Larry Kearney met Jack Spicer in 1964 at Gino and Carlo’s on Green Street, North Beach, San Francisco where Spicer held court among the other poets – Fagin, Kyger, Allen, Duncan, Creeley, McClure, Duerden, Welch, Hirschman, Brautigan, Blaser and others. In Testamentality, Transcryption: An Emotional Memoir of Jack Spicer, Kearney writes, “So Jack was thirty-nine and I was twenty-one and we were both alcoholic and both deeply gnostic in the sense that we’d been in touch with, felt, the purely random ecstasies that were realer than anything else, ever, but also that the real was out there and couldn’t care less though sometimes it would come close enough for jazz – as used to get said – as if it meant something.”
[Left: Spicer] They became close friends – but Spicer died the next year at the age of 40, his liver ruined. “The last time I saw Jack was the only time we touched,” Kearney recalls. Spicer was dying in his hospital bed; Kearney took Spicer’s hand in his. The touching is mentioned here because “I loved the man, and took him seriously, and didn’t want to hurt him, but physical love was so far from a possibility that it was an embarrassment to both of us.” But how Spicer touched Kearney’s emotional life in poetry is the whole show here. “I wouldn’t say that what happened between Jack and me was learning,” he says. “It was more a matter of a simple confirmation that there was someone out there whose relationship to the poem was something I could honor if not always quite understand – then – and whose occasional bravery was out of pretty much of the same cloth as my own – wanted, untrusted, and an endless source of trouble.”
When Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian brought out Spicer’s collected poetry via Wesleyan University Press in 2008, several essays and reviews appeared that placed Spicer in the context of his moment and the various poetries that branched out from or were influenced by his work. Writing in The Nation, Barry Schwabsky said, “What Spicer recognized as poetry was always fierce and contentious and, despite the devices that feign otherwise, written to no one and for no one. Through parody and pastiche, he exploded every form he touched.” Mark Terrill, in Jacket, described Spicer’s “imperative voice laced with contrariness that borders on cynicism, but not without its trenchant humor.” But Kearney wants to illuminate the impulse more than its effects, the inner disturbance and despair. Testamentality, Transcryption embodies his exertion to do so. Some samples:
“The all-pervasive understanding that we are not up to understanding, that the mind won’t do it, coupled to a gnostic passion for gnosis – its approximations, at least, in the babble of the halfway hallway head-lit.”
“It had to do with the universe as is, and how he felt it as initially flawed by the will of a self-deluded, self-imagined god … the essential flaw of its creation … a basement of snaky ladders to dead end platforms of simple, hobby-shop magic kits and grandiose imitations of anthropomorphic power.”
“And words don’t do the job except to the degree that they call attention to their own peripheries, their junkshop places of the mind and spirit, their clacking as they roll down the tracks …”
“The irrevocable sense that the mind is not up to the real …”
Dr. Williams had spoken about “the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses” – and perhaps no poet heard those words as acutely as Spicer while still producing utterly unique work. What WCW said is daunting and demanding — and Kearney’s point about Spicer in this regard is profoundly poignant and fundamental: “He wanted more is what it was, and the poem said, I want more than I am, and I knew that … all of this was a secret I thought, but there it was.” It’s a secret for the child who can’t share it, can’t articulate it, but learns early that the let-down is aboriginal. Kearney sensed the kid in Jack: “The kid’s sense of time passing and the end drawing closer, mainly. The shadows getting longer and the grass dimmer. The sense of some wrong-doing and the inexorable embarrassment for his own family, his father in particular. The sequencing of reality and the inevitability of the understandings one would rather not have.”
Declarative, recursive, and full of idiosyncrasies (including typos), Kearney’s memoir shook me. Spicer liked to say “the fix is in” – he knew that the culture is misaligned with our desires and thus stacked against real poetry. But every poet, if truthful to themselves, asks if they are “up to the real.” The commonality of our devices, styles and gestures makes it too easy to get by.
Larry Kearney [left] is now 77-years old – but he writes about his brief time at Spicer’s table to tell us that the battle is still raging, and that poetry is “a flawed entrance to a fugitive meaning” – and absolutely essential. Childhood terror, baseball, drinking, popular song lyrics, the bar – they’re all evoked as aura around the central view: Spicer was a poet “who understood poetry as an unclear responsibility.” And those who think they know what they’re doing are faking it.
[Published by Spuyten Duyvil on February 11, 2020, 176 pages, $16.00 paperback]
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Mary Wollstonecraft never completed her novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Women, but it was published in 1798, a year after her death. Maria discovers her pregnancy after being raped by her “master” who then “gave me a medicine in a phial, which he desired me to take, telling me, without any circumlocution, for what purpose it was designed.” After suffering humiliation and self-hatred, “I hurried back to my hole, and, rage giving place to despair, sought for the potion that was procure abortion, and swallowed it, with a wish that bit might destroy me, at the same time that it stopped the sensations of newborn life, which I felt with indescribable emotion.”
