A translation for Jack Spicer

              In his 7th letter to James Alexander written around 1958-59, the Californian poet Jack Spicer quotes the wristwatch he traded with his lover against a pawnticket and some money sent via Air Mail: «There are two kinds of places in the world (...) pawnshops and postoffices.»

In this handful of seductive letters written by the older poet-Spicer to his younger poet-muse James Alexander, this double concept of the postoffice/ pawnshop is further evoked and developed, in times given the ubiquitous power of a mushroom that grows in unexpected places, some other times expanded to contain the Pacific Ocean and the moonless stars shining above it at night, while the poet is pissing out the wine and the conversation he had with his poets friends a couple of hours before.

In Spicer’s understanding of this dualistic space that binds back to back the pawnshop and the postoffice, the walls don’t exist and the stars are to be included to what he also calls «The Dead Letter Office» in his 1960’s poetry book The Heads Of the Town Up To The Aether, a place where R-I-M-B-A-U-D was once born, where the letters get lost and where objects are abandonned, feelings are traded for money, rejection is being smoothened by cash one is free to spend buying stamps or wine.

The wine will be pissed, the letters opened by a nosy postman who is also a foot fetish, and the dead’s poet’s words will
be played through someone’s phone speaker and echo through the busy streets of a city the poet’s never heard of, in the vicinity of a two room space sometimes called Scheusal, a random place where letters are sometimes delivered, a place com- parable to a box of shredded wheat, a drunken comment, a big piece of paper, a shadow meaningless except as a threat or a communication, a throat.

Or maybe the city did enter the poet’s brain? In another of his letters to James Alexander Jack Spicer is filling the silence of an answer failing to come, writing about spring, about countries and about words invented by an authoritarian post officer called Mr. Still-Water-Run-Do-Not-Walk-To-The-Nearest-Exit, that one must obey because he knows the way letters and objects move. About that spring in this city Spicer writes:

« (...) Things cannot die in such a spring (unless the old men of the world commit suicide (our suicide) over the question of wether East Germans be called East Germans in diplomatic notes) and every leaf and flower of this red-hot February asks me to remember this. Though it is on the other side of poetry, spring, thank whatever created both of them, is spring. And I am not sure on a day like this that the living and the dying world doesn’t have something analogous to poetry in it. That every flower and every leaf (properly read) is not a James as well as a Jim.

Things cannot die in such a spring and yet your silence (for the spring itself proclaims that there are such things as clouds and moons) frightens me when I close my eyes or begin to write a poem.

I wish you were with me on this grass in the Tiergarten and could be with me like the leaves and the flowers and the grass a part of this spring. Jim and James.»

                                                                                                                                                                                                            Love, 

                                                                                                                                                                                                            Rosa Joly