Latter Spicer / Lovecraft 1.

Jack Spicer listening to a baseball game
on his little transistor radio

-- Jack Spicer (1925-1965) is a principal figure of latter literature, many commentaries on his work have positioned it as being somehow of the future, or the outside (see Robin Blaser's essay "The Practise of the Outside" for example) If Spicer is of a time, it is implied, we have not yet reached it.


-- Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937) perhaps was a principal figure of latter literature, until his time seemed to come, and many books, and newspaper articles on the books, were written about him. Michel Houellebecq wrote an essay "H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life"

                                                          Here is Howard failing not to smile

"The Call of Cthulhu" is a description of how messages from an outside alien zone are gradually connected,
to reveal a threat against all life on earth.
There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before . . . and Wilcox's imagination had been keenly affected . . . an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities . . . from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters: "Cthulhu fhtagn." . . . a thing "miles high" which walked or lumbered about . . . scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23 and April 2 - the period of young Wilcox's delirium // The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention . . . //MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA//They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.

-- Transistor Radio (1953 - )

"I don't think the messages are for the poet
anymore than a radio program is for the radio set" (Spicer)
-the transistor radio was not seen in Lovecraft's life, but it is what he had in mind, let's say
"They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals." (Lovecraft)

Sporting Life
The trouble with comparing a poet to a radio
is that radios don't develop scar tissue.
The tubes burn out or with a transistor which most souls are
the battery or diagram burns out
replaceable or not replaceable
But not like that punch drunk fighter in the bar the poet
takes too many messages
The right to the ear that floored him in New Jersey
The right to say that he stood six rounds with a champion
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions
or if the scar tissue is too heavy demonstrate in a bar.
The poet is a radio
The poet is a liar
The poet is a counter punching radio
and those messages
god would not damn them
do not ever know they are champions
(Spicer)

notes
- My books are not with me so I have had to rely for the poetry on transcriptions of recordings of readings, hence the innacurate arrangement of the lines and so on. Don't get heavy handed.

- Therefore i will continue this loose beginning in the eventual future with discussions of Hannah Weiner and Daniel Davidson, who wrote "culture" half of which is available as pdf. I will put the links in comments in the next few days. Or, find them yourselves, why don't you.

-- this post was troubled by my not knowing what I was doing, like someone trying to beat you at street fighter 2 by wriggling the joystick a lot. May I apologise and ask that any errors be blamed not on me, but on the unfairness of being born.