Jack Spicer and Conrad Pendleton
Fall 1957
Note on Jack Spicer: Memoirs of Our Time and Place
Jack Spicer has been since 1945
a central influence in the development of poetics in this region.
To be such means doctrine, a locus in concept. Robin Blaser and
I have perhaps been most concernd among his contemporaries. It
is appropriate here, however briefly, to state my derivations
from the Spicer position. In the Berkeley period between 1946
and 1950 I was most deeply involved, contributed my part and in
turn received my part, in shaping a poetry conscious at the level
of language, of lore, and of operation in life of the potencies
defined as magic. What was crucial was that this potency sprang
from the idea of genius not from the idea of personality. In the
very same period when Rexroth, certainly another central influence
in the development of our poetics, advanced most articulately
his doctrine of person, involving as it did the elegiac and the
philosophies of personal integration, of individuation; what I
found there was subject to the processes at work in Berkeley circles.
It is a question of image. William Everson, Sanders Russell, Kenneth
Rexroth (among the earliest influences in my work) all variously
held to the personal, a dynamics which led the imagination toward
mystic participation thru self in the Divine--Buddha or Christ.
Short of that, this self--image involved all the abbreviations
of dignity, self-opinion, individualism, autobiography under trial.
Whatever I have of that teaching has been seriously compromised
by another concept of the image of the poet as participant in
mysteries, of the poem as an event, paramount in itself. The imagination
is here involved thru self in the Actor.
To this end Spicer brought Yeats, Rilke, and
recently Lorca and Artaud to bear. He insisted upon discovering
the specific manifestation of what in the poem appeard as symbol
or archetype: the swan of Medieval Scenes was "located"
in decalcomania on the bathroom wall. From this proceeded major
method.
In his own work, Spicer disturbs. That he continues
to do so is his vitality. The abortive, the solitary, the blasphemous,
when they are not facetious, produce upheavals in the real. Life
throws up the disturbing demand "All is not well"---sign
after sign generated of accusation manifest--which it is the daring
of Spicer at times in poems to mimic. If you do not allow that
life vomits; that the cosmos with its swollen and shrunken stars,
its irruptions, vomits--you can refuse to allow only by denying
fact. And, in the fullness--the image of God must contain the
grotesque. The Creator accuses as he blesses His creation. That
God contains more, that God "contains" is an aesthetic
that defines my critical departure from delight in Spicer's work
where the uncontaind, the isolate, appears and accuses the Creator.
All partial voice screams out of very hell, divorced from the
Good, truths that we can afford neither to deny nor to embrace.
Note on Conrad Pendleton
Conrad Pendleton is the pen name of Dr. Walter E. Kidd, an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Fresno State College and an editorial member of Twentieth Century Literature. Among the literary prizes awarded him are the Southwest Writers Poetry Prize, the Manuscript Poetry Prize, Kaleidograph Lyric Prize, Prize Poems of 1954, the Edison Marshall Story Prize, and the Parsons Story Prize. His Slow Fire of Time, a group of poems which won in the New Poetry Series Contest, was published in book form in October 1956 by the Alan Swallow Press. During the last few years, Dr. Kidd has participated in literary workshops at the Universities of Washington, Iowa, and Denver.