Collage, Collaboration & Bookish Beasts

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Jack Spicer is perhaps the 20 th century's most insistent proponent of the essential Outside as a source of poetry, though the idea of a generative outside source is an ancient one, from classical invocations to the muses to Milton entering William Blake's foot as a comet to dictate poetry to him. In Spicer's first Vancouver lecture, in June of 1965, he articulates his theories:

. . . essentially that there is an Outside to the poet. Now what the Outside is like is described differently by different poets. And some of them believe that there's a welling up of the subconscious or of the racial memory or the this or the that, and they try to put it inside the poet. Others take it from the Outside. Olson's idea of energy and projective verse is something that comes from the Outside.

I think the source is unimportant. But I think that for a poet writing poetry, the idea of just exactly what the poet is in relationship to this Outside, whether it's an id down in the cortex which you can't reach anyway, which is just as far outside as Mars, or whether it is as far away as those galaxies which seem to be sending radio messages to us with the whole of the galaxy blowing up just to say something to us⁸

According to Spicer, an essential element of the outside source is its remoteness; the distance a poet (or the source) must travel is a sign of the message's claim to urgency. To illustrate this ideal, Spicer famously referred to the poet as a kind of radio: “essentially you are something which is being transmitted into.”⁹ The importance of technology is notable here, whether it is the invention of the radio which allows Spicer's Martians to dictate messages to the poet or whether it is the evolution and popularization of the Internet to such a degree that the Google search engine allows Mohammad to access social climates and circles that – whether because of geography, race, class or inclination – he would not otherwise access. For the contemporary poet's imagination, technology is a democratizing force; a poet is pushed to acknowledge the divide between his or her poetic presentation of everyday speech and the actuality of everyday vernacular as it occurs in chat-rooms, personal websites and the like. A poet can offer her or his poems as a respite from the everyday “abuses” of the language or work to more accurately reflect “non-poetic” registers of language, but it's becoming more difficult for poets to ignore what the everyday vernacular actually looks like in the hands and mouths of the people who use it.

The other Outside source that Spicer refers to in the above passage – the id – can also serve as a map for Mohammad's Googled sources, the language of individuals whose values are normally nowhere reflected in the well-considered, carefully chosen lines of (in Mohammad's words) “ the effete peripatetic poet safely above a scenic view of the countryside and its filthy horizon.”¹⁰ In one formulation that can be derived from Mohammad's view, the Googled sources create the bubbling subconscious of the language, a subconscious that more directly expresses the fears, desires and prejudices that often are excluded from acceptable and publishable poetries. But in fact Mohammad takes a more radical stance and offers these voices not as marginal or subliminal pools but as the actual main current/currency of the language: “ A mainstream is a forceful, central current that carries in its path all the debris and livestock and entire vacationing families that get vortexed into it. It is not a carefully constructed iron walkway [. . .] In the mainstream, you have to shout to be heard above the roar [. . .] The mainstream is the scary global video game we live in, everyday, and it has nothing to do with some absurd publishing scam . . .” ¹¹ In Mohammad's formulation, the Robert Pinskys and Mary Olivers of the poetry world, poets who often are referred to as mainstream poets, are actually the (self-) marginalized voices. A poetics that truly reflected the “mainstream” would reflect the tensions and excitements of the present as the present is experienced by those outside a poet's (often privileged) peer group; a truly mainstream poetics would perhaps more resemble a chat-room or reality television show than most contemporary poetries.