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GETTING THE OUTSIDE IN


When I was a student at Naropa one summer, I audited a class taught by Michael
McClure in which McClure asked the students to create a "personal universe deck" of
cards. The rationale and a version of one of the lectures used in that class later appeared
in the book, Talking Poetics at Naropa Institute. The idea was to use words or images on
index cards as starting points for further reflection, and to mix and match the words or
images to generate new writing. As McClure explained the criteria for the deck, it
became clear that he wanted us to attempt to encompass our experiences and our beliefs
as broadly as possible, while remaining specific about each element within those broad
definitions. One other student in the classroom pointed out that this concept was similar
to the tarot. McClure agreed, but didn't elaborate. After that class ended, I asked the
fellow student about the tarot. He indicated that he was no expert on the subject, but that
he knew of a particular book I should read (Eden Gray’s Mastering the Tarot), and that he
knew of a used bookstore in town that sold used tarot decks. Within hours, I had my own
tarot deck, and Eden Gray's mass-market paperback.

Although I attempted to read fortunes with the deck (using the book on the side,
looking up definitions as I went) for a while, I eventually let the deck settle to the bottom
of a box of books that I hardly ever opened for years. Once I moved to New York, I
would occasionally pull out the deck for personal readings, and I slowly collected a few
other books (most notably, Paul Foster Case’s book, The Tarot), but I barely scratched
the surface of the cards.

In the meantime, I was becoming more and more obsessed with the works of
Jackson Mac Low and Jack Spicer. On the surface, it is hard to imagine two poets with
less in common. Mac Low was considered an experimental poet. He often worked with
various methods involving random chance, and many of his works were only realized
fully in performance. Spicer, on the other hand, would never have considered using
chance to generate poems. He claimed to be channeling the "outside," but mysteriously,
his poems tended to reflect the same concerns that I found in his prose. Indeed, the
structure and style of Spicer's work had nothing in common with Mac Low’s work. And
as for performance, I doubt anyone would ever characterize Spicer as a performance poet.
I was too young to have ever known Spicer, but I moved to New York partly to
meet Mac Low. Almost immediately I met Jackson. I got a job stage managing the 12th
International Sound Poetry Festival, where I met and worked with lots of amazing
people, and Jackson was on the board of the festival. One of the first conversations I had
with Mac Low was about what I considered to be a powerful crossroads, the use of
random chance to generate works of language art versus the use of random chance to
divine events of the past, present and future. I postulated to Mac Low that since tarot
cards are shuffled, and yarrow stalks are randomly pulled, that the processes he used to
write poems were also divinatory processes, and that one could use Stanzas for Iris Lezak
as a divinatory tool. Jackson was horrified! He apparently had never considered the idea,
and was somewhat offended at the thought of being tossed in the same hat with table
thumpers and gypsy fortune-tellers. He didn't even believe in divination as such, and
warned me not to confuse his work with such tosh.

My reading of Mac Low's works continued over the years, and I never lost the
sense of magical engagement with them. I never mentioned the idea to Jackson again, but
I secretly found confirmation of my ideas about his work again and again. At one point I
tried to replicate the Stanzas for Iris Lezak by purchasing some of the books that Mac
Low used to generate the poems in the book, and attempting to use the diastic methods he
used to generate new poems. Invariably, the poems I was getting were not up to Mac
Low's poems, even using the same methods on the same texts that he had used. That little
experiment indicated to me that the exact moment of the process, combined with other
seemingly random elements and the consciousness of the operator all played major roles
in the invention of those poems, and that one could no more replicate these poems than
one could replicate a particular sunset. The same could be said for any divination as well.
With Jackson Mac Low's work, the meaning derived by the reader would often be
collaborative. Eschewing ordinary grammar and predictable meaning-making, the reader
might get an entirely different reading of the poem every time the reader comes to the
poem. This was also true of the hot work of the 1980's, Language poetry. Of course,
many of the Language writers were reading Mac Low, too, along with Clark Coolidge,
Bernadette Mayer, and other writers whose work often broke with tradition in various
radical ways. For some of these writers, the implications of Mac Low’s works were seen
as political and social, which was more true to Mac Low's thinking than my speculations.
Jack Spicer's works take a much more metaphysical position than Mac Low's. He
insisted that his work was largely dictated from the outside, via the muses, or the
martians, or the spirits. Oddly, those outside voices often spoke in terms that only Spicer
himself would use, and the actual language used was much more traditionally legible. Yet
Spicer’s work is also prone to surprisingly unfamiliar readings every time one re-reads
the poems. The surface is the same (unlike Mac Low's work, which seems to shift focus
visually between readings), but the underlying "meaning" changes. Not to belabor the
point, but however different Spicer is from Mac Low, my fascination with both poets was
growing into a unified field theory which included a great deal of magical thinking (my
own).

