Nomad Codes

like Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and George Herms, bohemian bricoleurs who created their assemblages from junk, pop culture, and oracular fragments. Rather than practicing some version of the cut-up, Spicer achieves a sense of poetic collage through the intense and sometimes claustrophobic material collisions of his language. Blaser noted that while Duncan sits comfortably within an almost regal sense of language as support, Spicer’s language is piled up in front of him, like a “cubist painting where you can’t get through the fucking frame.” Spicer’s copious use of puns and syntactic ambiguity returns us to this consternating surface, where slips of the tongue turn poems into Möbius strips of meaning, figure-ground fluctuations over an essential groundlessness. This self-deconstructing passage through sound and sign marks Spicer as a prophetic postmodern and a crucial influence on the Language poets.
    At the same time, Spicer never abandoned himself to the linguistic turn that marks postmodernity. On this, the poet is unambiguous: the Outside uses language but is not identified with it. In his 1960 masterpiece, The Heads of the Town up to the Aether , Spicer proclaims,“From the top to bottom there is a universe. Extended past what the words mean and below, God damn it, what the words are.” Like Wallace Stevens, whose metaphysical telegrams he sometimes echoes, Spicer remains a poet of the real, or at least of the mantic, tricksy zone where poetry touches the real. By staying open to this zone in all its undecidability, Spicer subjected himself to the Outside—an almost penitent supplication that helps explain his sometimes startling “God language.” There is, in the poet, a Puritan or even Calvinist strain of deeply American dread:
    Mechanicly we move
In God’s Universe, Unable to do
Without the grace or hatred of Him.
    As the ambiguity of this last line shows—is “of Him” possessive?—Spicer’s Christianity is no less riddled than his other language games; his Logos is always condensing into what he called the Lowghost. For all the problems with the term gnostic , it remains the best characterization of Spicer’s spirituality. He named The Heads of the Town after a lost Gnostic text, and the title perfectly suits this tripartite book’s etheric fluctuations, its battles between divine and human love, and between the warring poetic agendas of personal gain and impersonal transmission—what Spicer elsewhere distinguished as the difference between “pawnshops and postoffices.” The book’s third section, “A Textbook of Poetry,” is a prose work of immense noetic power, an oblique catechism that bears uncanny fruit under sustained meditation. Spicer considered it one of his greatest feats of dictation.
    That said, “No / Gnostrum will cure the ills that are on the face of it.” And Spicer saw a vast conspiracy of ills, within poetry and within the world. By 1962’s “Golem,” he was offering a harrowing view of the economic, political, and linguistic “fix” we’re in—a claustrophobic scam, not unlike Burroughs’s concept of Control, that insures that transcendence in Spicer is always wily and furtive. In a marvelous letter to James Alexander, a young Hoosier poet who became one of Spicer’s most powerful romantic muses, Spicer speaks of the “random places” where “they” will deliver their missives: “A box of shredded wheat, a drunken comment, a big piece of paper, a shadow meaningless except as a threat or a communication, a throat.” This is not Ginsberg spotting Whitman in a California supermarket. This is Oedipa Maas wandering San Francisco in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 , looking for muted post horns.
    There is an even stranger synchronicity lurking in Spicer’s California mysterium. In 1948, back in Berkeley, he and Duncan roomed briefly with a peculiar young man named Philip K. Dick, who once supplied an LP-recording device for their parlor games of poetic performance. As Killian and Lewis Ellingham point out in their definitive Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God , the books of Dick and of Spicer later became mirror images of each other, in theme as well as in imagery—grasshoppers, Martians, radios, salesmen, cities. Like Dick, Spicer was an impoverished and alienated artist for whom writing was, as Darko Suvin famously described the genre of science fiction, a motor of “cognitive estrangement.” Both are cult artists who wrote, it can seem,