Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Daniel Katz on Jack Spicer ("Psychoanalysis: An Elegy")
0 Playsin 3 days
How is a poem like a session of psychoanalysis? The scholar Daniel Katz joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem that poses that question, Jack Spicer's "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy."
Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and is the author of several books and articles on modernism, modern and contemporary poetry, and psychoanalysis. His work on Spicer includes a monograph, The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh UP, 2013), and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan UP, 2021), for which he served as editor. He is currently finishing a book called "The Big Lie of the Personal: Poetry, Politics, and the Lyric Subject."
In our conversation, we refer to a few other Spicer volumes: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, and finally Spicer's book After Lorca.
If you're enjoying the podcast, please share it with your friends and networks. Please also subscribe and leave us a rating and review. More soon!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hello everyone and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javadizadeh, and I am very happy today to have ah Daniel Katz on the podcast ah to talk about a poet um whom he knows inside and out, ah the poet Jack Spicer, and Spicer's poem, Psychoanalysis and Elegy.
00:00:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I won't say anything at all really about Spicer or the poem here at the outset. I'll let Dan do that um work for us. in just a moment, but let me tell you first about our guest.
00:00:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
um i'm I'm also, I should say, under strict instructions here not to make a fuss in my intro. So this is a bare bones kind of intro. um Daniel Katz is a professor of English and comparative literary studies at the University of Warwick.
00:00:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
um He has written books and articles on modernism, modern and contemporary poetry, and psychoanalysis. um He's worked um ah ah quite a bit on Spicer himself. His work on Spicer includes a monograph called The Poetry of Jack Spicer, which was, I believe, the first and maybe still the only, I'm not sure, a monograph devoted exclusively to the work of Jack Spicer.
00:01:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
That book came out from Edinburgh University Press in 2013. ah More recently, Dan was editor of a volume called Be Brave to Things, the uncollected poetry and plays of Jack Spicer, which Wesleyan University Press published in 2021.
The Significance of Jack Spicer's Letters
00:01:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Dan has also actually, before we um ah started recording, reminded me that this year, 2025, Spicer's centenary. spicer's centenary A hundred years since Spicer was born. And perhaps for that reason, or on that occasion, and this year we'll see the publication of an um important new volume in Spicer's of his um collected letters, which will also come out from Wesleyan.
00:02:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
university press. And i as i as I suspect we'll get into, letters and correspondence are not an incidental interest of Spicer's, but but absolutely crucial to him as a poet. And so that's going to be a really important book, I think, and um one I'm looking forward to to reading.
00:02:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Dan's most recent piece on on Spicer is on his play Troilus and is entitled Emulus Fidelity Shakespeare Jack Spicer and Troilus and that appeared um or ah will appear I should say in new developments in Shakespeare and psychoanalysis a volume edited by um Catherine Bates and James Stone.
00:02:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Daniel Katz is currently finishing a book ah with a Spicerian title called The Big Lie of the Personal, Poetry, Politics, and the Lyrics Subject, which looks at poets like Yates, Neruda, Aragon, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, Michael Palmer, and Denise Riley.
00:03:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
um David Koffman was ah as a poet that I've already learned um much about from Dan directly. i um I had the pleasure of meeting Dan a few weeks ago.
Daniel Katz and Jack Spicer: A Scholarly Journey
00:03:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Now that feels ah longer than that, but I think it must only have been a few weeks ago um at Cambridge University at a symposium, wonderful symposium on psychoanalysis, a symposium called the Aesthetics of the Clinic that had been organized by Jess Cotton and Christian Gelder.
00:03:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And, ah you know, I listened admiringly Dan's talk and and had a ah a lovely opportunity to talk with him afterwards. And part of what I so admire in Dan's work is the way that he...
00:03:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
um does the important labor of bringing to light under-read poets um and um helps readers see how those poets um address concerns and interests that they might already have had, but also helps readers see what might make the poets strange and how our field of vision might do well to expand. um that That was true of of Dan's work.
00:04:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
On Kaufman, Spicer, is um in ways that I'm sure Dan will tell us about in ah in a minute, you know used to be sort of an obscure poet and has become an increasingly well-known one.
00:04:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Don't worry, listeners, if you don't know much about Spicer yet, we will we will help you out there. um but but um But I can see a kind of common thread in Dan's work. And so for for those reasons and so many others, I'm i'm really pleased to have Dan Katz on the podcast today. Dan, how are you doing?
00:04:52
Daniel
I'm doing really well, Cameron, and thank you for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
00:04:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, likewise, ah maybe we could just begin with my inviting you to tell us how you first became a reader of Jack Spicer, um when that happened for you, and what drew you to him um at the beginning.
00:05:12
Daniel
Yeah, it's a hard question to answer. He'd sort of been a little bit on my radar for a long time. am. I would see bits of poems here and I'd see poems here and there.
00:05:23
Daniel
I'd see him referred to and in interviews with with writers I was interested in. It's kind of on my radar and I guess I don't want to go into too much detail, but really um when I finished my PhD, which is on on Samuel Beckett, um I remember and I was like feeling like there some mental space had opened up.
00:05:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:05:44
Daniel
to do something that wasn't Beckett related. One of the first books I got was the collected books of Spicer, which was before before the more recent Peter Gizzi, Kevin Killian edition. That was what was out there. It was edited by Spicer's friend, Robin Blazer.
00:05:59
Daniel
And, you know, the more I read it, the more I got interested in it. And in a way I saw...
00:06:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm. Hmm.
00:06:06
Daniel
what interested me in Beckett was not, there were similar, not the same, but some of the similar things going on in Spicer. And so basically it really did start there. And then over the years, it took a long time. um Every so often i would I would think that there was something worth exploring in Spicer. And I would always find more than I thought.
00:06:28
Daniel
I think, well, this could be an interesting talk, could be an interesting paper. I'd always find more than I thought. And at a certain point, I thought, there's probably a book here. And that's really how I got got into it.
00:06:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:06:37
Daniel
Yeah.
00:06:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
could Could you say something more? Because it's so intriguing for me to hear, you know beginning with um Beckett, as you say, um that there were similarities, not the same, but similarities, likenesses between what had drawn you to to devote your doctoral research to to Beckett and then continued to kind of fan the flames of your interest in Spicer, what what are some of those qualities?
00:07:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
that Maybe that's just another way of
Jack Spicer: Life and Legacy
00:07:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
asking, i don't know, um ah like in what sense do you find continuities between Spicer's work and say modernism?
00:07:08
Daniel
who
00:07:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
but But maybe maybe that's not what you meant in referring to Beckett.
00:07:18
Daniel
Yeah. No, no. I mean, there's one really clear continuity is that both of them write with a great intensity and what feels like...
00:07:33
Daniel
you know, a personal voice, and yet they present their voice or their work as coming from elsewhere, coming from beyond them, that they represent their relationship to their own speaking as one of almost alienation in a strange way. They observe themselves um producing this verbiage. And so in terms of the question of well, we could say the lyric subject, I mean, I was interested more in Beckett's prose, and I felt that in some ways Beckett had taken certain questions from poetics and worked them out in prose form in his trilogy.
00:08:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah.
00:08:13
Daniel
And so in some ways I felt there was a real similarity here. And, you know, not to get too lost in this, but another real similarity is that they're both highly intellectual writers who work out problems in there in their writing.
00:08:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:08:29
Daniel
um One of the interesting biographical tidbits about Spicer is that his younger brother Holt um was apparently a legend in American speech and debate, that Holt Spicer was a legendary debater and coach of debating.
00:08:49
Daniel
And sometimes Spicer's poems can feel like a brilliant debate, you know, with the poem occupying all the sides, but a brilliant argument between various positions.
00:08:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Ah. Right.
00:09:01
Daniel
um um And Beckett has that quality, too, of throwing something out, questioning it, questioning the questioning. So there was a kind of affinity there, at least for me.
00:09:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
I, I, that's fantastic. I know we'll, I know we'll probably get into the question of Spicer and his feelings and attitudes about biography, which I think we've already you know alluded to in some ways, but um are you are you suggesting, however gently, that, that perhaps young Jack Spicer um was trained in debate in the domestic space of having a, ah ah I don't know, a a brother.
00:09:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
and It's funny too, I was thinking of another, I know, shared interest of yours and mine, which is Ben Lerner, um you know, young debater, famously, um and and thinking of poetics as a kind of terrain in which some of those same kinds of formal concerns or patterns can be played out.
