Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Crab report from Portland

Yes, I'm cranky!

I have been reading Jack Spicer's biography -- eating it really at 50 + pages a day - I'm usually a slow reader. Last night, I had a dream that I was in Paris and carrying the book around. I went into J Crew (yes, in Paris) and gave them my credit card - I think you had to get a credit card to get in there. My card was bad, so they said,;'we'll have to take your book away.' I FREAKED out and ran out of the store. It was raining and my book got wet. This is the third dream 'in which I was a poet' in two weeks. I also dreamt that Eileen Myles was my boss at the Department of Education and that I was trying to write a poem like Mei Mei Berssenbrugge writes a poem - with collage pieces all over the table.

I'm exploring the idea of whether every writing poet today can claim they know Spicer by six degrees of separation. I'm still working on the rules. My primary idea is to connect the people through intimate relationships - not sexual - meaning long friendship, relative, mentor or other. I've found out that Jack and I are pretty close. Here are some lists I made last night which I'm not sure are accurate:

Me
Lee Bartlett
Bill Everson
Robert Duncan
Jack Spicer

*
me
Norma Cole
Jess
Robert Duncan
Jack Spicer

*
Me
Lisa Jarnot
Kevin KIillian
Jack Spicer

1 comment:

Steven Fama said...

You can go straight from Everson to Spicer, at least to me it's certain they knew each other; I've seen a photo of the two in the same room (a small poetry reading at Rexroth's apartment) at the same time.

And you don't need to to go through Duncan to Jess to Spicer; Cole knew them both (Jess designed a book cover for one of Cole's books), and Spicer knew both Jess and Duncan -- though of course RD was there too.

And Killian, for all the fine work in the biography, didn't know Spicer. Spicer was long dead.