Jack Spicer's Words: 'God Must Have a Big Eye'

In the issue of Archeus (1989) devoted to the work of Andrew Crozier, Geoffrey Ward wrote about the unpunctual nature of language:

Language is doomed to unpunctuality, words chasing, describing, shadowing a reality they can do anything but actually be. But if words miss their goal they pursue in the meantime their own life in the mouth or on the page, powerful figures of speech that predate our individual use of them, constraining or permitting meanings always aslant or surplus to requirements.

With an Orphic sense of inevitability our words can only record our loss, acting as totemic symbols of what is already ghost. The third poem in the sequence of Crozier's 'The Veil Poem' opens with the lines

In nature everything, we suppose, connects up with everything else...

Ward suggested that the inclusion of the word 'suppose' cuts off access to the connection 'except in moments of expanded awareness that give Crozier's poetry both its tacit pathos and its fixture within the rhetorics of Romanticism'. Crozier's full awareness of the distance of language in its yearning for connectedness is intriguingly brought out when one looks at the earliest draft of those lines from 'The Veil Poem'. In a manuscript titled 'The first five sections of SEVEN VEILS OF WISDOM IN TEN CARDS a return for Jeff Morsman' Crozier's opening line to section three runs:

In nature everything, we suppose, is connected with everything else...
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