and-seek with meaning. What seemed most important for Spicer was the practice of dictation itself, a practice that demanded a dismantling of what he called “the big lie of the personal.” In his Vancouver lectures, Spicer describes taking hour after agonizing hour to clear out his mind enough for a handful of truly dictated lines to appear.
    Does Spicer’s spectral poetics represent a last-gasp Romanticism or postmodernism’s last-ditch turn towards “the abject” and the materiality of language? This fluctuation is fundamental to his poetry and accounts for much of its relevance and power. On the one hand, the muse of Tradition has been body-snatched by one of William Burroughs’s alien viruses, whose codes and messages, Spicer insists, are not necessarily right or wise or beautiful. But behind this science-fictional frame—rooted in part in Spicer’s love of Astounding Stories and pulp writers like Alfred Bester—is a more traditionally Orphic stance, which finds the poet cocking his ear to the ocean beyond and transmitting its white noise and ghostly signals into the tangles of our fixed tongue. One of Spicer’s favorite images for this process is, in fact, the car radio in Cocteau’s film Orpheus , which broadcasts verses from a deceased poet—verses that the handsome Orpheus transcribes obsessively.
    This circuit of parasitic haunting also forms the framework for Spicer’s 1957 breakthrough, After Lorca , a collection of purported translations of the Spanish poet. The book opens with an introduction from the dead Lorca, who complains, justifiably, that Spicer has taken undue liberties with the translations that follow, and that some poems are not his—Lorca’s—at all. Not only do Spicer’s translations interrogate originality, they recast the poem as a kind of time machine, or what he elsewhere calls a “machine to catch ghosts.” Most of these ghosts are other poets throughout time, “patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem.” But one of these captured specters, it begins to dawn on the reader, is none other than you yourself—you and the voice now in your head, dictating a poem like “Alba”:
    If your hand had been meaningless
Not a single blade of grass
Would spring from the earth’s surface.
Easy to write, to kiss—
No, I said, read your paper.
Be there
Like the earth
When shadow covers the wet grass.
    After Lorca was Spicer’s first realization of the serial poem, a form he shared with Duncan. Dismissing his earlier, stand-alone writings as “one night stands,” Spicer wrote nearly all his mature poems in series. Though he did continue to write and submit single poems for publication until his death, his serial poems were often published, independently, as small books. The Holy Grail (1962), which includes seven “books” with seven untitled poems each, is the most balanced and structurally harmonious of these works, even as the clash of its voices, images, and beats creates, as Spicer himself acknowledged, an “uncomfortable music.” The sprawling lack of closure inspired by the serial poem also invites us to read my vocabulary itself as a serial “book of Jack.” For though it is too much to say that there is unity in its diversity, there is, beyond the repeated images and tropes that reward tracking throughout his career (lemons, rope), an essential condition to this work—even if that condition is nothing more than “a simple hole running from one thing to another.”
    Any attempt to read that hole holistically, however, runs against the heterogeneity of its materials—not just poems but prose fragments, commentaries, a “textbook,” and personal letters Spicer presented at readings that blurred public and private. And the poems themselves are patched together from all manner of language: ordinary speech, myth, epistle, foreign language, folk song, list, in-joke, street sign, homily, personal address, journal. Spicer wanted to make poetry a “collage of the real,” an ambition that linked him to West Coast visual artists