Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
We live in a world of impermanence. The impermanence of memory. The impermanence of sight. The impermanence of life itself.
At times we shore ourselves up trying to deny this fact, and yet at other times, we fully embrace it. Sometimes life is a fleeting thing, a heartbreaking thing, and yet even then, there is beauty.
Jack Spicer was someone who lived a heartbreaking life.
A gay man before Stonewall who seemed never to find connection and an alcoholic who became crushed by the power the drink brought him.
He collapsed in the elevator of his apartment building at the age of 40 and died from liver failure.
His famous last words were, “My vocabulary did this to me.”
Jack Spicer and the Lost Voices of Poetry
I feel like I came to poetry at the most exciting time.
When I was an undergrad, the Jack Spicer collected was reissued, as well as some works that had been out of print for a long time, like Zukofsky or some of the Language poets.
Spicer captivated all of us at that time.
Here was a poet almost neglected, who was astounding not only in his poetry but in his poetics, a figure perfect for mythology.
He was a poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance, which basically cleared the way for the Beat movement to find success.
Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Spicer were the three figureheads in this revolutionary new post-war poetics, and all three demand to be read today.
One of their central preoccupations at the time was the serial poem, a long poem that is worked on over time, and each one has their own interpretation.
Spicer’s is his famous Imaginary Elegies, which presents a heartbreaking treatment of poetry, self, and impermanence.
Poetry as a Moment, Not a Monument
In Imaginary Elegies, poetry is not a monument that stands the test of time but a moment, a flash of perception that is gone as soon as it arrives.
The opening lines of the first elegy present poetry as a camera that is only capable of capturing an instant:
Poetry, almost blind like a camera,
is alive in sight only for a second.
Poetry, often thought of as an enduring art form that will outlast everything to preserve the past, becomes but a moment itself.
It becomes a snapshot that exists only in the moment of its making and not a vessel of permanence.
Further, since poetry is now subject to the same decay as memory itself, it cannot offer any sort of salvation from time, nor can it hold any truth beyond what the instant of perception presents.
Poetry then, like a memory, begins to dissolve the very instant it comes into being.
The moment of its making becomes a moment already lost.
Not only does poetry itself fail to capture the full picture of reality, but its own act of perception becomes ephemeral—this blink and a click snap that happens almost as the word itself forms and is lost.
It challenges the deeply ingrained assumption about art itself, that it provides a means of preserving an experience.
But unlike the camera, which can capture the moment for all time, the camera of poetry seems to be without any film inside, so that the device cannot store anything but can only illuminate a moment before the image itself is erased.
This begs the question of what poetry itself is.
If it cannot preserve, then what does it do? If it cannot hold onto the past, then what is happening in the poem itself?
For Spicer, poetry does not become something to hold onto things or to keep them from vanishing—poetry becomes the very witness of their vanishing in time.
The Moon: A Vault for Lost Memories That Never Returns Them
What is lost to memory or memory’s fragility is a central concern of the entirety of the elegies, but its exploration truly begins in Elegy II:
God must have a big eye, to see everything
which has been lost or forgotten.
Instead of memory being something within us and our own perceptions of our life and reality, something that we can summon at will, the poem suggests that memory exists elsewhere, in a sort of celestial archive that we don’t have access to.
The moon holds what we have lost or forgotten, a repository of lost things, and yet it does not return them.
Memory itself is stored but cannot be recalled, preserved but ultimately rendered useless in any sort of reflective spirit.
The moon then becomes a camera that sees what was never noticed in the first place, those hidden details of life unencountered because they were outside of our perception:
It is the objects that we never saw.
It is the dodoes flying through the snow
that flew from Baffinland to Greenland’s tip
and did not even see themselves.
Memory then is not a tool of recollection, something we can lean on and learn from as is traditionally thought, but a ghostly presence, something extinct like a dodo, of what was never fully perceived to begin with.
The moon does not become the repository of our treasured recollections, but a record of everything that has slipped past our awareness.
It does not store meaning; it merely records its absence.
The failure of the moon to be an archive becomes the failure of memory itself.
What we think we remember is never fully accurate and cannot be truly retrieved.
Instead of something that somehow preserves the past, this poem suggests that memory is only a mechanism that highlights how much we have lost, how much we have failed to see, and how much we can never recover.
Time Does Not Finish a Poem—Because Nothing Ever Truly Ends
One of the central ideas of the poem, which becomes explicit in Elegy IV but has really been shadowing the entire sequence from the start, is that:
Time does not finish a poem.