00:09:45
Daniel
Yeah, absolutely.
00:09:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
But that's fascinating.
00:09:58
Daniel
No, absolutely. I mean, they you know, who knows which one trained the other, but they both clearly, you know, they both clearly had this kind of mind.
00:10:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:10:07
Daniel
um So it's, you know, we'll never know. Yeah.
00:10:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's great.
00:10:11
Daniel
Yeah.
00:10:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's great. well Well, could you tell us that just a little bit um as ah um then sort of in following up on that, could you tell us a little bit about ah Spicer's biography, ah born, well, as I've already said, I guess, in 1925? I don't know. Take it from there, Dan.
00:10:29
Daniel
Yeah, no, he was born in 1925, and he is a hardcore Californian, an Angeleno, in fact, um born to intellectual but lower middle class parents.
00:10:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:10:42
Daniel
His mother was a teacher. His father um was... um a hotel manager. So they, I think they sometimes lived in the hotels his father managed.
00:10:54
Daniel
So he did not at all come from a grand family. But I guess what would now be called an aspirational, word I hate, but an aspirational family. um He was, he went to Fairfax High School in Los Angeles.
00:11:08
Daniel
He was um
00:11:13
Daniel
Did not serve, he was found to be medically unfit for military service in World War two He knew people from high school who went and some died. He was of that, he was you know born in 25, he was of that age.
00:11:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right. Hmm.
00:11:27
Daniel
um He went to University of Redlands in Southern California, um which he didn't love. And after two years, he transferred to UC Berkeley.
00:11:39
Daniel
Sometimes he listed as his birth date in 1945, which was when he arrived in Berkeley.
Spicer's Poetic Influences and Themes
00:11:45
Daniel
And he quickly became a core member of what was first called the Berkeley Renaissance with poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blazer.
00:11:53
Daniel
A few years later, it was more the San Francisco Renaissance. which overlapped with the beats when the beats you know the beats who were sort of camped in both New York and San Francisco. There was overlap, but also rivalry in a sense that the the groups were not distinct.
00:12:10
Daniel
But obviously San Francisco was quite a ah vibrant scene when Spicer was there.
00:12:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
00:12:18
Daniel
um And he died very young, the age of 40 in 1965, the cumulative effects of alcoholism.
00:12:31
Daniel
died in San Francisco General Hospital after a few weeks in a coma and was you know buried in the proverbial, well, it turns out he was cremated, but he was buried in the proverbial pauper's grave until Kevin Killian found out where it was. It's in coma south of San Francisco. Kevin Killian tracked this down a few years ago.
00:12:55
Daniel
There's a little plaque where Spicer's ashes are along with those of 20 or 30 other people. I think there's a project to maybe expand that. but um So that's sort of the capsule biography. He was very charismatic, um but unhappy man.
00:13:17
Daniel
um
00:13:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:13:19
Daniel
who often broke with his friends who were nevertheless quite devoted to him, but he could be quite impossible. And certainly his substance abuse issues didn't make that better.
00:13:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:13:34
Daniel
So that's sort of the the short version of of Spicer's life, yeah.
00:13:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
that Yeah, that's very helpful. I wonder if I could make one sort of selfish request to make that short version ever so slightly longer. And and it's something I know um you very memorably begin your monograph by discussing the scene of Spicer's actual death and his final words.
00:13:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Is that something that that you might tell our listeners about? Yeah.
00:14:04
Daniel
um Yeah, certainly. i mean, one thing that also in that very um capsule biography I just gave that I didn't mention, which is important, is that Spicer was gay, out of the closet, and very deliberately involved in working on a kind of working out what it meant to be an out of the closet gay man and also a a gay poet in
00:14:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:14:31
Daniel
in the times he was alive um with Blazer, above all with his friends Blazer and Duncan, who were both also gay and out of the closet. And Spicer was also ah gay activist.
00:14:46
Daniel
um But on his deathbed, um when his friends finally found him in San Francisco General, it took a few days. They had to go to, he wasn't showing up in places. They had to go to all the, they went to all the hospitals. They finally found him.
00:15:01
Daniel
um Robin Blazer recounts, we only have Blazer's word on this, there are no witnesses, but that he was, Spicer could barely talk, and Spicer made a kind of supreme effort and said to Blazer, my vocabulary did this to me, your love will let you go on.
00:15:24
Daniel
And that's definitely a huge part of the legend to the extent that the his collected works edited by, by Peter Gizzy and Kevin Killian has the title, my vocabulary did this to me.
00:15:39
Daniel
And so, um, um,
00:15:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's such a fascinating, mean, it's such a moving story, but also, ah you know, just a fascinating utterance of its own. Both halves of it, actually, i think.
00:15:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
there's You can almost imagine a kind of line break between the two. Yeah.
00:15:56
Daniel
Absolutely.
00:15:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:15:57
Daniel
Absolutely.
00:15:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
00:15:59
Daniel
yeah that's absolutely right.
00:16:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, great. but so So then, just to maybe to, I mean, not, I was going to say to put a bow on, but I don't mean anything quite that pat. I realize these questions are ones that could endlessly be investigated, but maybe just, um this is me asking for a bit more information.
00:16:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah You mentioned that but sort of ah via the geographical kind of account that you gave of Spicer that ah we might think, and
Spicer's Innovative Poetics
00:16:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
rightly so, that his circle of poetic affiliation in some sense overlapped with that of the beats, but in other senses diverged from.
00:16:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah I'm asking this maybe just because I think it's perhaps likelier that our listeners will have some write you know ah accurate or inaccurate, whatever, but some preformed notion of, say, Allen Ginsberg in their mind.
00:16:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah ah Apart from the question of geography, which is which is not incidental, I mean, it's interesting, but apart from that, maybe as a question of poetics, like, ah what what does um Spicer's circle have in common and what what not so much with a kind of beat sensibility?
00:17:16
Daniel
That's a great question and a really difficult one. And in fact, the the question of geography is for Spicer is completely tied to this and that Spicer very much considered himself to be a California poet and a Bay Area.
00:17:29
Daniel
And, you know, as we'll see, Psychoanalysis and Elegy is an amazing Los Angeles poem, among other things.
00:17:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:17:35
Daniel
And and And then later, even more a Bay Area poet. And so certainly he didn't think the Beats were proper Californians. He felt they were interlopers. And and Spicer's sense of localism could be very, um I mean, there was something a little campy about it and deliberately exaggerated about it. But there was also something that was a little bit edgy and even retrograde.
00:17:58
Daniel
You know, he really did believe that this was his space and he belonged there and the Beats didn't. could also say he went, he tried to move to New York at one point and was miserable in New York.
00:18:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:18:12
Daniel
And after a few months moved to Boston where he spent a year and and that was very fruitful for him.
Conclusion and Poem Reading
00:18:19
Daniel
But then he did come back to California. So there, but there was, there was certainly rivalry.
00:18:23
Daniel
um Spicer personally um felt that the Berkeley slash San Francisco Renaissance poets, and he really meant above all him and Duncan and Blazer,
00:18:35
Daniel
um, were more, um, educated, um, than the beats.
00:18:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:18:42
Daniel
Um, Spicer felt Spicer for all his, um you know anti-establishment and anti-academic. I mean, he calls himself an anti-academic poetry.
00:18:54
Daniel
uses academic poetry as a term of of abuse, but but he still was very, he took very seriously the studies he did at Berkeley. He worked with the great medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, you know, and he really felt that that the Berkeley poets had a depth of knowledge that was informing their poems that the beats didn't have.
00:19:17
Daniel
um He felt a lot of personal rivalry with Ginsburg, though they were friendly, but he, and there's no question that he felt that Ginsburg was too interested in being loved and that Ginsburg pandered to his audience.
00:19:31
Daniel
Whereas Spicer, who was contradictory, um he often, he liked to challenge his audience. He liked to he liked to write poems that his friends wouldn't like um and to provoke them.
00:19:45
Daniel
And he felt Ginsburg was sort of too interested in in playing for the laugh line or the applause line.
00:19:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:19:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:19:51
Daniel
um
00:19:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
There's something punk in the spicer that you're describing to me.
00:19:54
Daniel
Absolutely. No, absolutely right.
