Abstract
Jack Spicer was an important mid-twentieth-century poet, part of the ‘Berkeley Renaissance’ during the 1950s. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, completing coursework for a PhD in Old English and Old Norse, specializing in linguistics and philology, largely under Arthur Brodeur. His mature poetics featured ideas about ‘dictation’ and ‘serial poetry,’ with works that respond to medieval themes and languages. A closer look at Spicer’s handling of medieval sources – beginning with a previously unpublished short story and proceeding to an early play, both of which comically engage with Chaucer – shows how, for Spicer, tradition must be reimagined in contemporary language, as well as being an entity that itself continues to find new life through a poet’s words. Spicer’s process in turn illuminates Chaucer’s own approach to working with and updating source material, most notably in Troilus and Criseyde.
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Notes
The name manages to cleverly combine those of Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994), Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974). The story, titled ‘The Tragic Disappearance of My Friend Cleanth Penn Ransom’ (taken from the first sentence) in a version being prepared for publication by editors K. Killian and P. Gizzi, was likely written in the early 1950s while Spicer was still technically a graduate student.
All references to Chaucer’s (1987) works are from Benson’s edition of The Riverside Chaucer, by line numbers (as well as by book and fragment numbers, where applicable).
Spicer’s stance towards New Criticism was straightforward and consistent. In a 1965 lecture, he said, ‘the New Criticism is big in universities. I haven’t seen it have any effect at all on poets for the last ten years. Anybody knows that a poem is not something which was written at no particular time, which is what New Criticism is about, and that it is written at some particular time. You have to know that. You’re a fool if you don’t’ (Spicer, 1998, 165).
See Spicer’s (2011) Beowulf, eds. Hadbawnik and Reynolds. Daniel Remein (New York University) is also preparing a dissertation on the so-called ‘Berkeley Renaissance’ poets, which includes Spicer, Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, in relation to their medievalist roots.
It appears that Blaser had used the notebook in the same Beowulf class in which Spicer produced his own translation and later sent it to Spicer, which explains its presence in the latter’s archive.
See Jack Spicer’s Beowulf, eds. Hadbawnik and Reynolds (2011, 3), for more details and a timeline.
‘Dictation’ is one of the key concepts explaining Spicer’s approach to poetry (the other being ‘serial poetry’). It is explained in some detail in the first ‘Vancouver Lecture.’ As outlined in brief by editor P. Gizzi: ‘[T]he poet is a host being invaded by the parasite of the dictating source of the poem’; subsequent metaphors include comparing the poetic source to invading ‘Martians’ or ‘spooks,’ and the poet as a ‘radio’ through whom they broadcast messages (Spicer, 1998, 2).
See Owens’s (2012) essay ‘Finance Innovation Commodity Culture,’ in which he explores this phrase in Marxist terms and thinks through current avant-garde movements and their approach to ‘making it new’ (37–38).
The book was published in its unfinished state as The Tower of Babel.
The paper is whimsically titled ‘A Preliminary Excursion into Comparison of Shakespeare’s and Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida in a Quixotic Attempt to Discover Neo-Classical Poetic Technique, or Some Little Truth Found too Early.’
Shakespeare’s play begins with Pandarus and Troilus already discussing Troilus’s suit for Cressida’s hand. Dryden’s begins with a council among the Greeks.
On the first point, see Patterson (1991, 84–164), Lewis ([1932] 2006, 451–463) and Bloomfield ([1957] 2006, 464–474), as well as the narrator’s frequent allusions to prior authors such as the fictitious ‘Lollius.’
‘Of instruments of strenges in acord/Herde I so pleye a ravyshying swetnesse’ (197–198). The ‘ravishing’ portion of this phrase seems related to Spicer’s own ideas about poetry, wherein the poet allows messages to enter from outside and take over. Cannon examines in some detail Chaucer’s linguistic and poetic choices in ‘sweetening’ his own prose translation of Boethius from philosophical prose into poetry.
The first instance of this happens in Act I, Scene 2, when Aeneas, Paris and Troilus are arguing about love: ‘Paris and Aeneas now suddenly seem to change personality. It is as if someone partly, only partly, had taken them over’ (92).
Patterson (1991) writes, ‘That Criseyde is changeable is the central fact about her: linked imagistically to the moon, to “slydynge fortune,” and to the unstable world itself, she is an object of exchange whose subjectivity alters with her circumstances,’ adding that ‘Criseyde ... is the mediating third term’ (143, 144). Fradenburg (2002) develops this point in a different way: ‘Troilus and Criseyde sees the exchange of sentient objects from the standpoint of the Thing by asking what kinds of judgments can be made by and about objects of exchange whose sentience is constrained by conditions. In other words, it sees from the standpoint of the Thing the ethics of the economy of sentient exchange’ (202–203).
Spicer uses the Shakespearean spelling of Criseyde, which I have maintained only in direct quotes.
See, again, Fradenburg on Criseyde as a ‘sentient object of exchange’ (emphasis mine) as well as Mann’s ([2002] 2006) book Feminizing Chaucer: ‘The real tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde is not simply that Troilus is separated from Criseyde, it is that she ceases to exist as the Criseyde he has known and loved ... Troilus’s fidelity is enslavement to a ghost’ (617). Troilus also perceives Criseyde’s final letter as ‘straunge,’ not merely in the sense of ‘off-putting,’ but ‘lik a kalendes of chaunge’ (5.1632, 1634).
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Hadbawnik, D. Time mechanics: The modern Geoffrey Chaucer and the medieval Jack Spicer. Postmedieval 4, 270–283 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.13