A review by ombudsman
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer by Jack Spicer
3.0
I think you have to be a little in love with Jack to get through this collection. A singular voice.
Favourite sections: Letters to James Alexander, The Holy Grail, Map Poems, Language
For Steve Jonas who is in Jail for Defrauding a Book Club (c. 1958)
And you alone in Federal prison saying
That the whole State is based on larceny
Christ who didn’t know that, Steve?
The word steals from the word, the sound from
the sound. Even
The very year of your life steals from the last one. So
Do you have to get put in jail for it? Finding
Yourself a martyr for a cause that you and your
jury and your heartbeat all support. All
This crap about being a human. To tell the
truth about our State.
So—
You would say—
It is better than going to Europe.
Intermission I (c. 1965)
“The movement of the earth brings harmes and fears.
Men wonder what it is and what it meant.”
Donne
In the next line
Contrasts this with “the celestial movement of the spheres.”
Rhyme soothes. And in a book I read in college fifteen years
ago it said that this was an attack on the Copernican theory
and a spidery hand had penciled in the margin
“Earthquake.”
Where is the poet? A-keeping the sheep
A-keeping the celestial movement of the spheres in a long,
boring procession
A-center of gravity
A-(while the earthquakes of happiness go on inside and outside
his body and the stars in their courses stop to notice)
Sleep.
Favourite sections: Letters to James Alexander, The Holy Grail, Map Poems, Language
For Steve Jonas who is in Jail for Defrauding a Book Club (c. 1958)
And you alone in Federal prison saying
That the whole State is based on larceny
Christ who didn’t know that, Steve?
The word steals from the word, the sound from
the sound. Even
The very year of your life steals from the last one. So
Do you have to get put in jail for it? Finding
Yourself a martyr for a cause that you and your
jury and your heartbeat all support. All
This crap about being a human. To tell the
truth about our State.
So—
You would say—
It is better than going to Europe.
Intermission I (c. 1965)
“The movement of the earth brings harmes and fears.
Men wonder what it is and what it meant.”
Donne
In the next line
Contrasts this with “the celestial movement of the spheres.”
Rhyme soothes. And in a book I read in college fifteen years
ago it said that this was an attack on the Copernican theory
and a spidery hand had penciled in the margin
“Earthquake.”
Where is the poet? A-keeping the sheep
A-keeping the celestial movement of the spheres in a long,
boring procession
A-center of gravity
A-(while the earthquakes of happiness go on inside and outside
his body and the stars in their courses stop to notice)
Sleep.