"Muphrid's Law"

part of me will forever
be rooting for the hunted

though sometimes i lapse reiver
part of me will forever

i know which army's braver
in these swart woods so haunted

part of me will forever
be rooting for the hunted


"You have to be happy and full of hope for the Leander swim." --Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)


"There is an even stranger synchronicity lurking in Spicer’s California mysterium. In 1948, back in Berkeley, he and Duncan roomed briefly with a peculiar young man named Philip K. Dick, who once supplied an LP-recording device for their parlor games of poetic performance. As Killian and Lewis Ellingham point out in their definitive Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God, the books of Dick and of Spicer later became mirror images of each other, in theme as well as in imagery—grasshoppers, Martians, radios, salesmen, cities. Like Dick, Spicer was an impoverished and alienated artist for whom writing was, as Darko Suvin famously described the genre of science fiction, a motor of "cognitive estrangement." Both are cult artists who wrote, it can seem, as much for our time as for theirs." --Erik Davis (via Silliman)