1I want to start with a homage and an address. I want to start in August, 1933, when an edition of fifty volumes of Federico Garía Lorca’s Oda a Walt Whitman was published, meant to be distributed privately to the poet’s friends. This ode, as the generic form implies, is of course an allocution and a prosopopeia – the poet speaks not only of Walt Whitman, but to Walt Whitman. The poet calls to Whitman, recognizes him, and names him. But the litany of praise directed at “viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,” at “ Walt Whitman, lovely old man,” is interrupted in a lengthy passage, in which García Lorca shifts his attention, and the direction of his voice. Here he addresses no longer the good gray gay poet, but a group of individuals he calls the “ maricas,” a word for which the most common English translation is “fags,” and here he moves from the eulogistic to invective :

Pero sí contra vosotros, maricas de las ciudades,
de carne tumefacta y pensamiento inmundo.
Madres de lodo. Arpías. Enemigos sin sueño
del Amor que reparte coronas de alegría.

Contra vosotros siempre, que dais a los muchachos
gotas de sucia muerte con amargo veneno.
Contra vosotros siempre,
Fairies de Norteamérica,
Pájaros de La Habana,
Jotos de Méjico,
Sarasas de Cádiz,
Apios de Sevilla,
Cancos de Madrid,
Floras de Alicante,
Adelaidas de Portugal.

¡Maricas de todo el mundo, asesinos de palomas !
Esclavos de la mujer. Perras de sus tocadores.
Abiertos en las plazas con fiebre de abanico
o emboscados en yertos paisajes de cicuta.

¡No haya cuartel ! La muerte
mana de vuestros ojos
y agrupa flores grises en la orilla del cieno.
¡No haya cuartel ! ¡¡Alerta !!
Que los confundidos, los puros,
los clásicos, los señalados, los suplicantes
os cierren las puertas de la bacanal

2I now want to move forward 23 years to 1956, to another homage and another address – that of San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, who honored Lorca through his collection of translations and adaptations of him, and who addressed him in a series of letters directed toward Lorca’s shade. Spicer, a close friend of Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, was to first gain national recognition through his inclusion in Donald Allen’s enormously influential anthology of 1960, The New American Poetry, which also included work by young poets like Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Gregory Corso, to name only a few. Though Spicer’s work has taken longer to achieve wide-spread critical attention than that of most of the poets I have just mentioned, he has been a cult figure for practising poets ever since his death from alcohol poisoning in 1965, at the age of forty, and has been increasingly discussed in the context of mid-century poetics over the last ten years or so. Spicer, like Garcia Lorca not only a gay poet but explicitly concerned with gay poetics, and at the center of an almost exclusively gay poetic coterie, put his translation of the Ode to Walt Whitman at the heart of his book, After Lorca, and here is Spicer’s translation of the passage above :

But against the rest of you, cocksuckers of cities,
Hard-up and dirty-brained,
Mothers of mud, harpies, dreamless enemies
Of the Love that distributes crowns of gladness.
Against the rest of you always, who give the kids
Drippings of sucked-off death with sour poison.
Against the rest of you always
Fairies of North America,
Pajaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cadiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Adelaidas of Portugal,
Cocksuckers of all the world, assassins of doves,
Slaves of women, lapdogs of their dressing tables,
Opening their flies in parks with a fever of fans
Or ambushed in the rigid landscapes of poison.

Let there be no mercy. Death
Trickles from all of your eyes, groups
Itself like gray flowers on beaches of mud.
Let there be no mercy. Watch out for them.
Let the bewildered, the pure,
The classical, the appointed, the praying
Lock the gates of this Bacchanalia.

