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Liberal America (in the mid 1950s) taught you to keep quiet about resentment, competitions or bigotry; and modernist art, a liberalism of culture, offered disguises and strategies for basic conflicts. It's not hard to think of high modernists whose writing gets more and more paranoid - Wyndham Lewis, Kafka are wonderful examples - and closer to home a tradition of flaky millenarians, Poe and Emily Dickinson through Black Mountain. Letter writing gave you a chance to expand on this system-making, express yourself more candidly.
There's a Spicer essay, "Some Notes on Whitman for Allen Joyce, ' ' that's relevant here. Dating from about the time that Jack Spicer wrote his letters to Joyce, it signals in its very title its intention to be for him. I don't find that particularly flattering, and I wonder how Joyce might have felt about this honor, given that most of the essay is really a badmouthing of the possibility of gay community. Spicer calls up the hostility of the Other World. "Calamus," he says, meaning roughly Whitman's idea of a gay community, ' 'cannot exist in the presence of cruelty," defining this as "not merely human cruelty" but the "cruelty of shadows, the cruelty of spirits. " Conclusion: heaven is against this particular community as it is against so many (ethnic, sexual and racial) others. Did these demographies help to shape the science fiction /Star Wars atmosphere of the great and late Collected Booh?
I'm talking about allegory. Not a formalism. But a plurality of voices rooted in a person's own social -history, a populist topography
When asked if I am of the Jew or Goyim
When asked if I am an enemy of your people,
I would reply that I am of a somewhat older people:
The Gay, who are neither Jew nor Goyim
- as Spicer was to put it in one early poem. There's a shiver, because in these electrically charged proper names, Gay and Jew, energy is tied down, as it is in the letters with these and other names,...