Tracing Feeling, Writing Futurity: A Case Study On Spicer’s Early Poems as Dictated, Serial Poetics

Abstract

This thesis re-reads three poems Jack Spicer wrote to his long-distance lover, Gary Bottone, between 1950 and 1952 (namely, “Sonnet for the Beginning of Winter,” “Train Song for Gary,” and “A Second Train Song for Gary”) as proto-dictated, serial poetics rather than the “one-night-stands” he later dismissed them as. Through scholars Massumi, Sedgwick, Cvetkovich, and Ahmed, I identify the fragmentations and wordplay of the poems at the level of the line. I trace these elements as mobilizers of queer affective economies that prove microdictation and seek to de-pathologize ways of feeling and being in the world. Then, through scholars Muñoz, Freecero, Freeman, and Halberstam, I pinpoint the recurring metaphors and cross-textual storytelling modality across the works as traits of the dictated, serial practice at the macro level of form. I demonstrate how these formal characteristics create an intersubjective web of meaning across time and space, where Spicer’s Not-Yet-Here becomes a project of political resistance and futurity. This analysis’s methodology is composed of Brooks’ close reading and Sedgwick’s concept of the reparative reader, reframed and cast here as a method to engage with the observable (line-by-line dictation) and the imaginative (broader serial temporality) as spaces of transformation, potential, and collectivity. By attending to these texts with a different, kinder lens, this work seeks to expand an understanding of dictated poetics that precedes Spicer’s later self-proclaimed mastery. Through an exploration of deferral and hope, these poems transform into communal spaces of belonging and perseverance. This study ultimately advocates for these poems to find a space within queer literary history and utopian futurity, arguing that their dictated, serial poetics model communal survival and defy normativity outside conventional poetic chronologies.