After Lorca - Jack Spicer
Part of my reading goal for next year is to read more widely, both in fiction and outside of it. That means reading non-fiction but it also means exploring poetry, which is something I've always liked but never really dug into. I've got the classic English Lit undergrad grounding in poetry but I don't know much modern work, and my courses never went near American poetry at all. Last year I read Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy The Kid and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and loved them both, and I want to explore a little more.
Enter Jack Spicer. After Lorca was recommended to me by a friend and it was a fantastic place for me to start. The framing device of Spicer corresponding with the late Federico García Lorca as he translates the Spanish poet's work really worked for me; Spicer's work pre-dates postmodern fiction as a movement by a few years, but there's a lot of overlap between that genre and what he's doing in this book.
I particularly love the sequencing here. This is clearly a collection designed to work as a book rather than simply an assortment of poems, and there are moments of great joy in the way the poems are arranged. Early in the book we hit the poem 'Buster Keaton Rides Again', which is one of the strangest works in the volume and to be honest one of my least favourites. A little later we come to 'Song For September', and my initial reaction was that structurally it reminded me of 'Buster Keaton...' without being quite as weird. Spicer clearly agreed, because the very next poem in the book is 'Buster Keaton Rides Again: A Sequel'. Finding that poem immediately after 'Song For September' amused me for reasons I can't fully explain - and when I say "amused me", I mean it made me laugh loud.
Because I'm so new to poetry it's hard for me to talk meaningfully about it. I'm still unsure how to react to it, and I'm remembering that reading it is very much a skill. Reading poetry is not the same as reading prose - and especially not the same as reading fiction - and that's fine. I forced myself to slow down with this, reading one or two poems and then taking a break to think about them, maybe going back to reread and fully take them in. If we look purely at the length of After Lorca, I'd expect to get through this in an hour or so were it fiction. Instead I took three or four days over it, and I@m glad I did.
When I was studying writing at university I was always drawn to formal poetry. Playing with structure and form gives me a lot of pleasure, and something I've found when I've (very occasionally) read contemporary poetry is that many poets are eschewing more formal structures. So finding that Spicer does a lot of work with form and structure was a very nice surprise. Opening the book to a sonnet was not what I expected, but it made me very happy.
Spicer dedicates all of the poems in this book to other poets and artists who were in his circle, and I'm struck by the idea of trying to find their work to explore what was going on in Spicer's scene at the time we wrote After Lorca. Because poetry is so new to me it feels like trying to find an inroad could potentially be a little intimidating, but this feels like a fun way to go about it.