00:19:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:19:56
Daniel
And Peter Gizzi was one of the first to say that. And but there's also something, you know, he just was. um I mean, there were serious poet poetic differences, but but he did. um um
00:20:12
Daniel
Rivalry and jealousy informed his relations with other poets more than they might have. But but i wouldn't I wouldn't want that to reduce the the real critiques he had.
00:20:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right?
00:20:23
Daniel
But there was an edge that came from this. He was a very close friend of Don Allen, um who edited the New American Poetry Anthology.
00:20:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Sure.
00:20:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:20:33
Daniel
And among all those amazing poets that Alan included, you know, I won't go to list them all, but spicer among those poets, Spicer was actually one of the ones he was closest to personally.
00:20:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:20:44
Daniel
They spent a lot of time together in Berkeley.
00:20:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's interesting.
00:20:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, and so so that that anthology, famously for people who don't know, I mean, I'll say just a bit more about it, it includes the work not only of, um you know, the beats and so on, but like New York School poets, right, and um and has often been used as like as a kind of shorthand for describing ah a split that happens purportedly in American poetics of that period in which you have a kind of establishment wing of of poetry and then very much
00:20:47
Daniel
and
00:21:11
Daniel
Absolutely.
00:21:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
the other wing often associated with California, let's say, but that, that this, that the Donald li Allen anthology gathers together as another tradition.
00:21:18
Daniel
Right. so so
00:21:23
Daniel
Yes, exactly. So Spicer, you know, he didn't like Ashbery. He didn't like O'Hara. um He certainly respected Olsen very much, though he tangled with him.
00:21:34
Daniel
He respected Robert Creeley very much, you know, for poets who are not in the Berkeley circle. Those are two that matter to him.
00:21:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:21:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Tell us, um maybe just by way of um transitioning us now towards the the poem that we're here to discuss, about where this poem fits in, um either chronologically, thematically, or otherwise formally, um into Spicer's work. um it It comes early in My Vocabulary Did This To Me, um the the collected poetry. um is ah Is it that therefore should I understand that it's a poem that comes from the beginning of his career as an adult poet.
00:22:16
Daniel
Yeah, I think so. I mean, Spicer is about 24 when he writes it. He's a graduate student at UC Berkeley. um And I mean, I don't know if we want to go into this now, Cameron, or not. as As you know, at one point, Spicer sort of has a ah philosophical break with the idea of the individual lyric poem as such.
00:22:42
Daniel
But this hasn't happened yet. and of the Spicer develops a concept that he calls a serial poem.
00:22:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:22:50
Daniel
Of the poems that he writes before he moves into that serial mode or what he also calls composition by book, when the book rather than the poem is the unit,
00:22:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:23:00
Daniel
of the of of the Of the poems he writes before that, psychoanalysis and elegy is is you know generally considered one of the three or four best. and and Certainly, um probably his most significant accomplishment,
00:23:16
Daniel
almost certain, one of his two most significant accomplishments before this transformative year in Boston, which is in 1955-1956. So from the early Berkeley period, this is really a major, major poem for him.
00:23:32
Daniel
And it's a curious poem. um in that, i mean, I think it is worth talking biographically a little bit because it's a poem that arises out of his only serious romantic relationship with a woman.
00:23:51
Daniel
um it's a relationship that doesn't work out and one of the um he's still a virgin at this point one of the effects of this relationship not working out is he decides he really has to i mean he certainly was aware of homoerotic feelings but he but he decides he needs to act out on this and live as a gay man that's sort of what the conclusion of this but um
00:24:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:24:20
Daniel
I guess I can you know say that It was during this difficult relationship with this woman that she herself was getting psychotherapy and she encouraged him also to get psychotherapy through the student health center at UC Berkeley.
00:24:35
Daniel
And he agreed. So ah the poem comes out of that early experience of psychotherapy. He went back for more psychotherapy in the year before he died. but But um so he's not simply imagining an analytic session, though he might be, but but he was actually having sessions at this time.
00:24:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:24:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Do we know, um i mean, is it meaningful to make a distinction between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis? I mean, was he in analysis as as one says?
00:25:05
Daniel
It's super meaningful, but I don't have any of the details or facts.
00:25:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:25:10
Daniel
My guess is a practitioner would think what he was having was more like what we would now call psychotherapy, but that he might have thought of it as psychoanalysis or the person might even have called it psychoanalysis.
00:25:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:25:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Sure.
00:25:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:25:26
Daniel
Very hard to know, but extremely pertinent question.
00:25:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:25:30
Daniel
Yeah.
00:25:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, yeah, good. oh we Well, we don't need to try to pin down biographical facts to which we don't have access, but but maybe some of those issues will arise in our reading of the poem sort of... ah naturally and one thing i just wanted to say in response to your very uh helpful comment about sort of marking this poem at a place in spicer's career prior to his his uh commitment as you say to the book as the meaningful unit of poetry rather than or the coherent unit rather than the the lyric poem
00:26:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
which is just to say something that I probably don't say enough in the run of this podcast, but that the format that I've selected for this podcast lends itself very much to the kind of a lyric model of of poetry. that i'm you know This is perhaps a comment more for the academics in the audience than the general listeners, that maybe everyone is interested in this kind of thing.
00:26:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
There has been a lot of um ink spilt and and interesting discussions had in recent years, including by former guests on this podcast, about ah what the term lyric designates, how that concept has evolved over literary history, and how it has evolved.
00:26:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah encroached more and more on the, one would take it broader category of poetry, right? that So that um a scholar like Virginia Jackson, who's been on the podcast before, would say that increasingly what people mean when they say lyric ah today is sort of coterminous with poetry that but um that she she describes a process of what she calls the lyricization as having taken place and over the last two centuries.
00:27:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah all All of that, you know, and perhaps interesting side note, just just to say, i i do have some kind of ongoing awareness of the the sense in which this podcast project is um is itself sort of in line with or participating alongside this project.
00:27:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
this kind of lyricization ah unfolding, historical unfolding. Okay, that's that's a digression that that maybe was not worth getting into. Nevertheless, here we are, um I think, at ah at a good time, Dan, to listen to Spicer read the poem.
00:28:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
And and then we will we will talk about it. Listeners, um you should know that there's a link to the text of the poem available to you in the episode notes. so if you want to look at it as we listen to Spicer read it, you may do so. But here's Jack Spicer.
00:31:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
So that's Jack Spicer ah reading Psychoanalysis and Elegy. um Dan, no doubt this is a poem you've read many times and thought about and written about and so forth. I wonder what you found yourself thinking about. I realize I'm asking you the question that's asked by the poem.
00:31:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
I wonder what you find yourself thinking about as you listen to Spicer's voice just now.
00:31:37
Daniel
Well, whenever I hear Spicer read this poem, one of the things I immediately think about is why he says Santiana and Santy Claus.
00:31:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
I did too.
00:31:50
Daniel
um And it's just very peculiar, but somehow it, I mean, I don't know, Cameron. I mean, you're from Southern California.
00:31:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well...
00:32:00
Daniel
where would Where would you place his accent there? Because it sounds a little sort of
00:32:08
Daniel
It doesn't sound like urban Los Angeles, right? I mean, he's situating himself. ahead. go ahead
00:32:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah Well, I don't know what i what I have to add. I mean, I guess I would just say I have heard people say Santa Claus. um to To me, that sounds, I don't know where I've, what I would associate that with, but but for some reason, I want to say some kind of New York.
00:32:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
I can imagine like a ah kind of like a gangster you saying, oh, kid, you believe in Santa Claus?
00:32:37
Daniel
Yeah.
00:32:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
they say it in Home Alone. That's why thinking it.
00:32:42
Daniel
All right. Yeah.
00:32:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
But no, I've heard that. I've never heard the Santa Anas, the Santa Ana winds or Santa Ana, the region, where you know the the place where the winds come from and and where they get their name.
00:32:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Never heard them referred to as Santiana. um So I noticed that too. I mean, i know where Fairfax High is and ah you know i don't i don't i haven't heard this voice around there, but times have changed.
00:33:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
And yeah, I don't know. I don't know where where the accent is coming from. um Yeah.
00:33:17
Daniel
and Spicer was very interested in regional accents. um And apparently he was an uncanny mimic and also had something that seemed like a magic trick that people could, he could talk to someone and tell them exactly where they were from.
00:33:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
00:33:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, that's interesting.
00:33:32
Daniel
So this would have meant something to him.
