Letter to Jack Spicer

Dear Mr. Spicer,

When I read one of your poems and I come across words I understand, I never guess at their meanings. I am randomly getting it. A really perfect poem (of the kind you wrote) could be perfectly understood by a person who knew all of the words and had many interpretations. A really perfect poem (of the kind you wrote that cannot be written) is an infinitely small black hole.

It is somewhat simple. We want to obliterate the temporal object, explode the material emotion into the poem—and yet the temporal always sends out hundreds of its own ideas, prickly and depressive as mosquitoes. It is fine to tense your arm as they pilfer your blood, and watch them explode. A poet is an agent of nature not a saint. The ideas cast by the temporal harden and crack like a failed plaster cast of a wasted rock star's cock. No lipstick of oldest tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words, must be obliterated and reimagined outside of time.

I hear "Fire" from the back of the proverbial cinaplex. I grip my lover's hand and laugh. We have heard "Alas." But if there is a real fire, with real smoke, the word "Fire" will arrive outside of time, and we will hurry our asses for the nearest "Exit" sign, trusting it accurately signifies "this way out," trampling those in our path if we must.

Everyone I know is enthralled by ideas. They spill them out onto a table under the interrogative light of the poem, and count them up; they group them in any number of ways, trying every combination, invoking countless binary profundities—as if an idea could become an enlightenment by mere addition, or subtraction, of contemplations. Others pick up ideas from the sidewalks, from their coffeehouses, from their classrooms and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "Look what I have collected from the Postmodern age. See my tattoos, my blog roll, my baseball cap!" What does one do with all of this flotsam and jetsam?

Ideas bounce off the imagination. We throw them at the imagination only to chart the various deflections. They are the ricochet, nothing more. They are as valuable in themselves as giant, bright red clown shoes in a brothel.

Let me repeat—the perfect poem is an infinitely small black hole with meaning only on the other side.

Broken golden lip-synch, or
Yours in passing,
Scott