Patrick James Dunagan Reviews Larry Kearney's Memoir of Jack Spicer

An Entropy, Patrick James Dunagan reviews Testamentality, Transcryption: An Emotional Memoir of Jack Spicer (Spuyten Duyvil), penned by Larry Kearney, who "met poet Jack Spicer at Gino & Carlo’s bar in North Beach nearly immediately upon arriving in town." More:

As Kearney states, with nod to Fielding Dawson’s enthralling book on Franz Kline, this is an Emotional Memoir, only where Dawson’s book lays things out pretty direct, Kearney is far more enigmatic in his approach. His writing has a manner of breaking off at points to only return to the same scene later on but from a different angle, revealing another feature of the exchange at hand. Memories arise in passing swirls of recollection as the narrative snatches at them, sometimes only getting them down one piece here, another there. So a couple dozen pages or so prior to the above “first time we talked” scene, Kearney tells of being introduced to Spicer:

Jack came in the bar and as it turned out I was sitting at his table. He and Graham Mackintosh. They sat down. Lew Ellingham was there and there were a couple of chairs open and Lew said, ‘Jack, this is Larry Kearney. He’s just in from Brooklyn.’

‘Golly gee,’ Jack said, and I smiled at him prettily which threw him a half-step off. My bar instincts were pretty good. God knows I’d been in bars for a long time and I knew some fancy defensive footwork.

Jack and I started arguing immediately. Don’t remember what about. ‘Bare ruined choirs where once . . .’

I remember there was something about those lines but can’t imagine what the point was or might have been. Round and around. Went up to get a drink and Graham followed me said, ‘Do you have poems?’ and

I said ‘Uh, yeah,’ and he said, ‘I’ll print them.’

‘Why?’

‘Cause you’re arguing Jack to a standstill.’

Poetry or baseball: poetry and baseball. If these aren’t beginning sound like scenes out some kind of distorted Western, they probably should: Spicer’s Billy The Kid (1959) is a prime poetics-erotica exploration of his imagining of the historical mythic gunslinger’s aura as the poet’s young lost lover. Spicer had played out the role of being the rejected older man pursuing the younger man across the page of The Poem on many a prior occasion. When he became entangled with Kearney through the Imagination of the Poem, it was familiar territory...

Read on at Entropy.