Jack Spicer

I don’t think that anyone who’s a practicing poet, even a practicing bad poet, who’s done it for a long enough time, would disagree with the fact that there is something from the Outside. I mean, you get this in Longinus for christ’s sake, all of these pretty square people going all the way back. Saint Thomas Aquinas says it, and you can’t have anyone who’s farther away from poetry than him. But I do think that an awful lot of poets feel at the back of their minds that they would really rather express themselves. « This poem is me. I am this poem, » you know, and so forth.

Now, Creeley talks about poems following the dictation of language. It seems to me that’s nonsense. Language is part of the furniture in the room. Language isn’t anything of itself. It’s something which is in the mind of the host that the parasite (the poem) is invading.

But on the other hand, given a source of energy which you can direct, you can direct yourself out of the picture. Then given the cooperation between the host poet and the visitor—the thing from Outside—the more things you have in the room the better if you can handle them in such a way that you don’t impose your will on what is coming through.

But at the same time, you are stuck with language, and you arc stuck with words, and you are stuck with the things that you know. It’s a very nice thing, and a very difficult thing. The more you know, the more languages you know, the more building blocks the Martians have to play with. It’s harder, too, because an uneducated person often can write a better poem than an educated person, simply because there are only so many building blocks, so many ways of arranging them, and after that, you’re through. I mean, the thing behind you is through. And it can make for simplicity, as in good ballads, American and English. In the long run, it can make for really just good poetry. And sometimes for great poetry, an infinitely small vocabulary is what you want. Perhaps that would be the ideal, except for the fact that it’s pretty hard to write a poem that way.

And this is the kind of thing that you have to avoid. There are a great many things you can’t avoid. It’s impossible for the source of energy to come to you in Martian or North Korean or Tamil or any language you don’t know. It’s impossible for the source of energy to use images you don’t have, or at least don’t have something of. It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message. This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.

And here the analogy of the medium comes in, which Yeats started out, and which Cocteau in his Orphée, both the play and the picture, used a car radio for, but which is essentially the same thing. That essentially you are something which is being transmitted into, and the more that you clear your mind away from yourself, and the more also that you do some censoring – because there will be all sorts of things coming from your mind, from the depths of your mind, from things that you want, which will foul up the poem.

You have to not really want not what you don’t want to say.

That’s something which is in all English department lectures now, but it was the first thing since Blake on the business of taking poetry as coming from the outside rather than from the inside. In other words, instead of the poet being a beautiful machine which manufactured the current for itself, did everything for itself – almost a perpetual motion machine of emotion until the poet’s heart broke or it was burned on the beach like Shelley’s – instead there was something from the Outside coming in.