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GEOFFREY HLIBCHUK hough the poetry of Jack Spicer has accrued a deserved amount of critical attention in recent years, the best treatment of his work is still Robin Blaser's seminal essay, "The Practice of Outside." In this study, first published in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (1975), Blaser lucidly details Spicer's specific method of composition, summarizing it as "the dictation, the unknown, or the outside" (115). Essentially, Spicer's poetics sees the poet as passive, inflicted by a sort of "divine possession," as Plato's Socrates characterized the performances of the rhapsode (222). Rather than emanating from a subjective source, poetry is instead the result of an unknown energy communicated through the poet. Against "the push of contemporary poetics towards locus, ground" and a sense of "where we are" (Blaser 133), Spicer's work dissipates into air, frequencies, and radio waves. His poetry indexes a mysterious outside, a force threatening to break into our own world in the form of curious linguistic configurations through the conduit of the poet. The poet, then, is never fully in control of the poem but rather is a medium for whatever unholy energies are on the verge of erupting into our domain. Poets can
Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press
Published: Dec 10, 2010
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