No Speakee A-rabb

Some Statistics
Out of 20,000 State Department workers, only 20 of them speak Arab.

From a teevee show: "All I know is he wears the uniform so he gets our best."

That's totally BS to me.

A uniform seems to cleanse a man of all blame.

We shield soldiers from blame: "This man was a fighter"--again from a teevee show.

"He really cared about his recruits...why we got 2 death reports a day from Iraq..." From a popular CSI show. A Marine recruiter's wife is talking about her husband.

Military good & evil. The good soldier and the bad soldier. Both are killers. They are trained "to kill or be killed," remember? That's the army's motto. That's a police motto, too.

From Jack Spicer
"The self is no longer real
It is not like loneliness
This big huge loneness. Sacrificing
All of the person with it.
Bigger people
I'm sure have mastered it.
'Beauty is so rare a thing,' Pound sings
'So few drink at my fountain.'"

From Fifteen False Propositions Against God #1, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1975.

Jack Spicer died in San Francisco in 1965. He hung out in North Beach bars and "practiced" his poetry, as he called it. Jack would write a "book" of poetry and then abandon it with a friend or a stranger--he was always in the bars "to be met" by young poets "to be asked" about poetry and life and living a life of poetry--by then he would be at work on a new "book" of poetry. After Lorca was his first book, completed in 1957, the year Spicer gave his "Poetry as Magic Workshop" at San Francisco State. Spicer believed in what he called "the Outside Real." It's kind'a like Gertrude Stein's continuous present tense or writing in what she called the continual present. Faulkner's way of writing this way was called "stream of consciousness" writing. It's all the same; Kipling said it was a muse sitting on his shoulder. Some from "without" coming to "within" to become a disturbance their, a disturbance that can't be quelled unless it's written out in poetic code--it is a continual presence of the Outside Real..."'Beauty is so rare a thing,' Pound sings, 'So few drink at my fountain.'"

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler