Confessional, by David Spicer
/The book arrived between two neatly cut pieces of corrugated card board, slid inside a thickly taped envelope. I thought it was mail art at first. And it was.
Confessions, from Cyberwit.net publishing, slapped me upside the head. One of Spicer’s central threads, a father breaking a son, investigates how that colors a man. Only if he’s lucky, the breaking leads to a journey. It could just as well be a mother breaking a daughter, a father breaking a daughter, a mother breaking a son, doesn’t matter, but sets up the potential for the forever seeking defining that person.
Shel Silverstein’s A Boy Named Sue: “And he said, ‘Son, this world is rough and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough and I knew I wouldn’t be there to help ya along. So I give you that name and I said goodbye, I knew you’d have to get tough or die.’”
Spicer embarked on his heroic quest and eventually comes to celebrate what sets him apart and now sings his own body electric. He has a reason to write and in that, to believe, and it’s not, he implies, to write a poem that will be accepted in The New Yorker (“Wears his perfect poem like a white tuxedo”). In the manufactured industry of literature, there’s a pressure to produce, and as an extension, to please. No, that’s not it (and if that were it - no comment): It’s writing to save your life and that’s why I like this book so much, as that’s what Spicer is doing, writing to save his life and about how he did save his life, which is not an easy thing to accomplish and make it lyrical.
As soon as I recognized this book was personal for me, the writing became universal and then, wonderful.
Anne Sexton. First stanza, the Black Art:
A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.
My own psychic journey, for instance, commenced with the feeling I needed to punch my way out of a paper bag. Down the line I realized “I was the paper bag,” all that. . . Spicer infers the journeyman needs a map some of the time, or a guide (see Dante’s Inferno), or at least come to know somebody who has traveled a similar path. Spicer shares his heroes, the ones who made sense (to him), who put words together in such a way that saved him. I read Confessions as a book about what a poet does, about their underbelly, and thought he described all that remarkably well, as underbellies can present an intimate and uncomfortable subject matter.
As much discussion or treatise in places, Spicer’s analysis still takes the shape of poems. There is enough critical thinking to go around, enough of the explicit and dynamic, which is why poetry IS important. Socrates has as much a place at the dinner table as Homer.
One of my favorite poems involves the speaker observing and weighing in on a woman who wore zippered clothing. I knew one too once so was interested in what his take was on all that. With a sense of humor, Spicer finds and describes his identity and voice. Confessions tells that story, how it came to him, paying homage to famous unknown poets and their existential last stands at the Alamo, to words and word endings, word beginnings, word salads, Canadian Air Force exercising his craft and celebrating people who work in words while moving from dead ends to flying without a flight plan to transcendence.
David Spicer’s poems are true.
Cover art by Nancy Clift Spicer