Testamentality, Transcryption

Duncan told me it was too late, that I was too late, I’d missed Spicer… I slept thru grad school with The Collected Books Of Jack Spicer for my pillow, provoking dreams of writing books of serial poems, book-length poems like Spicer’s, not journal poems… Awoke to the Great Binge of ’98, spending my teacher’s pay on whole shelves of biography/poems/lectures… And thru it all, Jack Spicer the man waited wisely inside Helen Adam’s blurry b/w snapshot and outside of time; it did seem too late to catch up. Until this. Until Larry Kearney’s new portrait, the “emotional memoir,” invites me to sit at Jack Spicer’s table, where I just now overhear him to say: “This is where the poem happens. Here.”

     Rich Blevins