This phrase, which becomes a refrain for the poem, denies that poetry can offer any sort of resolution or permanence.
If time itself cannot finish a poem, then perhaps neither does the poet—perhaps nothing truly concludes or is finished.
The traditional idea of an elegy is to provide a sort of linguistic mourning, a way to make sense of loss through language.
In the traditional elegy, poetry serves as a means of stabilizing grief, turning sorrow and sadness into something whole and coherent.
But for Spicer, the elegy is not a tombstone to center grief, but a ripple on a pond of water that disappears as soon as it is made.
Here, the elegy is not something that can conclude grief but is just another moment of impermanence.
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Your Identity is Just a Story You Tell Yourself
Who is watching this imagined place?
This is a central concern in these poems—that of a stable or singular identity. The shifting voices and shape-shifting figures destabilize certainty.
Spicer, in these elegies, is at constant play with perspectives, introducing figures of gods, animals, and dead poets that transform or contradict the self, making any sense of identity fluid and dependent on perception rather than essence itself.
It seems in these poems that we do not see ourselves as we are—that we are often caught in a sort of liminal space between who we think we are, how others see us, and what we fear we actually might be.
Take the idea of the lovers in Elegy II, who:
Lose themselves in others,
do not see themselves.
Instead of revealing an identity, love dissolves it.
And in that dissolution, the only thing that can truly see them is the moon, which is a cold and distant recorder of forgotten things.
If we cannot see ourselves, then who actually can?
The Fragile Nature of Identity: A Shifting Illusion
Identity, much like memory or poetry, becomes a complicated thing in the elegies, where possession is in constant question.
Identity becomes something we cannot control or even own.
Figures are continually surfacing and changing in this poem, often becoming shaped by how others perceive them,
“The witch-like virgin Diana, being neither witch nor virgin, is the moon’s god. Even her sex changes, she is a black bitch-dog look! She has yellow tits.”
Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon, becomes something in fluidity, a sort of metamorphosis constantly pulsing between divinity and animality, between the witch and virgin, between masculine and feminine.
Spicer further complicates her identity by making her existence conditional,
“But she doesn’t exist, when the poem is over.”
Diana then is not so much an entity as a projection; she is the powerful goddess as long as she is being watched, but the moment she isn’t and the poem ends, she dissolves into something ordinary.
Identity itself here is contingent, not something that is inherent but something that relies on being perceived by an external force.
Beyond just Diana in the poem, we see Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, or Sigurd, the Norse hero, or even the poet himself, flickering between existence and nonexistence depending on how they are observed.
Each figure appears to have an essence, that of goddess or hero or poet, which shifts only to contradict itself or disappear entirely under different circumstances.
Identity then becomes not something that is fixed but, much like memory in its impermanence, it becomes a series of perceptions constantly in a state of flux but never fully belonging to the person it is ascribed.
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The Fractured Voice: When the Poet is No Longer One
If identity itself is unstable, what does that make the traditional elegiac speaker?
In Spicer’s elegies, we see a fractured poetic voice, and often, we are unclear who is speaking themselves.
At times, the poet himself speaks in his own voice, but just as often, he is channeling other voices—dead poets or mythical figures or even imaginary spirits,
“It is as if we conjure the dead and they speak only through our own damned trumpets, through our own medium.”
Here, the poet, instead of being a unified single voice, becomes the site or host for multiple voices, each of which creates an entirely different identity.
In fact, these identities become contradictory—some are mythic, others historical, and some seem invented—but they all share the central idea that they are mediated through the poet and therefore become unstable.
Just as Diana can only exist while being observed, these figures can only exist through the poet and, by extension, the poem.
However, they become not an extension of the poet’s voice but a mirror showcasing the instability and impermanence of the poet, who is speaking themselves into being.
In these poems, the poet is both the creator and the created,
“Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought when I wrote that.”
Here, as in other places, memory itself isn’t something permanent.
He cannot remember what he himself had meant, calling it into question.
Much like the multiplicity of voices, the authority of his own poetry is unstable.
He is looking back on these words after years of separation and finding them strange, foreign, and possibly false.
The role of the poet in these poems is one of continual change; he is the creator but also the very medium or host for voices outside himself.
He doubts his own assertions, and he writes but can’t ever finish.
The Deception of Sight: When Vision Fails You
In these poems, there is a world constructed where vision is both a gift and a curse, where light does not always reveal, and darkness does not always obscure.
