In Memoriam
Barry Spacks 1931 – 2014
in the Santa Barbara poetry room. As Chryss Yost has said, he was a creative force we couldn’t just talk around but had to acknowledge as central, not only to poetry but with excursions to the other arts. In doing so, we were like the blind men describing that other elephant in the old fable. One of us — it could be myself — touches and hears the trunk and exclaims: “A Poet!” Correct! This revelation has come to every Santa Barbaran who cares about poetry, even before Barry became our first poet laureate. Slogging through the May 1966 issue of Poetry magazine, my spirits were suddenly lifted by two bright and sparkling pieces by someone at MIT, whose name I had just read on a letter of recommendation to UCSB: Barry Spacks. One of those spirited poems parodied what he had written seriously, and it was mischievous (this MIT Spacks was the Poet), being titled “Recommendations”:
This is a good fellow who knows what he may do? He is most excited, he is walking the walls of himself on tiptoe. Give him a prize.
MIRANDA STARKEY
I
BY J O H N R I D L A N D ’m tempted to think of Barry Spacks as the elephant
The Elephant in the Arts Room poetry and literature at MIT while his first wife, Patricia Meyer Spacks, taught literature at Wellesley. The second half was measured out in the cooler ambiance of Santa Barbara, first in the English Department at UCSB, and later in the College of Creative Studies, until December 2013, when he began to feel exhausted by his final illness. In 1989, he won a UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award and was always very highly rated in student evaluations for his enthusiasm and knowledge, as Teddy Macker’s online Independent article attests. The elephant’s fourth leg is Tibetan Buddhism, which I believe Kimberley Snow had been practicing for some time before Barry. For six years, they were based in a Tibetan Buddhist community in Northern California. In what may be his most widely known poem of recent years, “Within Another Life,” he speculates on several transmigrations a soul might make after death — becoming a boulder, a pane of glass, a door — and expresses a final hope for his own:
And if a knotted, twisted rope from long self-clenching and complexity, oh love, unbind, unbraid me then, until I flow again like windswept hair.
The elephant’s tusks are for fighting, seemingly essential for professors of literary criticism. But although well aware And this one is steady: LOVE SONGS: One of Barry Spacks’s many side projects was singing with the of the civil and uncivil wars in English departments, Barry Barry Spacks Rawkus Blues Band. it is clear that he is breathing; did not take up the style of confrontation but its opposite: he will never kill any number conciliation. In essence, his was a creative, not a destructive, for discipline but a love of food, expressed in such poems as “The talent, whether in his own work or helping others with theirs. of old ladies, nor harrow Artichoke” or “The Onion,” and in allying himself with Kimberley To attest to his editorial skills, I cite my personal experience. As hell. Give him Snow, the chef with a PhD in English in Lexington, Kentucky, and reader for the MIT Press, Barry had first turned down, as needa prize. author of In Buddha’s Kitchen. The point about this “leg,” though, ing editing, the original manuscript of a book my wife and I had (William Faulkner in an interview had said,“Keats’s ‘Ode on a was his growing up in a Jewish district of Philadelphia and his written about our deceased “special child.” Then, unpaid, and anxiety for the “Assimilation” of Jews into American society, about communicating cross-country by letter, he generously and cheerGrecian Urn’ is worth any number of little old ladies.”) I wrote Barry an Authentic Unsolicited Fan Letter, and which he published a poem under that title in the August 1979 fully worked together with us, painstakingly helping us cut and reword, making possible its eventual acceptance. These critical after a great deal of correspondence, I booked him for the fourth Poetry, regretting its slow pace: issue of my magazine, The Little Square Review. In my “note” skills were always available to anyone whose poems he was asked there, I wrote: to assess, in numberless formal and informal poetry workshops So maybe, say in ten thousand years, and private sessions in person or online. Barry must rank as one Even the grim ones will start to join us? of the most collaborative of modern American writers, which The poems are imbued with the freshness that comes (We who take jokes as a serious business) — requires a diminishing of the ego in all parties concerned. only