“A whore’s answer to a whore”: The Prostitution of Jack Spicer

According to Gioia, Spicer's poetry is praised as "accessible," but, rest assured, he "is not by any standard a major poet" (126).2 It is precisely this trope-promiscuity remunerated, the "easy" poet making "easy" money, writing and risk, publication and compromise-that Jack Spicer repeatedly employs and investigates when he, a poet with a varying but regular affiliation with academia and an instrumental role in "workshop" sessions between writers, dwells upon the ethics of poetry. According to the version of this story offered by his biographers, Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Spicer gave the hesitant reply: "Well, I guess Allen can make it that way, but I've never been able to" (quoted in Ellingham and Killian 348). [...]courtesy seems at odds with Spicer's distrust of Ginsberg's combination of overt homosexuality and fame, a distrust which governs Spicer's parody in his poem "The Fix": I have seen the best poets and baseball players of our generation caught in the complete and contempt whoredom of capitalist society ("The Fix," quoted in Ellingham and Killian 243) Drawn together in a vortex of betrayal of principles, the "fix" of the World Series, the "sell out" of poets, and the example of Ginsberg's controversial "Howl" are symptoms of a "complete and contemptible / whoredom," the imminence of which haunts Spicer throughout his writing career. [...]for Purgatory or Heaven one must give oneself up to the first guide-to the Beloved, to Beatrice. (quoted in Ellingham and Killian 80) One could perhaps describe the fundamental difference between Duncan's notion of the "serial poem" and Spicer's as that between giving oneself up to a "Beloved" (contingent to agape) and "going to bed with [one's] own tears" (eros collapsing).3 Four years after this letter was written, in Spicer's most polyphonic and perhaps schizophrenic book of serial poetry, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, he would effectively provide a direct response to Duncan by calling into question specifically the myth of Beatrice and, more generally, the compulsion to be guided in a poem called "Sheep Trails Are Fateful to Strangers": Dante would have blamed Beatrice If she turned up alive in a local bordello Or Newton gravity If apples fell upward What I mean is words Turn mysteriously against those who use them Hello says the apple Both of us were object.