00:33:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
So it's a fair question for him. he he would He would have been interested in this if we were asking it about some other poem.
00:33:42
Daniel
Absolutely. Absolutely.
00:33:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:33:44
Daniel
Absolutely.
00:33:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I mean, it's interesting. i mean one One thing I found myself thinking about also just did in your really ah kind of lucid and helpful... ah ah out of capsule biography of of Spicer is, you know, to refer to him as a California poet, um and you know, meaningfully seems seems right. And I guess I'd just say as a Californian myself that, you know,
00:34:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah there's There seems to me to be a big difference between Los Angeles and the Bay Area um or Southern California. i mean, they may as well be two different states from within California. Maybe from without, they seem like all part of one place or one one big culture.
00:34:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
um But it it is interesting to me that that Spicer would have have roots in in Los Angeles, clearly seem to be, this poem seems to be of that place, as you say, but but that, you know, he he dates his his ah birth as his arrival at Berkeley.
00:34:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:34:46
Daniel
So here's, um yeah, so maybe it's time to head to like one of the big reveals here.
00:34:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
All
00:34:52
Daniel
I mean, interesting, you know, like we've got the setup. It's a session of psychoanalysis and it's free association.
00:35:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:35:01
Daniel
You know, so what are you thinking about? And here's this guy and and and he's actually thinking about summer in Los Angeles where he grew up.
00:35:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:35:09
Daniel
you know, he's thinking about his childhood, the kind of thing you're supposed to think about in a psychoanalytic session. Good boy, you're thinking about your childhood.
00:35:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:35:16
Daniel
And he's thinking about California. And he's thinking about, he'd like to make a poem that's like California.
00:35:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:35:25
Daniel
You know, what does it mean? What's California to him that a poem could be like it? And he's thinking about all this stuff. Now, Maybe this is happening because he's in Berkeley.
00:35:37
Daniel
I mean, he didn't go to UCLA. He was in Redlands, okay, but but you know he he's in Berkeley.
00:35:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:35:41
Daniel
He loves it is culturally vibrant. Weird thing happens in Berkeley. he's you know he' is he iss um you know His two best friends, one is from Idaho and one is from the San Francisco Bay Area. They're both gay men, he's gay.
00:35:55
Daniel
He finds himself in this relationship with a woman up in Berkeley and guess what? She's from Los Angeles. And guess what? Big reveal.
00:36:07
Daniel
Her name is Catherine Mulholland.
00:36:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh my God.
00:36:10
Daniel
And she is that Mulholland. She is the Mulholland heiress.
00:36:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, wow.
00:36:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. So wait, tell people, tell people just a little bit more about Mulholland, right?
00:36:16
Daniel
So...
00:36:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
So, um famously Mulholland Drive in, in, in California, but, but named after, uh, uh, yeah.
00:36:28
Daniel
Her father, I think, who who, I mean, you might know more about this than me, he sort of engineered the irrigation system, right?
00:36:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:36:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:36:36
Daniel
The transportation of water that makes Los Angeles, I mean, I wouldn't say viable because it's not, but but almost viable.
00:36:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:36:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
For the time being, yeah, nearly viable.
00:36:45
Daniel
Yeah. I mean, he made he made he made Los Angeles possible. It's you know, it's the story of of Chinatown with Jack Nicholson.
00:36:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:36:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:36:52
Daniel
It's that, you know. And so here he is. Here's Spicer, who is not from a high class family.
00:36:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:36:59
Daniel
And he's in this relationship with, you know, Los Angeles royalty.
00:37:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:37:05
Daniel
And it's happening in and Berkeley where he's moved and where he has this, as you said, you're i mean, I'm from the Bay Area.
00:37:15
Daniel
We know this. There's, you know, Los Angeles and the Bay Area are two really different places. And and spicer Spicer doesn't have the identity of ah of an Angeleno in the Bay Area.
00:37:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:37:26
Daniel
He's like, he quickly becomes a Bay Area Absolutely.
00:37:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
He's happy to shed Los Angeles.
00:37:31
Daniel
Absolutely.
00:37:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
And yet, here he is, thinking about it.
00:37:35
Daniel
Here he is with another angel. I mean, so it really is a poem about geography in a deep way.
00:37:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, but let me, yeah. yeah Oh, yeah sorry. Yeah, it didn't mean to interrupt you there, but, you know, just, just, um but I want to put a little bit of pressure on this because, that be yeah, I mean, I see the, the, the tension or the kind of interesting ah question that we're pulling out of this business, but,
00:37:42
Daniel
no. that's and
00:37:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
You know, I was so struck by something you said. i think it was with respect to earlier in this conversation. I think it was with respect to what Spicer and um Samuel Beckett had in common with each other in your view, which was, um if I can summarize it quickly, that on the one hand, there is this kind of intensity behind the speech or behind the you know production of language.
00:38:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
And yet on the other hand, there is this implication or understanding that the language is coming from somewhere else. That it is, um you know we can we can follow them in naming the metaphors that are employed to describe where that somewhere else might be.
00:38:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Radio transmissions, letters that arrive in your mailbox. um you know, messages from Martians or or whatever the kind of more or less, yeah, fan fanciful versions of that um kind of dynamic might be.
00:38:54
Daniel
Yeah, those are Spicer's terms for sure.
00:39:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
So, you know, we'd expect that a poet who speaks with intensity to be also speaking personally. um
00:39:08
Daniel
Correct.
00:39:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
or or we might think that a poet who is taking dictation from, i don't know, God or something to be writing um dispassionately somehow, but that in these to two writers, we find a kind of unusual configuration of those two um properties, all of which I bring up at this point simply to ask,
00:39:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, it's clear in, you read the title of the poem, although I have questions about what comes after the colon, and like why is this an elegy? Put that to one side for the moment, unless you want to pursue it now.
00:39:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
um You see the word psychoanalysis and you you see the setup of the poem that has these one line in italics, uh, questions followed by this sort of free associative ah apparent response to those questions as mimicking in some kind of fairly literal way, the dynamics of a, of a session of psychoanalysis in which, you know, the first and only rule is to free associate, right. To say whatever comes into your mind.
00:40:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um,
00:40:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
But the fact that you've alerted us, Dan, to the way in which Spicer thinks of poetry as coming from somewhere else, not from inside of him, makes me want to sort of pause and say, well, shit you know...
00:40:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
should we, um how suspicious should we be of this kind of immediate ah ah falling into this early childhood landscape and so forth? Like, i guess ah I guess I'm trying to put my finger on, and it might be an impossible thing to do, the sort of tonal irony, or, I mean, is is he making fun of that kind of talk?
00:41:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is he earnestly engaging in it? Both, neither, something else and ah yet yet again?
00:41:16
Daniel
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really great question. i You know, this is this is before he really fully commits to this idea of dictation.
00:41:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:41:25
Daniel
um But you could think of free association as being on that road.
00:41:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, right.
00:41:32
Daniel
and And certainly, you know, coming right out of surrealism, really. And... um and some of Bliton's dictates about you know that where poetry should come from.
00:41:48
Daniel
and um And Duncan certainly you know had this very elaborate poetics of free association, but with revision, but not revision that erases the, you know you let all the process stand.
00:42:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Right.
00:42:05
Daniel
You let the thought, the response to the, you think of revision, not as a cleansing, but as a response. And the poem integrates this long conversation you're having with yourself really.
00:42:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:42:19
Daniel
To the point where you don't know which part is really yourself and you you let it all in, you keep it all in.
00:42:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:42:24
Daniel
um So that's something that's going to be, Spicer's going to be thinking about at this time for sure.
00:42:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
i get I guess that the the sort of point of free association is that it's a way of producing language where one encounters one's own language as though it were coming from somewhere else, because in some sense it is, you know, it call it the unconscious or whatever.
00:42:30
Daniel
um
00:42:44
Daniel
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
00:42:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:42:47
Daniel
Though so obviously, I mean, this poem also is, you know, it's it's you know extraordinarily deft technically.
00:42:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Say more about that.
00:42:56
Daniel
you know
00:42:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
what do What do you have in mind when you when you talk about the poem's technical deafness?
00:43:03
Daniel
um
00:43:06
Daniel
I think the pacing of the poem is extraordinary.