3Lorca’s poem and Spicer’s translation have both generated a good deal of critical discussion, and raise fascinating questions which I can only discuss briefly here. First would be the logic behind García Lorca’s startingly violent homophobic invective, which occurs in a poem which, in veiled language, celebrates Whitman as a sort of patriarch for gay poets every-where. A detailed look at the rest of Lorca’s long poem would be required to do justice to the vexed question of what “kind” of homosexual, or homosexual activity, García Lorca so violently condemns here. Evidence elsewhere in the poem bolsters the two prevailing interpretations : first, that the poet condemns gays who have a “feminine” style as opposed to the “macho” (Lorca’s word) Whitman ; second that he condemns homosexuals who are ostentatious in marking and signaling their identity, rather than emulating, as other lines have it, “... the kid who puts on a wedding dress/In the darkness of a closet ” (30). For my part, however, I would tend to agree with John K. Walsh, who has argued that neither of these interpretations is entirely borne out, and that a coherent “logic” defining García Lorca’s homophobia is not to be found. What seems clear is that Lorca associates a certain kind of defiled sexuality with what he sees as the degraded condition of urban existence in general. As Walsh points out, this leads to a “flawed syllogism,” for if the “maricas de las ciudades” or “ urban fags ” are guilty almost by association with the “ cities ” they inhabit, Lorca never is able to define precisely what aspect of this “ urban homosexuality” makes it so abject.

4The second point deserving of lengthy study is Spicer’s approach to translating the poem, and the liberties he takes. In this context, it is important to note that Spicer deliberately cast his book After Lorca in the light of Pound’s brilliant and notorious Homage to Sextus Propertius, and Spicer’s work contains original poems along with interpolations of full lines and passages, in addition to a rather surrealist conception of referential “correspondence,” which he elaborates in a series of letters to Lorca’s ghost, which also form part of the book. In any event, the translation of “ maricas ” by “ cocksuckers,” and Spicer’s deliberate insistence on obscenity in place of García Lorca’s more euphemistic vocabulary, has been discussed recently by Eric Keenaghan, for example. But one point which has largely escaped notice in discussions of Spicer’s translation of the Ode, is that a crucial part of it simply has not been translated, at least, not in the conventional sense : I mean the long list of derogatory terms for homosexuals, which Spicer (like other translators of the poem) can only repeat. As Antoine Berman has pointed out, in discussing what is translatable and what is not : “C’est la structure même du texte comme texte qui dictera ici ce qu’il faut ‘traduire’ ou ‘ne pas traduire’ (au sens courant), la non-traduction d’un terme valant comme un mode éminent de traduction" (302).

5What I want to emphasize here is that Spicer’s translation through non-translation suggests a crucial aspect concerning the role and function of invective in Garcia Lorca’s bewildering poem : that it is less about categories of homosexuals to be excoriated, than it is about names as used in excoriation. If, as Eric Keenaghan argues, the list of derogatory terms is universalising in its assertion that every city, like New York, has its contingent of “maricas,” which differ only in the local name used to excoriate them, the very emphasis on the variety and singularity of the regional name pushes the poem in another direction. In fact, this insistence on the name might be read as indicating that if Garcia Lorca cannot successfully define the category of homosexuals he wishes to condemn, it is because this category does not exist outside of and beyond its continual reinvocation through the repetition of derogatory interpellation and invective. In other words, the derogatory terms, named as such, point to no other referent than to their own regional singularities, and hint that they allude not to a referent, in the sense of a grouping of a kind of people, but to a social practice in which an adjectival value judgment is written into the allegedly value-neutral linguistic unit : the noun. It is the ontological groundlessness of the derogatory epithet which the poem enacts here, displaying the injurious term as a performative that creates a “catergory,” rather than referring to one, through a necessarily repeated ritual of interpellation. It is also a strikingly violent example of what Judith Butler has called the “ aesthetic of an injurious word ” which “ uses that word, but also displays it, points to it, outlines it as the arbitrary material instance of language that is exploited to produce certain kinds of effects. In this sense, the word as a material signified is foregrounded as semantically empty in itself, but as that empty moment in language that becomes the site of a semantically compounded legacy and effect ” (99).

