AG: (Jack) Spicer had I think a somewhat similar theory (to Jack Kerouac‘s). Though, did you ever see Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète) by Jean Cocteau?
Randy Roark: Yes.
AG: And there’s a certain kind of basic Surrealist imagery there, which comes through. Then he explains his method in a later film called Orpheus, (Orphée) did you get to that one?
Randy Roark: No.
AG: Well, in Orpheus, Jean Marais the hero, the poet or something, (I guess he’s a poet, is he?)
Student: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. He’s Orpheus. I think it’s him. He sits in the garage and turns on the car radio, and the car radio, which is his unconscious so to speak, pronounces these fantastic phrases like L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts – “the birds sing with their fingers.” Remember that? What else? – A casser des statues on risque d’en devenir une soi-meme” – ““Breaking a statue, one risks becoming one.” And that’s from The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète)
Do you remember any of those little phrases?
Student: No, I don’t know French enough.
AG: And then numbers. This poet is taking down “un, cinq, six, huit..” (one, five, six, eight) (because these messages are coming form his unconscious and he’s not in control of them). Sometimes it’s just numbers, sometimes it’s impossible irrational statements, like “The birds sing with their fingers.” That was his classic representation of the idea of the unconscious, where poetry was coming from.
Spicer had that. Lamantia has that thing of it coming from … but he’s very precise about it. And it’s got something to do with alchemical … states of mind arrived at during alchemical studies. Or, at the time, when I was talking with Lamantia, I never fully understood what he was talking about, because he had been reading a great deal in Egyptian theory and in Hermes Trismegistus and Pythagoras and had very complicated scholarly notions. .. Yeah
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-six-and-a-quarter minutes in
Addenda
“The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios
don’t develop scar-tissue . . .”
The poet/ Takes too many messages.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even
know they are champions.” (Jack Spicer)
Stevan Delbos reviews The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer for Rain Taxi
Erik Davis reviews The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer for Bookforum
Mark Scroggins reviews The UnCollected Poems and Plays of Jack Spicer for Hyperallergic