00:43:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:43:10
Daniel
You know, it is a poem about time. and the way the flow of the lines that in some way capture the flow of a wind blowing, but also the temporality of a lazy summer day, but also the temporality of where you are inside the summer and all these but spaces of time, you know, that he's also relating to where you are inside the session, right?
00:43:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
00:43:40
Daniel
Because the psychoanalytic session has its own temporality. And then he's also relating all this to the temporality of the poem itself. I mean, this extraordinary, you know, I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer, as slow getting started as 4th of July, somewhere around the middle of the second stanza.
00:43:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:44:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:44:07
Daniel
And, you know, the poem does get started slowly.
00:44:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:44:10
Daniel
And we are in the middle of the second stanza when he writes that.
00:44:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:44:15
Daniel
And, um
00:44:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
We should have tried to time this conversation maybe a ah week or so earlier. We're just after the 4th of July now as we sit here and talk.
00:44:22
Daniel
but yeah
00:44:25
Daniel
well, you know, we're doing our best, yeah.
00:44:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
We are, yeah.
00:44:27
Daniel
But, you know, and then and then this other kind of temporality, which he comes back to at the end of the poem, I am thinking of how many times this poem will be repeated.
00:44:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
00:44:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right. Right.
00:44:40
Daniel
And, you know, so whenever I read the poem, it's this strange, uncanny feeling because he's thinking of me at them at any moment I'm reading the poem, he's thinking of me at that moment.
00:44:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:44:51
Daniel
So the poem does keep getting repeated. And a poem is a funny thing because a poem, you know, you can read a novel more than once. Of course you can. But a novel isn't made to be repeated the way a poem, like a song.
00:45:04
Daniel
Here we go back to lyric. A poem is something that's made to be repeated.
00:45:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:45:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, an iterable event, right, yeah, right.
00:45:09
Daniel
and Yeah, ah exactly. And then, you know, and how many summers will torture California?
00:45:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:45:19
Daniel
And so we've got, ah so it's this extraordinary poem about time. And the the time of, I think the time of the lines in this poem and the syntax is, you know, just, um just, you know, just, you know,
00:45:34
Daniel
I don't really an argument here, it's just sort of appreciation.
00:45:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:45:37
Daniel
But you know I think he does manage to use the line and the syntax of the sentences in relation to the line to really make this sense of temporality happen.
00:45:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, let's let's think some more about i' about time. and we don't I mean, I have a question about, well, it's not the first line of the poem. I guess it's it's the first line of the first, and you know, of the, I don't know, Anna-Lizanne's response to the first question.
00:46:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
I'm thinking of an early summer. um um We don't need to stay with that, but but i have ah I have a question that sort of springs off from that, Dan, and you can take it where you will.
00:46:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Early. that that word of an early summer, does that mean early in my story of my life, right? Or does it mean um June, but not August, right?
00:46:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Or does it mean both? does it you know say Say more, I guess, about what work sort of the the idea of earliness is doing for Spicer. for ah spicer i feel i feel as though we have lots of interesting sort of moments in literature in which we kind of theorize lateness as a concept, right?
00:46:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Or belatedness.
00:46:54
Daniel
No,
00:46:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
But what does earliness signify to Spicer?
00:46:59
Daniel
no it's really interesting. i mean, i I hear it more as it's early in the summer, but it's this strange, like, it's not spring any anymore, but but we're just getting into the summer.
00:47:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:47:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:47:16
Daniel
um And, you know, lines like,
00:47:22
Daniel
bruising everything and making the seeds sweet. So, you know, the you get the feeling the seed hasn't yet fully blossomed or whatever it's going to do.
00:47:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:47:34
Daniel
Down in the city where the peach trees are awkward as young horses. Again, you know, a cult. We're not in the full sort of efflorescence of summer yet.
00:47:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:47:47
Daniel
um And so it's this moment of... of
00:47:52
Daniel
What can I say? um um It's hot, but it's going to get hotter. You know, it's so going to be a hot summer in Los Angeles and we're just starting.
00:48:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:48:05
Daniel
um
00:48:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um And we're getting some uncharacteristic rain in the beginning of the poem.
00:48:12
Daniel
That's right.
00:48:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I was wondering what the... um
00:48:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
whether it might be a useful kind of mental exercise to imagine how the poem would be different if we were just to take out the words that we we would want to assign, I guess, to the analyst, the questions.
00:48:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
What if we just got the free association without that kind of back and forth rhythm? Would things change? I mean, is it,
00:48:43
Daniel
you
00:48:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
And or i don't know, take either horn of this that that you find more generative, Dan.
00:48:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is the reader here meant to be cast into the role of the of the kind of nodding um analyst who is taking in these words and forming some kind of impression of the psyche of the of the patient on his couch?
00:49:10
Daniel
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And, you know, when when you played Spicer's reading, you can see he dramatizes that a little bit in a way that, that you know, you could you could imagine him not doing that, but he gives this urgency.
00:49:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah.
00:49:23
Daniel
Do you get me, doctor? Do you get me? It's like, and and it's sort of, you know, it's interesting that he dramatizes that but anxiety of the Anilazan that, you know, that the shrink actually doesn't understand what you're saying and that you're just...
00:49:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:49:37
Daniel
you know, which is like the worst feeling, right? You know, you're sort of like, um what's the, you know, the whole point is that someone will understand me and then help me understand myself. And if they don't understand what I'm saying, I mean, you know, so it's sort of like he he he he dramatizes the anxiety of the whole situation.
00:49:56
Daniel
and And Spicer is interested in the addressee throughout. He has a poem, one of his other important early poems is called Poem to the Reader of the Poem. um He has his other really important early poems, Song for Bird and Myself, which is Bird as Charlie Parker.
00:50:18
Daniel
you know he He addresses the his readers in, um shall we say, insulting terms.
00:50:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh. Right.
00:50:28
Daniel
so So he likes to stage this moment of address.
00:50:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:50:31
Daniel
and And one of his favorite figures for the poet is Orpheus, Precisely because he said, not because Orpheus, you know, had the most beautiful songs, but because Orpheus moved the stones.
00:50:44
Daniel
That this is, the poet is someone who creates a reaction, who is speaking to someone, one and who makes something happen for someone else.
00:50:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:50:55
Daniel
so So you're completely right that the figure of the analyst, you know, ties in with a lot of things that are really important for Spicer's poetry here.
00:51:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. does Does the, um the first time the analyst asks the question, it's what are you thinking about? The second time it's what are you thinking?
00:51:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Which sound like they may as well be the same question, but of course they're not quite. It's a bit different to say, what are you thinking about versus what are you thinking?
00:51:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
I think, right?
00:51:29
Daniel
I agree.
00:51:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:51:31
Daniel
yeah i don't know i don't have anywhere to take that observation, but I think it is absolutely worth noticing these modulations.
00:51:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
00:51:40
Daniel
and Then you get, what are you thinking now?
00:51:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
And then it... right.
00:51:43
Daniel
So it's like, you get the sense that, you know, the analyst keeps prodding him, keeps prodding him. and And the one thing you can get there is, um so a couple of things I'll bring in.
00:51:56
Daniel
You asked about the elegy after the colon.
00:51:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good. Yeah. Yeah.
00:52:00
Daniel
That is just a simple reference to John Donne because Spicer was an and incredibly intense reader of John Donne at the time he was writing this poem.
00:52:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:52:13
Daniel
He wrote a major graduate school paper on geographical lore in John Donne, which is informed, I think, by his work with Kantorowicz. There's a lot of medieval philosophy in this essay.
00:52:25
Daniel
And he's really one thing he's really interested in in John Donne is the idea of the body as a microcosm. that the human body is a microcosm for greater structures.
00:52:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:52:38
Daniel
God has given the human body to be a microcosm. That, for example, the the rivers and waterways on Earth are organized the same way that the blood and arteries are in a body.
00:52:51
Daniel
This is apparently things that come up in medieval or early modern thought, and Spicer's very interested in this. And so this is completely... um behind this idea of the woman as a geographical element.
00:53:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
So like when Dunn says, oh, my America, my newfound land, right?
00:53:13
Daniel
Precisely, precisely, exactly.
00:53:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
In describing a woman's body, right? Yeah.
00:53:15
Daniel
So this is this is not, I mean, this is absolutely deliberate on Spicer's part.
00:53:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:53:21
Daniel
Dunn is at the forefront of his mind. But you know if you look at the poem, then if you look at the poem really as this kind of, you know
00:53:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's great.
