A Book of Music

by Jack Spicer

Fourteen Jack Spicer poems connected with the notion of music. The chapbook was designed and printed by Ron and Graham Macintosh in San Francisco from a typescript made available by Peter Howard.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.[1] Spicer's poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement.

Reviews

[mwpm]

Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe

"Indefiniteness is an element of the true music."
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier crawling its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. No fish
No other seagull, no ocean - the true
Music.



A Valentine

Useless Valentines
Are better 
Than all others.
Like something implicit
In a poem.
Take all your Valentines
And I'll take mine.
What is left is better
Than any image.



Cantata

Ridiculous
How the space between three violins
Can threaten all of our poetry.
We bunch together like Cub
Scouts at a picnic. There is a high scream.
Rain threatens. That moment of terror.
Strange how all our beliefs
Disappear.



Orfeo

Sharp as an arrow Orpheus
Points his music downward.
Hell is there
At the bottom of the seacliff.
Heal
Nothing by this music.
Eurydice
Is a frigate bird or a rock or some seaweed.
Hail nothing
The internal
Is a slippering wetness out at the horizon.
Hell is this:
The lack of anything but the eternal to look at
The expansiveness of salt
The lack of any bed but one's
Music to sleep in.



Song Of A Prisoner

Nothing in my body escapes me.
The sound of an eagle diving
Upon some black bird
Or the sorrow of an owl.
Nothing in my body escapes me.
Each branch is closed
I 
Echo each song from its throat
Bellow each sound.



Jungle Warfare

The town wasn't much
A few mud-huts and a church steeple.
There were the same leaves
And the same grass
And the same birds deep in the edge of the thicket.
We waited around for someone to come out and surrender
But they rand their church bells
And we
We were not afraid of death or any manner of dying
But the same muddy bullets, the same horrible
Love.



Good Friday: For Lack Of An Orchestra

I saw a headless she-mule
Running through the rain
She had the hide of a chessboard
And withers that were lank and dark
"Tell me," I asked
"Where
Is Babylon?"
"No," she bellowed
"Babylon is a few baked bricks
With some symbols on them.
You could not hear them. I am running
To the end of the world."
She ran
Like a green and purple parrot, screaming
Through the sand.



Mummer

The word is imitative
From the sound mum or mom
Used by nurses to frighten or amuse children
At the same time pretending
To cover their faces.
Understand is not enough
The old seagull died. There is a whole army of seagulls
Waiting in the wings
A whole army of seagulls.



The Cardplayers

The moon is tied to a few strings
They hold in their hands. The cardplayers
Sit there stiff, hieratic
Moving their hands only for the sake of
Playing the cards.
No trick of metaphor
Each finger is a real finger
Each card real pasteboard, each liberty
Unaware of attachment.
The moon is tied to a few strings.
 Those cardplayers
Stiff, utterly
Unmoving.



Ghost Song

The in
 ability to love
The inability
 to love
In love
 (like all the small animals went up the hill into the
 underbrush to escape from the goat and the bad tiger)
The inability
Inability
 (tell me why no white flame comes up from the earth
 when lightning strikes the twigs and the dry branches)
In love. In love. In love. The
In-
 ability
 (as if there were nothing left on the mountains but
 what nobody wanted to escape from)



Army Beach With Trumpets

Rather than our bodies the sand
Proclaims that we are on the last edge
Of something. Two boys
Who cannot catch footballs horseplay
On the wet edge.
Or if the sight of the thing ended
Did not break upon us like a wave
From every warm ocean.
We call it sport
To play on the edge, to drop
Like a heartless football
At the edge.



Duet For A Chair And A Table

The sound of words as they fall away from our mouths
Nothing 
Is less important
And yet that chair
 this table
 named
Assume identities
 take their places
Almost as a king of music.
Words make things name 
 themselves
Makes the table grumble
 I
In the symphony of God am a table
Makes the chair sing
A little song about the people that will never be sitting on it
And we
Who in the same music
Are almost as easily shifted as furniture
We 
Can learn our names from our mouths
Name our names
In the middle of the same music.



Conspiracy

A violin which is following me

In how many distant cities are they listening
To its slack-jawed music? This
Slack-jawed music?
Each of ten thousand people playing it.

It follows me like someone that hates me.

Oh, my heart would sooner die
Than leave its slack-jawed music. They
In those other cities
Whose hearts would sooner die.

It follows me like someone that hates me.

Or is it really a tree growing jest behind my throat
That if I turned quickly enough I could see
Rooted, immutable, neighboring
Music.



A Book Of Music

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

[Nathaniel Klaung]

Spicer exemplifies his versatility in this work. It is less experimental than After Lorca and Heads Up to the Town of Aether--- but it is just as emotionally moving and provocative.

[Sam]

“Sharp as an arrow Orpheus
Points his music downward.
Hell is there
At the bottom of the seacliff.
Heal
Nothing by this music.
Eurydice
Is a frigate bird or a rock or some seaweed.
Hail nothing
The infernal
Is a slippering wetness out at the horizon.
Hell is this:
The lack of anything but the eternal to look at
The expansiveness of salt
The lack of any bed but one’s
Music to sleep in.”
—
“The moon is tied to a few strings
They hold in their hands. The cardplayers
Sit there stiff, hieratic
Moving their hands only for the sake of
Playing the cards.
No trick of metaphor
Each finger is a real finger
Each card real pasteboard, each liberty
Unaware of attachment.
The moon is tied to a few strings.
Those cardplayers
Stiff, utterly
Unmoving”
—
“Rather than our bodies the sand
Proclaims that we are on the last edge
Of something. Two boys
Who cannot catch footballs horseplay
On the wet edge.
Or if the sight of the thing ended
Did not break upon us like a wave
From every warm ocean.
We call it sport
To play on the edge, to drop
Like a heartless football
At the edge.”
—
“The sound of words as they fall away from our mouths
Nothing
Is less important
And yet that chair
this table
named
Assume identities
take their places
Almost as a kind of music.
Words make things name
themselves
Makes the table grumble
I
In the symphony of God am a table
Makes the chair sing
A little song about the people that will never be sitting on it
And we
Who in the same music
Are almost as easily shifted as furniture
We
Can learn our names from our mouths
Name our names
In the middle of the same music.”
—
“Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.”

[Victor H]

não sei bem o por quê, mas tem uma coisa em ler (e traduzir) o Jack Spicer que te deixa viciado, fissurado. acho que esse é o terceiro livreto que leio simultaneamente no mesmo momento em que traduzo seus poemas (como exercício, leitura atenta e esperança de conseguir algum dia que role uma coletânea de poemas dele no Brasil) e é incrível como me prendo pelo fluxo que ele cria. acho que isso tem a ver com o conceito que ele começou a ter durante o After Lorca, do qual já comentei no último livro dele, que é o do livro não como um apanhado de poemas, mas como um projeto, com contexto e tudo mais. enfim, sigo eu nessa minha jornada de tentar traduzir esse carinha ai :)

[L██D███Y███S███]

"Hell is this. The lack of anything but the eternal to look at"

Pretty cool collection, with some highlights.

There might be more beneath the surface if I really dive into these poems, but a couple of reads and I didn't feel a desire to for most of them, based on the surface.

Really enjoyed:
- Orfeo
- Good Friday: For Lack of an Orchestra

[Luke]

Eh, trying to review poetry on here always makes me feel illiterate — it was just very good, that’s all