Abstract
The American poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) called, in his second lecture for students in Vancouver, his serial poem The Holy Grail (1962), ‘fairly simple’. Readers will undoubtedly find it not simple at all. ‘Cryptic’ would be a better characteristic. But Spicer does not want to be more explicit. Is he concealing something? The poet did not, however, leave us without some clues, two of them being references to authors, namely Jessie Weston and Hans Jonas. The editors of his lectures did give some, but in my view not sufficient, attention to these references. Through this article I intend to correct this shortcoming. Weston’s medieval studies, especially those pertaining to Arthurian Literature, contain many elements also present in Spicer’s serial poem, thus providing a possibility to examine his poetics more closely. In addition, Hans Jonas’s book The Gnostic Religion (1958), subtitled The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity, helps us gain a deeper understanding of Spicer’s poem; moreover, it explains his reluctance to write plain language. The knowledge Spicer intends to make known should at the same time remain somehow hidden, because, as an ancient tradition demands: only initiates have a right to know, to obtain access to gnosis.
Highlights
Since several years, Jack Spicer’s poetry has won a late and new actuality, thanks to new editions of his work [1, 2, 23], and studies from, among others, Daniel Katz [8], Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian [6], Lucinda Taylor-Callier [15], Scott Challener [9], R
‘simple’ serial poem The Holy Grail, if we are aware of the possibility of references in the poems to pre-Christian or Christian-Gnostic ritual
What exactly is the Grail? What does Jessie Weston have to say about this mysterious object? She researched the oldest surviving stories about this ‘talisman’ and found20 in them no less than seven different meanings of the word ‘grail’. They are: 1. ‘a mysterious and undescribed Food-providing Object, which comes and goes without visible agency’. 2. ‘a Stone, endowed with food- and life-giving properties, which from time to time assumes the rôle of an oracle’. 3. ‘a “Holy” Object, the form of which is not indicated, wrought of gold and precious stones, and emitting a brilliant light’. 4. ‘a Reliquary’. 5. ‘the Dish from which our Lord and His Disciples ate the Paschal Lamb at the Last Supper, or the Cup of that Meal’. 6. ‘the Vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea received the Blood which flowed from the Wounds of the Redeemer’. 7. ‘a mysterious combination of these two latter forms with the Chalice of the Eucharist’. Five of these seven meanings of the grail we find in Spicer’s Holy Grail
Summary
Jack Spicer’s poetry has won a late and new actuality, thanks to new editions of his work [1, 2, 23], and studies from, among others, Daniel Katz [8], Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian [6], Lucinda Taylor-Callier [15], Scott Challener [9], R. There were translations in Dutch [10, 21, 22] All these recent editions offer new interpretations, inviting further research and new insights into Spicer’s life and poetry. Poems, called ‘one-night stands’ by him, and rejected Spicer sets himself the task of opening his mind for messages from that Outside He adds that he will make his own vocabulary ‘as furniture’ available to the Outside, so that this for humans inaccessible area can contact our world. His series of grail poems was, he tells us, ‘inspired’, ‘breathed’ into him from the Outside, during a meditative writing process lasting months. As ‘ordinary readers’, get through to the meaning of these poems?
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