00:53:30
Daniel
if you have the kind of parody version of psychoanalysis, right.
00:53:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:53:35
Daniel
Where you have, um you know, you keep free associating and then like, if you free associate enough, you'll get to the real thing at the end, right.
00:53:47
Daniel
You know, you'll have all these displacements and, and, and defense mechanisms and diversions.
00:53:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:53:53
Daniel
But if you keep reassociating, you get to the real thing.
00:53:56
Daniel
And, and interesting. Precisely.
00:53:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
And it's your mother or something, right?
00:53:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:53:59
Daniel
That's exactly that's exactly right. you know No, I don't know who it is, but it's not my mother. right you know so um So yes, it's your mother.
00:54:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
00:54:07
Daniel
And so look what happens in this poem here. you know um
00:54:12
Daniel
You've got this extraordinary section where the woman is compared to California, but there's not just her body, there's a map, and the map is dress.
00:54:27
Daniel
So her clothes are the map to the body, which is the thing itself. And you know John Donne talks about clothes and bodies and bodies and souls, right? There's this sense of one thing covering another, indicating another, and you get to the to the final thing.
00:54:44
Daniel
There are postcards of her body. There are her breasts like curious national monuments. um interesting Interesting phrase towards the bottom of this.
00:54:57
Daniel
you know and i a rich eastern tourist lost somewhere between hell and texas looking at a map of a long wet dancing california that i have never seen send me some penny picture postcards lady send them one of each breast photographed looking like curious national monuments One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway 27 miles from a night's lodging in the world's oldest hotel.
00:55:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:55:33
Daniel
You know, the world's oldest hotel here, the womb, female sexual organ. um You know, there's this whole, I mean, it goes all the way back to Dunn and beyond, this kind of... of of of way of blazoning the the body as landscape, landscape as body.
00:55:52
Daniel
But an interesting thing here, though, is um
00:55:56
Daniel
I've never seen a three-lane highway. Have you? You know, there's something strange here. He just throws it in.
00:56:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:56:04
Daniel
Your body's sweeping like a four-lane highway or a two-lane highway, three-lane highway.
00:56:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Two lane highway.
00:56:10
Daniel
maybe
00:56:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:56:11
Daniel
Maybe that was a thing in California at the time. There was a passing lane, but it strikes me as a little bit strange. But all this, what I'm leading up to, yes, I am getting to the point, is if you think like the analyst wants him to get somewhere in the end, right?
00:56:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
I suppose.
00:56:29
Daniel
Right? I mean, you know, or...
00:56:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I mean, classically, yeah. I mean, I'm actually curious about what the analyst is supposed to be doing, but maybe we can come back to that. Go on, yeah.
00:56:37
Daniel
Yeah.
00:56:38
Daniel
Or let's say that the the analyst and thinks the analyst wants them to get somewhere, you know, or wants to get somewhere himself um in this case.
00:56:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
The analyst wants him to get somewhere.
00:56:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
00:56:49
Daniel
Well, finally, you have this payoff.
00:56:52
Daniel
I am thinking of how many times this poem will be repeated, how many summers will torture California until the damned maps burn, until the mad cartographer falls to the ground and possesses the sweet, thick earth from which he has been hiding.
00:57:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:57:14
Daniel
So it's like, right, this is sort of like almost, um, um a parody of, you know, what what a good therapy session will do. You'll stop running from the things you want.
00:57:26
Daniel
You'll stop hiding yourself from your true desire. You'll get rid of the maps and you will sink your knees into the sweet, thick earth.
00:57:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:57:41
Daniel
So if you can help people read this poem, some people will say, well, what he's really saying here is this is about him running from his own sexuality.
00:57:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:57:55
Daniel
And that, you know, he's finally got to get rid of this map and this mystified female body and get into, you know, what his, ah his true desire.
00:58:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:58:05
Daniel
um
00:58:09
Daniel
You can also sort of um um
00:58:14
Daniel
potentially read it as the kind of heteronormative institution of psychoanalysis may be doing the opposite. Like he's actually drifting along in all these ways that are very complex and ambivalent. and And you could read it as as the poem finally producing the right answer, which is like, yeah, I don't want any of this nonsense.
00:58:39
Daniel
I don't really want the poems. I don't really want the summer in California. I admit what I really want is the woman, the thing I'm supposed to want, you know.
00:58:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
00:58:46
Daniel
like The thing that psychoanalysis is supposed to help me be a normal guy who wants a woman. Yay, I've done it.
00:58:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, because it's pathologizing homoerotic desire and so forth.
00:58:52
Daniel
you know you could Exactly.
00:58:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:58:56
Daniel
Exactly. So so you you could also you could also read it read it that way. And one assumes, considering he he went to the this psychotherapist to to try and work out the problems in his relationship with Catherine Mulholland, and she asked him to do it,
00:59:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm hmm. Mm
00:59:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
hmm.
00:59:14
Daniel
one assumes he might not have talked about his sexuality in those sessions. We know that towards the end of his life, when he went back, he did talk about it very openly and was certainly not at all interested in being cured or reformed, but just talked about it as you know an issue that made, you know because of discrimination, an issue that made his life more difficult.
00:59:37
Daniel
So...
00:59:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
00:59:40
Daniel
so
00:59:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
But to come back to this question of um cartography or the cartographer and the the idea of maps, um ah so is the Is the idea something like this, um Dan, that um psychoanalysis might be like cartography in, in that both of them are, um, sort of approximations or schematic representations of the real thing of, of the land or of life, you know, life as it's lived.
01:00:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
And that,
01:00:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
presumably, i mean, i I guess a person could have an interest in cartography as a thing in itself, um as an aesthetic end in itself, but, ah but,
01:00:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
But presumably, generally speaking, the the point of a map is not is to is to put the map away, ultimately, right? is to Is to navigate a place, a real place, right? To get where you want to go or to find out where you want to go or something like that. and And presumably, the point of an analysis is to be done with the analysis and get back to life, right?
01:01:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, ah so I wonder what, if anything you make of, of, of that, but then but if if I could introduce a third term, which is clearly like the thing that, that might be lurking behind all this is like, how is poetry like either psychoanalysis or cartography in the, in the little um sketch that I've just drawn?
01:01:22
Daniel
Well, I mean, I think those are those are great questions and those are exactly the questions that Spicer's working with in another early poem that's addressed to Wallace Stevens, which is which is much less successful than this one, but he does basically question all that. He says, you know, maybe the maybe the map in and of itself is an object of interest.
01:01:47
Daniel
Maybe map making is an art you beyond, you know, maybe a map isn't necessarily a secondary thing. Just as, you know, a poem is in some ways about life, but it's part of life
01:02:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:02:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:02:07
Daniel
maybe Maybe the thing about life is more living than what it recounts. You know, um it certainly is true for Jack Spicer.
01:02:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:02:16
Daniel
I mean, the poems are more alive than whatever you might say a poem is about, but the life is in the poem. So...
01:02:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
01:02:24
Daniel
so so
01:02:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
That certainly sounds like something Stevens would say, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. yeah
01:02:29
Daniel
Stevens was very important to Spicer, for sure, always.
01:02:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah right
01:02:33
Daniel
um And so so this is really interesting. I mean, I think this is one of the things that the poem is is trying to talk about is is it's it's a poem about teleology, right? It's about what is the endpoint of the analytic session
01:02:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:02:52
Daniel
And also, what is what is the end point of a poem? What is a poem supposed to do? And that's where you get to that really important last line. I am thinking that a poem could go on forever because that's pointing forward
01:03:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:03:09
Daniel
to his idea of serial poetry, which is which is not just that instead of having one lyric, you have 12 lyrics and they dialogue with each other.
01:03:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:03:19
Daniel
That's part of it. That's important and that's part of it. But another part of it is not to look at any literary work as a closed space. but to look at it as something that always is opening out, that can always extend in some way, and and something that refuses to be bounded as an object.
01:03:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:03:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah for
01:03:43
Daniel
and so i think it's sort of you know um in a funny way, it's sort of looking, what spicer does here could be kind of assimilated to to licanian analysis where there's going to be much less the idea that you get to the core thing.
01:04:03
Daniel
you know There's always a constant, there's always a next thing after the core thing in Lacanian analysis.
01:04:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:04:08
Daniel
right You don't get to like, and that's it. this is This is the real referent that everything else was circling around. The real referent always leads to another series and then to another series.
