Dear Robin, Enclosed you find the first of the publi­ca­tions of White Rabbit Press. The second will be much hand­so­mer. You are right that I don’t now need your cri­ti­cisms of indi­vi­dual poems. But I still want them. It’s pro­ba­bly from old habit – but it’s an awful­ly old habit. Halfway through After Lorca I dis­co­ve­red that I was wri­ting a book ins­tead of a series of poems and indi­vi­dual cri­ti­cism by anyone sud­den­ly became less impor­tant. This is true of my Admonitions which I will send you when com­plete. (I have eight of them alrea­dy and there will pro­ba­bly…

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…

Yeah, except when he deci­ded that he was a solid recei­ver , then he star­ted wri­ting those damn pro­phe­tic books which I have gone through two, three times, and I can’t make any poe­try out of them what­soe­ver. I mean, I can make poe­try eve­ry once in a while, see it hap­pe­ning. But when Blake real­ly was sure that the angels were spea­king to him, they stop­ped spea­king. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University Press 1998 éd. Peter Gizzi…

As far as the busi­ness of rea­ding – edu­ca­tion – I think that unfor­tu­na­te­ly the uni­ver­si­ties hin­der it rather than help it usual­ly because they make rea­ding and edu­ca­tion a chore rather than some­thing that you enjoy doing. But cer­tain­ly I think that any poet who is going to write decent poe­try in this modern age where we don’t have the bal­lad tra­di­tion any­more, where you could get by with prac­ti­cal­ly no fur­ni­ture, and let’s squat on the floor, ma’am, and that sort of thing – I do think that just the ave­rage young poet ought to read as many…

I mean, things that you ought to be sus­pi­cious of are things that you can use for your own per­so­nal inter­ests rather than any­thing else. I wouldn’t wor­ry about if some­thing appears. It’s like an epi­pha­ny. Well then, use the epi­pha­ny, but just rea­lize that there could be about twen­­ty-seven other epi­pha­nies which would be just as good, if they’d hap­pe­ned . Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University Press 1998 éd. Peter Gizzi…

The point is that words are not some­thing which in them­selves are any­thing but Lowghosts, ins­tead of the Logos . Words are things which just hap­pen to be in your head ins­tead of someone else’s head , just like memo­ries are, various other pieces of fur­ni­ture in this room that this Martian has to put the clues in. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University Press 1998 éd. Peter Gizzi…

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. Jack…

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…

You see, the Word, the Logos is – and this is impos­sible to read out loud, just like the whole per­so­ni­fi­ca­tion thing is – the word is half the time with capi­tal W, upper­case, and half the time with the lower­case w, you see. And so Lowghost then becomes Word. In other words, the words which are being used are sim­ply a reflec­tion of the Word, with the capi­tal . And the pun doesn’t get as fun­ny when you have him pin­ned to the cross, and the busi­ness of the shadow—which was writ­ten, inci­den­tal­ly, on Good Friday, for some obvious…

JS : You mean can we take cre­dit for our poems  ? Well, is a radio set a crea­tor of the radio pro­gram ? Q : No. Well, that’s what I mean. JS : Yeah. But at the same time you don’t get the radio pro­gram if the radio set has sta­tic in it . Q : Oh no, no. But the poet is an agent then, or… JS : Well yeah, like a mother is, yeah. But you know, it’s pret­ty hard for a father to have a baby. I mean, good agents are kind of hard to find these days. I don’t real­ly see…

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…

Well, what I’m trying to say is if you have an idea that you want to deve­lop, don’t write a poem about it because it’s almost bound to be a bad poem. You can have an idea that you want to deve­lop, and the poem deve­lops an idea which is a lit­tle bit dif­ferent. Say, like Pope’s “Essay on Man” which was sup­po­sed to please Bolingbroke enor­mous­ly and didn’t, and didn’t please Pope. I’m using just about the so-cal­­led most dis­ci­pli­ned poet there. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University…

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. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected…

Q : Getting back to this idea of the crea­tive insights being iso­la­ted from the medium. Are you saying that all poe­try has to be writ­ten this way, or that some poe­try is writ­ten this way, or what ? JS : Well, I cer­tain­ly don’t know. If you mean it as a recipe for baking a cake, obvious­ly no. If you mean belie­ving in all of this, obvious­ly no. But it’s my firm convic­tion that all poe­try, good poe­try, is writ­ten this way, in spite of the poet . Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack…

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. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University Press 1998 éd. Peter Gizzi…

JS : I’m inter­es­ted in being a conveyor of mes­sages, whe­ther they’re the truth or not . There’s no rea­son to sup­pose that a mes­sage neces­sa­ri­ly because it’s conveyed from an out­side source to a poet is true . As far as not being inter­es­ted in lan­guage, it’s pro­ba­bly because I’m a pro­fes­sio­nal lin­guist. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University Press 1998 éd. Peter Gizzi…

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. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University Press 1998 éd. Peter Gizzi…

You have to not real­ly want not what you don’t want to say. Jack Spicer Vancouver lec­tures The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer Wesleyan University Press 1998 éd. Peter Gizzi…