SPACKS, Barry (Bernard)

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Nationality: American. Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 21 February 1931. Education: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, B.A. (honors) 1952; Indiana University, Bloomington, M.A. 1956; Pembroke College, Cambridge (Fulbright scholar), 1956–57. Military Service: U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1952–54. Family: Married Patricia Meyer in 1955 (divorced 1979); one daughter. Career: Assistant professor, University of Florida, Gainesville, 1957–59; professor of English, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1960–83. Visiting professor of English, University of Kentucky, Lexington, 1978–79, and University of California, Berkeley, 1980. Since 1981 member of faculty, University of California, Santa Barbara. Awards: St. Botolph's award, 1971; Commonwealth Club of California Medal, 1982. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019. Address: 1111 Bath Street, Santa Barbara, California 93101, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Twenty Poems. Santa Barbara, California, Sun Press, 1967.

The Company of Children. New York, Doubleday, 1969.

Something Human. New York, Harper's Magazine Press, 1972.

Teaching the Penguins to Fly. Boston, Godine, 1975.

Imagining a Unicorn. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1978.

Spacks Street: New and Selected Poems. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Brief Sparrow. Los Angeles, Illuminati, 1988.

Novels

The Sophomore. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1968;London, Collins, 1969.

Orphans. New York, Harper's Magazine Press, 1972.

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Barry Spacks is not widely known, and he is not regarded as part of a school or movement. So far as I know, he does not give readings and does not publicize himself. But what he does do is write steadily and well, producing poems that are craftsmanlike, pleasant to read, and genuine in feeling and tone. He writes on many subjects, often drawn from his life as a professor of English, but it is perhaps fair to say that his real subject is the life of the poet and his responsibilities and rights. Either directly stated or implied throughout his work are the themes of the right of the poet to remain free, to say what he feels, to indulge himself in nostalgia, speculation, dream, fantasy, and metaphor. Spacks is a likable writer ("unpretentious" is the word one is tempted to overuse in describing him), at home with himself and his life. His lyrics reveal an American poet-professor singing of the vagaries of the quotidian in a world that amuses, touches, and delights him.

Spacks's subjects are as numerous as his poems: his boyhood, his daughter, famous writers he has seen in Boston (Berryman, Neruda, Borges), a student killed while hang gliding, lustful thoughts in a Laundromat, a Buster Keaton film. But he is particularly good at turning casual occasions into poems. He has the ability to take a small incident, an almost everyday occurrence, and turn it into a small and unpretentious but nevertheless satisfying work. Grading papers late at night and mistaking the reflection of his light for someone else's, two friends cooking dinner, finding a design of leaves on the pavement, seeing his old professor drunk in a bar, landing at an airport, finding a Yiddish newspaper on the Riverside line—such subjects furnish the basis for his meditative (perhaps "ruminative" is more accurate) lyrics. But this intellectual cud chewing results in a very personal light verse, accomplished and sensitive in its handling of the stuff of everyday life.

Spacks has a good ear for language, and his poems are virtually without a false note. There is no rhetoric or bombast and little wordplay. The verse, often rhymed or in stanzas but moving toward more free verse in his later work, is clean and hard-edged, each word carefully chosen and placed. In his best poems one feels delight and almost surprise in seeing things come together, and what sometimes seems inconsequential at the outset suddenly resolves into a striking image or idea. In one of his best poems, "Like a Prism," the prism image comes to be a symbol of equality of opportunity; in "Teaching the Penguins to Fly" a whimsical idea becomes a wry comment on 1960s-like notions of social liberation.

Spacks's images are often striking, with a playful or even surrealistic quality, such as the comparison of the sea to the "sound of 12,000 women scrubbing bloody chainmail." Or consider these opening lines from "For a Pregnant Lady":

Doing my usual thing: vacuuming Death Valley;
    stitching up some weekday shrouds;
  when all at once your nowhere-near-born child
gazes through my window, nose against the glass;

These lines would seem to follow the little ars poetica he outlines in "Wit and Whimsy":

Rule one: make precious
little sense.
 
Rule two: commit
no permanence.
 
Rule three: ignore
rule four.

But there is more to Spacks than gently breaking the rules. In poems like "New Copley in the Gallery" and "The Parent Birds" he assembles intricate machines that function smoothly. In his later work his subjects seem more topical, as in the ecological "Malediction," perhaps reflecting his fuller sense of his roles as father, poet, professor, and citizen.

The title poem of Spacks Street: New and Selected Poems was first collected in his previous volume. It is a poem about fame, about the poet's understated anxieties about his ambitions, his goals in life, and the importance of what he does as a poet. He imagines a street named after him and someone recalling his youth on that street, and he says, "God, if they only could see me today, / the old gang / back on Spacks Street!" His ambivalence about the distance between his dreams and their realization goes back at least as far as "A Quiet Day," which mentions "a wife assisting the long divorce of her husband / from his large dreams." In another poem, "The Downright Poet," he ironically views the poet and his pretensions in relation to society: "always for him much is laughable, / namely Himself, and Others."

Among the best of the later poems is "A Marriage," about divorce, "The Shaver," a feeling memorial to his father-in-law, and "Six Small Songs for a Silver Flute," short imagist/haiku lyrics about love. In his poems of the 1980s Spacks sustained his love for the life of the poet and of the poet-teacher, continuing to find delight in the small surprises of daily life. If these poems have little chance of changing the world or the direction of modern poetry (and I suspect that their creator has no such hopes), they are nevertheless very accomplished, sensitive poems.

—Donald Barlow Stauffer