6What interests me here is how Spicer’s focus on correspondences, or the transfer of sense between languages, gives way before the properly untranslatable – the regional epithet as poetic matter. For Spicer, a poetics of referentiality thus yields to a poetics of pragmatics, as the cultural and contextual weighting of a word becomes the central poetic fact. Thus, the key term “ correspondence ” comes to carry two distinct but wholly intertwined valences for Spicer : that of the relationship between signifiers from different languages that bear in some way equivalent signifieds (i.e., translation), but also that of the exchange of messages between individuals (i.e., letter writing). This implies that on the one hand Spicer’s After Lorca needs to be read as a series of letters exchanged between the Spanish and English languages. On the other, Spicer’s new appreciation of poetry as act, interpellation, and event leads him to his next book, Admonitions, which foregrounds the problematics of address, and whose form is explicitly epistolary. Poetry here comes to seem less a question of expression – of either the self, or the “world,” or of “meanings” to which language would be faithful. Rather, poetry takes on a primary role of gesture, directed explicitly from one person to another. In other words, every poem in Admonitions is concerned with establishing a discursive relationship between a particular sender – here, we’ll call him “Jack” – and a particular receiver. That is why almost every one of the eighteen poems in the book carries as its title the preposition “for” followed by a proper name – “For Joe,” “For Robin,” “For Billy,”, etc, including an auto-addressed epistle, “For Jack.” What I am suggesting, then, is that Admonitions is a book about poetry as prepositionality, if you will, as an illocutionary act which establishes positions within a structure of enunciation. In this sense, then, the “message” emitted by “Jack” is of course determined by the receiver destined to receive it, who remains paradoxically primary. In fact, in the first poem of the book – a prose letter addressed to his publisher, Joe Dunn, Spicer discusses both the possible limitations of a poetry so clearly defined by its status as message to a particular individual, and the dubious possibility of ever corralling language into the rigorous singularity of an “act” : “Are not these poems all things to all men, like Rorschach ink blots or whores ? Are they anything better than a kind of mirror ?” (55) Spicer asks. Yes and no, Spicer will conclude. The poems are indeed mirrors, but are “ reflections ” or “ expressions ” of neither the poet, nor of the addressee that gives the poem its name. Rather, while the poems are “distorted” mirrors, to use Spicer’s own language, they are each also carefully aimed at a particular individual : “Each one of them is a mirror, dedicated to the person that I particularly want to look into it. But mirrors can be arranged. The frightening hall of mirrors in a fun house is universal beyond each particular reflection.... Mirror makers know the secret – one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror” (55). The whole book, then, depends precisely on this arrangement – on which poem is aimed at which face, on which exchange is created. And the manner in which these poems are pointed lends the poems an affective charge which they would not otherwise possess. Thus, without including any invective actually directed at any of the addressees of the poem, the book still bristles with injury and rage, and calmly borders on the rant. Spicer seems aware of this when, again in the prefatory letter to “Joe,” he mentions the prevalence of obscenity in the book, only to deny its real specificity : “In these poems the obscene (in word and concept) is not used, as is common, for the sake of intensity, but rather as a kind of rhythm as the tip-tap of the branches throughout the dream of Finnegans Wake.... It is precisely because the obscenity is unnecessary that I use it, as I could have used any disturbance, as I could have used anything (remember the beat in jazz) which is regular and beside the point” (55). Spicer’s denial notwithstanding, the proximity of obscenity and the proper name often creates a kind of complicity between Spicer’s own provocative rhetoric and his addressee, such as in the poem “For Joe,” which begins with the lines “People who don’t like the smell of Faggot vomit/ Will never understand why men don’t like women” (62). A different, but analogous example of the effect of “pointing” the poems at an individual can be found in “For Dick,” which begins, “Innocence is a drug to be protected against strangers/ Not to be sold to police agents or rather/ Not to be sold” (59). Here, what could be read as a general statement is transformed into a veiled accusation, by virtue of its inclusion in a book titled “Admonitions” and the use of the proper name.