01:04:19
Daniel
um
01:04:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:04:20
Daniel
You're not going to get that sort of um final moment. And so I think what's interesting about the poem is it's sort of suggesting that like, well, maybe this idea that you're going to finally get rid of the map and get to the sweet, thick earth.
01:04:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:04:37
Daniel
Maybe that's a fantasy in some way.
01:04:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right. um
01:04:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
that Yeah, it's um turtles all the way down or whatever, representation after representation.
01:04:49
Daniel
Yeah.
01:04:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
um i was thinking as I got to the ah the final line also of um Freud's um analysis, terminable and interminable.
01:04:59
Daniel
Absolutely.
01:05:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
um which I mean, I don't know that I can say um anything particularly um illuminating about just just now, except in in to to kind of bring things down to earth in some way. um You know, one one might go to therapy or be in analysis because one has a particular problem one wants to work out, right?
01:05:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
But there is always the possibility, maybe if one's temperament is aligned in the in a way to make this more likely than not, or or maybe this is just always present that,
01:05:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
one might realize, oh that thing that I came to therapy for is kind of not the point anymore. And now it's its own thing. And there, there would be no reason ever not to do this. It could just go on forever.
01:05:55
Daniel
That's right. Yeah, that's right.
01:05:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:05:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, which I don't know. am I giving too much away? Kind of, it's kind of my experience of therapy. Um, um,
01:06:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Yeah, so it's interesting to think of, um well, obviously, it's ah it's interesting to think of um psychoanalysis or to think of psychotherapy in those terms.
01:06:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's also interesting to to take that model and um analogize it somehow to the way we think of poetry. Yeah. is um You know, should should we think of the poem as the as the kind of object that has the beginning, middle, and end? Or should we think of poetry as a kind of ongoing way of living, you know?
01:06:44
Daniel
Yeah, I mean, that's right. that On the one hand, you know, we do want to be able to have a critical discourse about poetry, but but the poems like the summer, it's going to be repeated, if it's a good one.
01:07:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:07:01
Daniel
If it's a good one, it's going to be repeated. and And there's not something,
01:07:11
Daniel
there's very much the idea in Spicer, I mean, in many poets, but he puts it very strongly that, you know, there is not there's not a meaning you're going to extract from it and then finish with the poem.
01:07:23
Daniel
And so that question of, like, what is inside the poem, then that's... He puts that in parallel with the theoretical problem of of what is there in an analysis? What is... what what are you getting from it and and what does it even mean to to understand something in analysis or the whole question of working through right which is not so much understanding something but a process of living through something and a poem is that right a really good poem it's taking you through something you know um but this
01:07:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Right. right
01:07:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
So naively, you might you might think as an as as somebody who's gone to analysis, ah what I'm doing here is I'm talking about my life. And what you realize at some point, if it if it's gone well, is that, oh, I'm actually not just talking about my life in the analysis, I'm living in the analysis.
01:08:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
And we can attend to that.
01:08:13
Daniel
Right.
01:08:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
And so so too in a poem, you're saying, right? The poem might seem to be about the place where you grew up or about your early childhood.
01:08:17
Daniel
Yeah, absolutely.
01:08:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
But in the end, it might turn out not to be about anything. It's its own thing. It's happening there in the poem.
01:08:28
Daniel
I mean, I think this is a really good moment to to point to, to just read very carefully where Spicer theorizes the serial poem, which is about all these things.
01:08:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Please do. Yeah.
01:08:41
Daniel
And he does it in a letter to his close friend, Robin Blazer, um which he also includes as a poem in his book, Admonitions.
01:08:52
Daniel
So it's again, the same thing. Is it a poem about life? I mean, a letter is something that happens in a life where a poem is about life.
01:08:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:09:01
Daniel
He's completely mixing those two. It's at once an action that happens between people in their lives and a poem. You know, he's he's breaking down that distinction. i won't read the whole thing.
01:09:14
Daniel
But he dismisses his past work with a couple of exceptions. And he says, that is why all my myself that is why all my stuff from the past, he dismisses, he excludes a few things, looks foul to me.
01:09:27
Daniel
The poems belong nowhere. They are one night stands filled the best of them with their own emotions, but pointing nowhere as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath.
01:09:40
Daniel
It was not my anger or my frustration that got in the way of my poetry, but the fact that I viewed each anger and each frustration as unique, something to be converted into poetry as one would exchange foreign money.
01:09:58
Daniel
I learned this from the English department and from the English department of the spirit, that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us. And it ruined 10 years of my poetry.
01:10:11
Daniel
Look at those other poems. Admire them if you like. They are beautiful, but dumb. Poems should echo and re-echo against each other.
01:10:22
Daniel
They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can. um So there's a lot going on here.
01:10:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:10:30
Daniel
But the idea that... um I take each anger and frustration and convert it into poetry as one would exchange foreign in money. i mean, that's Eliot's objective correlative as as practiced by the English department of the 40s, 50s, and even 60s and 70s, frankly.
01:10:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:10:50
Daniel
so so So this is really, and Spicer's a big reader of Eliot and takes Eliot very seriously. But this is the big breakthrough for him is to break with the idea of the objective correlative that, you know, that you can, you know, that there's an exchange like foreign currency between, you know,
01:11:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. that that that That's really helpful and fascinating. um I guess I just want to observe, too, though that there's something sort of surprising in in the way he's configuring all of this, if I'm listen if i'm hearing it right, if I'm reading ah right which is is to say that you know when when he's when he says the poem in isolation, he criticizes it, right, or sort of rejects it and compares it to a one-night stand, right?
01:11:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
So presumably, you know and then later in as you went on, I think I was picking up on this in the um that's to be opposed to,
01:11:45
Daniel
yeah
01:11:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
what we might think of as a more uh kind of mature or ongoing um or open-ended model of um eros or or sexuality um and i guess what's surprising to me about it a little bit i mean i think i get it but um but i'm just going to say this is that i can imagine a poet who's saying like i've been um I've been seduced, or maybe that's exactly the wrong word. I've been persuaded to think of poetry as this kind of eliotic, objective, correlative kind of dry thing. It's sterile somehow in that respect.
01:12:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
And so i'm going to I'm going to try to reject all that or move on from all that into something. And then I would think the thing one would want to move on into would be the kind of delightfully queer sort of non, you know, erotic landscape that might include, might, might well include things like one night stands and so forth, but that's not getting it quite right.
01:13:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's not as simple as that. It sounds like, you know, go on.
01:13:05
Daniel
Well, I mean, no, I mean, a lot of critics have said that, that like, what is, what is going on here? You know, why does he, why does he say that one night stands have to be meaningless?
01:13:17
Daniel
Um, you know, maybe there's, um,
01:13:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
These critics are are divulging too much about their own taste, perhaps.
01:13:22
Daniel
Well, you know, I mean, so um no, but there is a lot of discussion about that. And is he actually, you know, is there something a little censorious here, ah actually, about how
01:13:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. We're kind of far from like the cruising kind of gay poem of mid-century, right?
01:13:41
Daniel
exactly. um But at the same time, you know, it's it's complicated, though. There is, And because Spicer is a very complicated person.
01:13:53
Daniel
And I mean, I think personally, he is a romantic, actually.
01:13:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:13:57
Daniel
Spicer is not, you know, he is not, um he certainly, you know, on the most mundane biographical level was not very successful in that kind of a lifestyle.
01:14:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:14:10
Daniel
It didn't suit him. He was not a big, he was a charmer intellectually, but he was not a big seducer. And, you know, That's kind of banal to say those kinds of things.
01:14:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. yeah
01:14:25
Daniel
but But there is definitely, I mean, there is um
01:14:33
Daniel
there is in Spicer a desire for a kind of impossible union. um And that would not be the kind of fleeting encounter of a one night stand.
01:14:46
Daniel
It would be a durable, an ongoing conversation
01:14:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:14:51
Daniel
And it's, you know, if you know his biography, it's sad because when occasions for that presented itself, at least in the form of friendship, he would often sabotage them.
01:15:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:15:03
Daniel
But that that's the form of his desire is is definitely, you know, he's not Whitman or Baudelaire for that matter. In in Paris, he really wants something sustained and changing and malleable and evolving.