My own work had undergone some changes over this time period, starting with
cut-ups and chance operations; I found various ways to get outside my own predilections.
Over time, I developed more direct ways of encountering the outside. I started taking
notes in a journal fairly regularly. These notes would include grocery lists, drafts of
letters to various friends, snappy lines overheard in public, personal expressions of
thoughts, ideas and feelings and attempted poems. I would studiously avoid looking over
these notes for months on end, and then, when the mood was right, I would sit down to
my typewriter (later computer) and begin to construct poems from these notes. I paid
special attention to lines that I could not remember ever having written. Those lines that
stood out because they didn’t even sound like me, or they were saying things that I would
never say, or believe. Those lines became central to my work. I imagined these words
were coming from the outside, since I couldn't locate their sources on the inside.
In the late 1980's, I was visiting every apartment in the East Village tenement
building I lived in, trying to organize a rent strike (that incidentally, didn’t happen). That
was how I met a fellow who lived several floors below me who happened to be a
ceremonial magician, with initiations all over the place. This guy knew a great deal about
the magickal world of New York. He had known Hermann Slater to begin with, and had
travelled all over the place, from Egypt to India and back again, picking up teachings and
initiations along the way. As we became more and more friendly, he told me that he
could tell that I was a tarot reader, and that I should revisit the old tarot deck I had
upstairs. He recommended a few books, including Crowley's Book of Thoth. Our
conversations were always rich, and as my tarot studies progressed, I found that the
archetypes found in the cards were all around us all the time. Most people, myself
included, walked past images of the green man carved into brownstone banisters; we
dallied under various animal and vegetable icons that dominated signage for centuries;
we didn’t even see the various angels and demons and other mythical beings used to sell
everything from airline tickets to furniture. In fact, once I became aware of this, I could
find at least ten archetypal references on any block in New York (or at least Brooklyn and
Manhattan).

The organizing principal I have used to contain my studies has been the Kabbalah
(or cabala, qabala, etc.). This mystical numerological system is perfect for studying the
tarot, and for that matter, almost any divination system. In fact, tarot people often assign
the 22 Hebrew letters to the 22 tarot trumps. One can do the same with the Greek
alphabet, the Coptic alphabet, the Georgian alphabet, Arabic, Persian and even English
(by way of the 19th Century magickal order, the Golden Dawn). Some have assigned
runes and other alphabets to the cards as well. Aside from the rich array of meanings that
become available to the reader, one can actually spell out words using the cards, and
whole new layers of meaning accrue to the cards in new contexts when interpretation
becomes a kind of translation. Gone are the corny gypsy messages of foreboding. Each
card in context (in a spread) opens a new world in the reader’s mind. After years of
memorizing the "meanings" of each card, I came to the conclusion that I should have
been memorizing Hebrew letters and numbers and archetypal associations. As it turned
out, the textbook meanings of tarot cards are not to be taken literally. The
correspondences between the cards and their attributes are far more useful than key word
meanings.

After many years of tarot work, I found the outside had moved in, so to speak,
and in poetry, the inside moved out. Even though my own work had very little
"metaphysical" content, I was beginning to think in the poem the same way I would think
in a tarot reading. Even the smallest detail around me has infinite correlations in every
direction. The air literally tingles with possibilities.

The tarot was for me a point of entry into worlds I had never imagined. A
working knowledge of tarot illuminates astrology, I-Ching, alchemy, magick and
mythologies from around the world. I discovered that the order of the Golden Dawn
modeled their entire teaching on the structure of the tarot (as assigned to the "Tree of
Life"). Yeats had been a member of this order, and knowing this, I re-read his work,
discovering many layers of meaning that had previously eluded my readings of the
poems.

In the summer before 9/11, I was working on a serial poem which was later
published as Koenig’s Sphere. The poem was written in the mornings before I went to
work. I often wrote at the fountain at the World Trade Center. I liked the spot, and the
white noise from the fountain was useful for me. The poem started observationally, just
notating things I saw around me. By the fifth section, lines were coming to me in rapidfire
succession. I was having trouble keeping up with them. Eventually, whole sections
came out as if by dictation. Much of what I was saying was entirely unfamiliar to me.
After years of trying to find out what Spicer was talking about when he spoke of the
“outside,” I suddenly found what for me was a definitive departure from all of my
previous work. Now, rather than manufacturing an outside from source texts and from
various bibliomantic techniques, I was online with a spook, or a martian, or whatever it is
that was dictating to me. It was both exhilarating and frightening at the same time.
Since that time, Wesleyan has published the lectures of Spicer. I had read one of
them in an old issue of Caterpillar magazine, but I had not read the others. I got the book
as soon as possible, and found in those lectures the most cogent description of how the
outside works, and how Spicer generated the magnificent poems he wrote under its
influence.

In magick, to name a thing is to have power over it. The word is not just a
signifier; it is the signified as well. The word chair can be sat on. This point of view has
been out of favor since structuralism reared its head decades ago, but I find the notion
very powerful. Now when I read Coleridge or Yeats, I find the hit from the language to
be so much more effective that way. The poet is creating worlds all the time, and all of
these worlds spin and cycle around in the air between us all, sparkling and exploding
portents in our ears. We are the receivers, and it is our job to re-transmit as much as
possible. The multiplication of all these transmissions ad infinitum renders all phenomena
as poetry. There is nothing else.




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