7In any event, it is within Admonitions that Spicer, in a letter he actually sent to Robin Blaser and subsequently included as a “ poem ”, dates his poetic maturity as beginning with Afier Lorca. In a different letter to Robin Blaser, he associates his translation of Lorca’s Ode with his learning “ to use anger (as opposed to angry irony) in a poem ” (Line, p. 38). This emphasis on poetry as address, on poetry as vector of anger, leads in Spicer, however, not so much to invective per se, but to a poetry of violence, to poetry as violence, which also means a poetry of the violence of love. Guns, words, and penises become increasingly for Spicer the mediators which link individuals together in networks of affect, networks in which affection is increasingly difficult to separate from violence, balm from injury, invocation from invective. As he writes in poem VI of his sequence “Billy the Kid” : The gun/A False clue /Nothing can kill/Anybody./ Not a poem or a fat penis. Bang, / Bang, bang. A false /Clue” (81). One could also think of the repeated appearances of the assassination of Kennedy in the book Language, always associated with both communicative violence and the wounds of Eros. Here is the final poem of the sequence :

Love is not mocked whatever use you put to it. Words are also not mocked.
The soup of real turtles flows through our veins. Being a [poet] a disyllable in a world of monosyllables. Awakened by the distance between the [o] and the [e]
The earth quakes. John F. Kennedy is assassinated. The dark forest of words lets in some light from its branches. Mocking them, the deep leaves That time leaves us
Words, loves. (243)
To close, however, I would like to look at the poem that Spicer addressed to himself in Admonitions :
For Jack

Tell everyone to have guts
Do it yourself
Have guts until the guts
Come through the margins
Clear and pure
Like love is.
The word changes
Grows obscure
Like someone
In the coldness of the scarey night air
Says –
Dad
I want your voice.

8Note that this poem is a meta-admonition – not only because Jack addresses himself, but also because he admonishes himself to remember to admonish : “Tell everyone to have guts.” But the guts – traditional sign of masculine resolve and male physical strength – here seep through onto the margins of a body thin as paper, of a violated text, itself permeable like a physical body. In fact, the poem seems to force one colloquial expression to seep into another. “ To have guts ” is, of course, often a euphemism for “to have balls”, and thus the guts one has and should have are a displaced synecdoche of masculinity. On the other hand, the image of guts pouring into the margins evokes the expression “to spill one’s guts,” which means, on the other hand, to speak or express what one shouldn’t, to be indiscreet, to allow what should remain inside and intimate to become public and exposed. The proximity of the two expressions makes clear that this form of exorbitant self-exposure is often figured as essentially unmasculine, feminizing, castrated. But having guts, Spicer seems to imply, means inevitably spilling them – out, over, through the borders of the page and the body. Thus the word guts – related etymologically to an Old English word meaning “to pour” – pours out into two meanings : Spicer writes, “The word changes/grows obscure.”

9This “ obscurity ” of the word contrasts with “ love,” defined as “ clear ”, and introduces the grammatical and syntactical obscurities of the poem’s last lines, which center around the question of the subject of enunciation. That is, does the phrase “ I want your voice ” belong to the “ someone ” who calls out “Dad,” or to the speaker of the poem ? In the first instance, we have an evocation of an unspecified childish victim of night-terrors invoking the comfort of the patriarchal voice, the voice which would re-establish, one imagines, the proper position of the “guts,” the line of the margin. In the second instance, we might read the poet as desiring to speak with, to write poetry with, the voice of the child who calls for his or her father in the night. The poem, of course, gives us no means for deciding between these two readings, but note that each attributes a different valency to the term “voice.” In one instance, we have a voice with which to speak, with which to express, but in another, we have a voice that we hear, the voice of the other, the voice that arrives from the outside, speaking to us, entering by the ear and reaching down straight to the guts. This uneasy balance between sending and receiving is of course appropriate in a poem of self-address, in a poem of auto-admonishment which is also one of injury and lack – a poem which begins by warning against the lack of guts, and then hints that an abundance of guts can lead to the same dangerous distancing of them. Most of all, the double instability regarding both the possession of guts and the location of voice indicates the dialectic of imprecation and aggrievement which Spicer’s poetry ceaselessly unfurls and refolds : that is, the dialectic that joins a positioning of injury and lack to a positioning of the pleading and insulting voice. That is, Spicer’s foregrounding of allocution displays invective, along with other forms of address, as a ritualized construction not only of the abjected receiver, but also of the sender who must always risk partaking of the abjection his language conjures. The invective functions so long as a mouth does not become an ear, so long as one does not send letters to one-self, so long as we know who Dad is, and what we want with his voice.