to a man who remembers his body, but they could be One more facet of elephant and human life might be alluded written only by one who takes an equal care of his mind. A second leg would be Barry’s fiction, best represented by two to in light of Barry’s continued emphasis on its enjoyments, in Barry had replied to my fan letter:“Since poetry has so adjusted exemplary novels, The Sophomore and Orphans. The Sophomore, his poems as well as the novels. It’s succinctly stated in his postto a medium of solitude, it comes as an energizing shock to dis- published in 1968, was unfortunately eclipsed by a similar but humously published blurb to Diana Raab’s current book, Lust, cover someone attending.” Also he lamented: “The great danger inferior coming-of-age novel, The Graduate, and though Barry which, he says,“celebrates the sacred everlasting Eros.” for all of us nowadays, don’t you think, is to yield to a sense of per- was paid for writing a screenplay of his, the movie of the more Others will have more to say about Barry’s years in Santa sonal irrelevance?”Yes, that was so, back then, and if it now seems famous one pushed it aside, like bad money driving out good, and Barbara. While he merged with the local arts community, I was that art has grown big enough to supply an elephant in our Santa it was never filmed. It was, however, reissued last year by Faber engulfed by duties at the university. After retiring, I was more in Barbara, Barry’s presence and example have made an enormous and Faber in London. touch, joining the monthly poetry workshop (now a hotbed of difference, which his diffidence in 1966 would not have foreseen. The second novel, Orphans (1972), is a very fine and moving Santa Barbara poet laureates), which he had started. His devastatThe blind person at the hind end of the elephant feels the tail: story from Barry’s experience in the Korean War, a conflict about ing last group email came on January 6: “I have rather bad news something like a paintbrush? “An Artist!” Yes. In recent years which very little fiction has been written. TV gave us M*A*S*H, from my doctors looking into my present state of exhaustion and Barry showed his paintings, distinctively sketchy and often liter- of course, but only its famously stunning final episode (no laugh won’t be able to be with you on the 19th. I’m afraid my strength ary. (A poster he made as Poet Laureate for a city tree-planting track) can be compared to the powerful plot and the poignant doesn’t allow for visits, but I know you’ll all be thinking of me.” In occasion was a Concrete poem: “St. = Street without tree.”) As an ending of Orphans. (Faber and Faber or the New York Review of other words,“over and out,” as radio operators said in World War II. Or, better, the valediction with which Barry closed his emails artist he admitted two things: One, he had been painting for 20 Books Press: Reissue it!) For a third leg, another blind man could propose Barry’s activi- in recent years: years before he showed any work, and two, he was color-blind. “On! On!” To counter that handicap, he shared a studio with Neal Crosbie, ties in other arts in Santa Barbara: “An Actor!” Yes, in at least four whom he would consult as to whether a green, which looked plays, including a musical by Victoria White where he played gray to him, would go well with this section of chartreuse, which Gertrude Stein’s brother, Leon (Kimberley’s novel It Changes A Memorial Celebration for Barry Spacks, including music, poetry, called him “Leo Stein”), and at UCSB in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. also looked gray. art, and community, takes place at the Museum of Contemporary An elephant has four legs like tree trunks. One, a blind person And why not credit here his teaching, both in and out of school? Art Santa Barbara, 653 Paseo Nuevo, on Sunday, March 9,3-4:30 p.m., might think, would stand for his grounding in childhood, the son His professional career divides in two, after undergraduate work with a reception until 6 p.m. People can also post remembrances at of a grocer who went to the Produce Market in Philadelphia at at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fulbright year at Cam- spacksstreet.com, which is dedicated to the informal naming of the 4 a.m. every day. One of Barry’s boyhood chores was to stack the bridge University. He spent 20 years in the hotbed of writers and alley by Granada Books “Spacks Street.” An exhibition of original fruits and vegetables in bins, which may have led to not only a will academics in colleges and universities around Boston, teaching work by Barry Spacks will show at Sullivan Goss beginning April 3. march 6, 2014
THE INDEPENDENt
17