Aquatic Park, San Francisco


"Nature is a Haunted House--but Art--a House that tries to be haunted" Los Angeles, Trauma, and Orphic Anxiety in the Work of Jack Spicer, by Alicia Cohen

"Spicer's world is not spatially stable like the world we find represented in the poetry of Whitman. In the world of Spicer's poetry, things do not stay in their proper places. In a spatially stable world, not only does the road one walks have constancy; one doesn't hear voices calling out from the spirit world as one traverses it, nor suffer the traumas of a dead man's crucifixion long past. Spicer, as Orphic poet, remembers the death and vertigo of the murdered and disembodied by opening to alien voices not his own. The difference between visible spatial regularity--roads that "go somewhere"--which is found in Whitman, and an unrepresentable world of spatial irregularity--where you are lucky if you can even know the road is there--is the heart of the difference between the poetries of Whitman and Spicer. Whitman's work is obsessed with gorgeous vistas of an American landscape, and with the vital living bodies of healthy men and women of a democratic polis. Spicer can barely see a thing, but his landscape is loud with invisible voices. He loves too, but without the comfort of laying his eyes upon the beloved's beautiful, stable form. Only their strange and often incoherent voices are embodied in the language of the poem."