01:15:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:15:20
Daniel
And like a serial poem, you know it does seem to be it does seem to hold for him
01:15:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
and So, so that whether he, um achieves it or not, um, whether in, in this poem or, or later in his, in his work, um, I'm, I am thinking, uh, Dan, that in light of what you've just said, that that last line of the poem, i am thinking that a poem could go on forever.
01:15:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I mean, abstracted from this poem and from anything that you just said, if you if you were to encounter that word, that line on its own in the wild, as it were, you might think there's there's something kind of threatening about that prospect, I don't know if I want that, right?
01:16:04
Daniel
yeah
01:16:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
um That sounds kind of dreary or drab. But I think what I'm hearing you say is that there's something rather... ah hopeful about that or um ambitious or um life giving about that aspiration at the I know in in a different context you said you didn't like that word ah with with respect to class and so forth but but here yeah maybe in this case so romantic both like lowercase r and capital are kind of romantic um that it's making a big claim in other words for what poetry might be capable of
01:16:30
Daniel
but and this It's so good's fine in this one. Yeah, yeah. but
01:16:41
Daniel
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I think you've you've you've hit it completely on the head that I think Spicer even says somewhere, you know, it's what's important is poetry, not the poem.
01:16:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:16:54
Daniel
So poetry is a process, it's an exchange. It's you know going, you know in his book, After Lurica, going back really to Pound in some ways, it's about translation.
01:17:05
Daniel
says retelling the same story again and again. One poet hands it down to another. It's not about producing perfect objects.
01:17:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, that's great. So I guess, um, in the spirit of that, I mean, it's funny on the one hand, I want to say like, all right, back to the poem, which seems like the wrong thing to say, but, um,
01:17:21
Daniel
No, absolutely. but it is the right thing to say.
01:17:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah Well, you you you brought up After Lorca, and i and it's such an extraordinary um book and project. I wonder if you might just, it's kind it like a very brief digression, but just explain that book to people who've never encountered it, ah what the concept of it or how it proceeds and might be relevant to what we're talking about here.
01:17:42
Daniel
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a book of translations. but Spicer takes great liberties with the translations and sometimes writes poems that are partly Lorca and partly his own invention. and and Some of the poems are just simply his own poems.
01:18:03
Daniel
But what's really important is there are a series of letters from Jack to Lorca where he addresses Lorca. I think six letters.
01:18:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:18:16
Daniel
And he he really irons out his poetics there and talks about what he thinks poetry is in in many different ways.
01:18:27
Daniel
um And it's the first book where he really talks about this idea of dictation.
01:18:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:18:34
Daniel
he He presents himself as being haunted by Lorca, that Lorca's spirit is speaking through him.
01:18:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:18:42
Daniel
And he claimed that that's how he actually felt. um but it's also the first serial poem in that it is it is a book. And he says when, because it does have these letters, which talk about the project, talk about where he is in the project, talk to Lorca, who is dead, of course.
01:19:03
Daniel
And when he sends a copy to Charles Olson, he says to Olson, read it from start to finish like a novel.
01:19:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:19:09
Daniel
Right. He says, you know, don't skip around, read it from start to finish like a novel. And that's an important part of a of the serial poem for Spicer is chronology, that it does have a chronology, that it is a process.
01:19:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, well i hope I hope that we've given listeners lots of ways in to Spicer if if they're not already um you know fans of his. ah One, of course, might be to read Dan's work, and and another might be to to get your hands on My Vocabulary Did This To Me, the Collected.
01:19:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
um spicer or the uh uncollected um edition that uh that dan helped to edit uh or edited recently the the letters of course are coming i know there is also isn't there dan a a reissue of after lorca that new york uh review of books uh published as a standalone volume right
01:19:57
Daniel
Indeed there is. Yeah, they did a little paperback. It's very affordable.
01:20:02
Daniel
There's a great introduction by Peter Gizzi. Yeah, and also a lot of the a lot of the theories, Spicer's Poetics, which have been so important, came from a series of lectures he did, as they're called, Three in Vancouver in June 1965. So it's the 50th anniversary of that.
01:20:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah yeah
01:20:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right.
01:20:23
Daniel
And, and of no, sorry, 60th anniversary.
01:20:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
And those are collected, aren't they? Yeah.
01:20:29
Daniel
And yeah, and one in and one in Berkeley the next month. And those are collected in the house that Jack built um edited by Peter Gizzi and a new addition of that is coming out along with the letters.
01:20:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good.
01:20:43
Daniel
so That's quite exciting that the sort of collected works of Spicer will will reissue the house that Jack built, which is a you know ah book that's really been very, very generative to to to to poets and and to readers of poetry, of course.
01:20:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:20:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, great. And of course, I'll put links to to all of this stuff in the episode notes that people can find these editions easily. um i know, Dan, from talking to you, at this part of part of what we were chatting about in Cambridge, as as I recall, you know Spicer is one of those poets that seems to be increasingly on the lips of contemporary poets who are working today, right? He, he um for for for all kinds of reasons, I suppose, has has become ah more and more um ah generative kind of inspiration or source for for poets who are working today.
01:21:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So it's it's it's exciting.
01:21:38
Daniel
Yeah, that's right. and Yeah, no, and his his poetics are very unique and in the way they the way they dialogue with with the other sort of new, as you mentioned, and the new American anthology poets.
01:21:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, go please.
01:21:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:21:53
Daniel
um Spicer has a really unique position there.
01:21:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Go on.
01:21:57
Daniel
And it's really one of the most, I think, interesting thinkers on poetics of of any of his poets.
01:22:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, I think you've demonstrated that well in our brief conversation today. Dan, I wonder if um here as we come to to a close of this conversation, if I might invite you to ah read the poem yourself for us as a way to conclude today.
01:22:22
Daniel
I would love to do that and I will. Shall I begin?
01:22:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Please.
01:22:31
Daniel
Psychoanalysis analogy.
01:22:35
Daniel
What are you thinking about? i am thinking of an early summer. I'm thinking of wet hills in the rain pouring water. shedding it down empty acres of oak and manzanita down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
01:22:59
Daniel
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana, driving the hills crazy, a fast wind with a bit of dust in it, bruising everything and making the seeds sweet.
01:23:11
Daniel
Or down in the city where the peach trees are awkward as young horses and their kites on the wires up above the street and the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.
01:23:25
Daniel
What are you thinking? i think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as the summer. As slow getting started as 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza.
01:23:40
Daniel
After a lot of unusual rain, California seems long the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California and as slow as the summer.
01:23:53
Daniel
Do you get me, doctor? It would have to be as slow as the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems on a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside, or standing in the middle of a white hot road between Bakersfield and Helm, waiting for Santa
01:24:17
Daniel
What are you thinking now? I'm thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still, her dress is like a road map.
01:24:28
Daniel
Highways traveling up and down her skin, long empty highways with the moon chasing jackrabbits across them on hot summer nights. i am thinking that her body could be california and i a rich eastern tourist lost somewhere between hell and texas looking at a map of a long wet dancing california that i have never seen send me some penny picture postcards ladies send them One of each breast photographed looking like curious national monuments.
01:25:04
Daniel
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway 27 miles from a night's lodging in the world's oldest hotel.
01:25:16
Daniel
What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem will be repeated. How many summers will torture California? until the damned maps burn, until the mad cartographer falls to the ground and possesses the sweet, thick earth from which he has been hiding.
01:25:38
Daniel
What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.
01:25:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, was Daniel Katz ah reading Jack Spicer's psychoanalysis and elegy. Dan, I want to thank you again so much for this conversation.
01:25:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's been a gift. I've i've learned learned a lot and really enjoyed talking with you.
01:26:03
Daniel
Thank you so much for having me, Cameron. It's been a great pleasure to be here. All I can say guess thanks.
01:26:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, sure. Thanks. um and Thank you. Thank you to our listeners um for hanging out with us for the last hour or so. i hope ah those of you who came in already as big fans of Jack Spicer will have found new grist for the mill, as it were. I hope um those of you who maybe were less familiar with Spicer will be running to get your hands on some of these.
01:26:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
um poems and books that we've been discussing. um In any case, I hope that um if you enjoyed this episode that you'll ah perhaps share it with a friend, um leave us ah a rating a review or whatever um service you get your podcasts on, subscribe, but um all that good stuff.
01:26:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I will be recording new episodes in the days and weeks to come and um this won't be the last time you hear from me this summer, I hope. So um Thanks again, everyone, and be well.