What do we mean when we say a poem is a machine? Part 5. (Happy
Birthday, Jack Spicer.) Jack Spicer begins the first of a series
of lectures in a living room in Vancouver in 1965 explaining his
belief in dictation, specifically that a poet is a kind of
conduit between the poem and the source of the poem, which is an
external, inexplicable thing. He begins by telling the story of
how Yeats, when on a train in California in 1918, witnessed his
wife fall into a trance in which she “started automatic writing
as they were going through the orange groves.” What got into her
head were “spooks,” as Spicer calls them, and they were talking
to Yeats through his wife. When Yeats asked them, “What are you
here for?” they said, “We’re here to give metaphors for your
poetry.” Spicer then explains the significance of this event,
saying “it was the first time since Blake on the business of
taking poetry as coming from the outside rather than from the
inside. In other words, instead of the poet being a beautiful
machine which