Event Follow-Up: On Jack Spicer's Papers

There was a full house at Jocelyn Saidenberg's home for the first of the Nonsite Collective's monthly Sunday meetings / events, 3/29/09. We launched an investigation into archival practices by way of a discussion on the Jack Spicer archive, with Kevin Killian, Tanya Hollis, and Jocelyn, all of whom worked to archive Spicer's papers in various capacities at the Bancroft Library. Brandon Brown, John Sakkis, Kelly Holt, Logan Ryan Smith, and Jason Morris also spoke about their experiences working as assistants to Killian and Peter Gizzi.

Jason Morris read from "A New Poem," one of Spicer's unpublished serial poems that will appear in a forthcoming volume of Spicer's work. The section Jason read goes like this:

The paratroopers of poetry
Fly hell
See them drop in a great body
Like moths or giant pandas. Joe Hill
William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope,
Gertrude Stein. Hear them scream
As they hit the edges
Sunya. There is nothing there. No
Female escort, no
Male escort. You are alone
Without even any policemen to try to arrest you.
The loneliness of hell is past belief. Beauty is dead
Sunya. The perception of beauty is dead
Sunya. There are shapes
That walk across the universe. We

(The section seems to end abruptly, just like that!)

The discussion ranged far and wide. Among many other things, some rich ideas emerged about the organization of archival materials around "traces of lived activity." Where do such traces begin, and where do they end? How can they ever be adequately cataloged? How will scholars, archivists, and poets ever agree on such questions within the hallowed halls of the academy's most prestigious libraries?

For Kevin Killian's reflections on his role archiving Spicer's papers, see his Bancroft talk, attached below.