The excerpt from Maria is one of the earliest texts in Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, an anthology of prose and poetry edited by Annie Finch. “I had an abortion in 1999,” she writes in her introduction. “Searching for literature to help me absorb my experience, I realized that I had rarely read anything about abortion … A physical, psychological, moral, spiritual, political, and cultural reality that raises questions about life and death, abortion should be one of the great themes of literature … I discovered that major writers had indeed written about the subject, but that much of the literature was hard to find, unpublished, or buried within larger literary works.” Ultimately, Finch selected 140 pieces for Choice Words: Writers On Abortion, by global writers from the 16th century to the 21st – “lyric and narrative poems, plays, short stories, tweets, memoir, flash fiction, rituals, journaling, courtroom testimony, and excerpts from novels.”
Finch organizes the works into five sections. “Mind” deals with the weight of decision-making.” “Heart” focuses on emotional dimensions – Sharon Olds: “We decided to have the abortion, became / killers together” in her poem “The End.”
“Body” treats the physical aspect of the experience – Annie Ernaux: “The two of us are back in my room. I am sitting on the bed with the fetus between my legs. Neither of us knows what to do” from “From Happening.”
“Heart” focuses on the emotional aspect of the experience – “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. / I have contracted. I have eased / My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck” — from “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks.
“Will” looks into “the personal and political power inherent in our ability to give life, and the courage and determination that the exercise of choice can require even where it is legal and culturally acceptable” – “Through winter-dim streets, I walked to the subway from the Doctor’s office, knowing I could not have a baby and knowing it with a certainty that galvanized me far beyond anything I knew to do” — from Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.
And finally, “Spirit,” locating abortion within the context of given or personal religious contexts, as in Hanna Neuschwander’s “River” – “The worst of it this: If you show this map to anyone, to try to give shape to the contours of the greatest, most difficult act of love you have ever committed, you will be called a murderer.”
[Published by Haymarket Books on April 7, 2020, 491 pages, $20.26 hardcover, $16.79 on Haymarket’s website]
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Writing about the artist Vija Celmins in his essay “Penelope” (1997), John Berger said, “Painting can never get the better of appearances. Painting is always behind. But the difference is that, once finished, the image remains fixed. This is why the image has to be full – not of resemblance but of searching.” But in the early 1950s, when Berger signed on as an art critic for The New Statesman, resemblance, not searching, was his mantra. Disparaging London’s “museum critics” who assigned prime values to modernism, Berger critiqued avant-garde art and promoted a group of young British realists called the Kitchen Sink painters.
Joshua Sperling’s biography, A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger, follows Berger’s transformation from an ardent Marxist and polemicist who placed all his chips on the act of seeing, socialist realism and depicting what is in front of us, to a critic, novelist and documentarian who retained his emphasis on seeing, remained committed to the idea that art should keep in touch with political hope, but who profoundly deepened his responses not only to painting but to photography and poetry. “In all poetry,” he said, “words are a presence before they are a means of communication.” That space – between utterance and meaning or recognition – became the lyrical territory of his thought and speculation about art. Yet he never lost his orientation to concretions. “One acts more frankly,” he advised, “by avoiding the excavation of all one’s motives. Frank action is the result of frankly facing the result” – this, from his novel A Painter of Our Time.
Sperling provides context for the art and political movements of Berger’s years such that we now have a full context for the evolution of his ideas and style – and the remarkable variety of his sustained output. Another line from A Painter of Our Time: “We have a horror of the specific because our minds reach out for an ever larger synthesis.” Over five decades, whether hosting television documentaries on art like Ways of Seeing or writing on “Why Look At Animals?”, Berger confronted the specifics while using both his political convictions and his orphic intuitions to spin his syntheses.
The text of Ways of Seeing, published in 1972, is still found on the syllabi of art history students. His sublime essays, collected in books such as The Shape of a Pocket, not only perceive art with precision and wonder but the prose itself inspires creativity among poets and novelists. There is no question that Berger is one of the most influential arts and culture intellectuals of the past 50 years. Furthermore, he was engaged with themes of precarity, exile, emigration and displacement during those decades – and his mind stayed lively and absorbent as his temperament retained its generosity. As Susan Sontag put it, “[Berger] seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.” Sperling’s biography, aside from elucidating the life, provoked my own question: Was John Berger one of a kind?
[New paperback edition published by Verso Books on April 14, 2020, 304 pages, $19.95]