There seems to be a constant tension between sight and blindness, illumination and opacity, as a way of probing the instability of perceptions and our own fraught relationship with truth.
Underlying these poems is the challenge that seeing is understanding; here, it seems that clarity can be deceptive, where obscurity may contain its own form of wisdom.
The images of the eye, the camera, the moon, and the sun construct a landscape where knowledge is always partial and perception is always in question.
The poem itself begins with an image of the fragility of vision and only continues to complicate it as we move on.
Vision is an instantaneous and fleeting thing, not something that can capture a continuous access to truth, just as memory in the poem appears as selective and unreliable.
The poet’s eye cannot offer a steady gaze but can only snap and click and disappear like a camera without any film.
The Moon’s Eye: A Cosmic Archive of the Forgotten
In the poem, the poet’s eye steps away from the traditional role of the poet as an all-seeing figure. Instead of clarity, the poet can only offer instability.
Perception can never be fully whole, never fully sustained.
Poetry itself becomes subject to the very same limitations as vision—it can only capture fragments, never the entirety of the truth.
What is left over, what cannot be seen, becomes collected in the moon.
It holds all that human sight cannot, what the poet himself cannot see—but not just what is visible or might be visible but all that has been erased, lost, or never even perceived at all.
The moon becomes almost like a cosmic camera, endlessly recording what human memory itself has discarded.
But we cannot forget that the moon remembers what we never even thought to see, so it contains not only forgotten reality but whole alternate versions of history—things that could have been, should have been, but that never were.
Perception becomes something that is expansive enough to contain the impossible and the absent.
The Trap of Absolute Clarity: When Seeing Too Much Destroys Meaning
Rather than celebrating sight and perception as something inherently valuable, Spicer suggests that seeing too much might be more dangerous than seeing too little:
“God’s goodness is a black and blinding cannibal with sunny teeth that only eats itself.”
God’s all-consuming eyes suggest that light does not always illuminate—it can burn, consume, and destroy.
The goodness of this divine vision can only feed into itself, offering only paradox.
The suggestion here is that memory or knowledge, just like light, can be too much. In the poem, the poet tries to see everything all at once and is doomed in his endeavor.
The poet, in order to reach the poetic, feeds on himself, consumes himself.
The poet must operate within his own limitations, with his own partial sight.
Twilight: The Only Place Truth Can Exist
If light and darkness are both forms of blindness, then where is a way out?
The poem offers the liminal space of twilight as a site of potentiality:
“Most things happen in twilight when the sun goes down and the moon hasn’t come.”
Twilight then is a space between these extremes of sight—a threshold where things are neither fully seen nor fully obscured.
This, the poem suggests, is the space where poetry happens and transformation occurs.
Rather than seeking an absolute light, as in clarity or logic, nor an absolute darkness, as in oblivion or forgetting, the in-between is embraced.
The ambiguous and the uncertain are prized.
By the final elegy, Spicer is no longer seeking the blinding knowledge of sight but instead learning to exist in uncertainty.
It is only in this final elegy where poetry, like vision, or memory, or identity, can remain open-ended, unfinished, unresolved.
Seven Lessons from Imaginary Elegies
- Nothing is truly preserved.
Art, language, and memory do not hold onto the past as we imagine. Instead, they fade, distort, and remain incomplete. We must accept that everything is in flux rather than seeking permanence. - Memory is an illusion of permanence.
We trust our memories, but they are more like dreams—fleeting, unreliable, and shaped by what is missing as much as what is recalled. Recognizing this can free us from clinging to distorted versions of the past. - Poetry is not a monument but a process.
If poetry is like a camera, it is one that fails to fully capture reality. Instead of being an archive, poetry exposes the limits of perception, the impossibility of truly preserving experience. - The act of writing (or remembering) is more important than the result.
No poem is ever “finished,” just as no memory remains unchanged. The value lies not in the final product but in the ongoing attempt to hold onto what is always slipping away. - Identity is not fixed—embrace change.
Like Spicer’s shape-shifting figures, who we are is constantly evolving. We are not static beings, and self-definition should remain flexible, allowing for reinvention and transformation. - Certainty is a trap—live in the twilight.
Spicer warns against both absolute clarity (which blinds) and total darkness (which erases meaning). Truth exists in the space between knowing and not knowing—in ambiguity, transition, and openness to change. - We must learn to let go.
The moon will not return what it has taken. The funhouse dummies will not come back to life. The poem is never finished. And yet, the birds keep flying. In the end, perhaps that movement—not resolution, but the willingness to continue—is what truly matters.
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