"Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries to be haunted": Los Angeles, Trauma, and Orphic Anxiety in the Work of Jack Spicer by Alicia Cohen (Jack Spicer) wondered about his home—a hundred years ago, what had these spaces been? Empty forest, native peoples. It frightened him to think of it, so he tried not to. But sometimes he forced himself to think about it, and that scared him even more

Over the past two decades the psychiatric community has developed an effective but largely inexplicable treatment for trauma called "Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing." Treatment sessions involve two simultaneous procedures: one, the patient conjures up a vivid picture of his painful experience and recounts it while, two, he focuses his eyes on a therapist's fingers as she moves them steadily back and forth across his field of vision. Why this procedure works largely remains a mystery, but somehow the dual focus—the gaze of the eyes held steadily when combined with the conjured image of the traumatic event in the imagination—helps to heal the patient's physical and emotional posttraumatic suffering (Shapiro 199-223). A puzzling relationship between vision, trauma and healing is embedded in the Orphic myth as well. Orpheus, traumatized by the loss of his beloved, seeks her even to the gates of Hades. Because his poems are so beautiful, he is able to charm his way into Hell—breaking the rules of earth and underworld, life and death. Ultimately, Orpheus is allowed to bring Eurydice out of the Netherworld but on the single condition that he not look at her. Tragically, he cannot resist looking back at his beloved and so loses her again, forever. It is as an orphic poet that Jack Spicer figured himself from his earliest poems, and it is the project of this essay to explore the relationship of "looking back" to sorrow, trauma and healing in Spicer's poetry. Spicer's orphic anxiety about looking back, I argue, is strangely linked to the "vacancy" that he so problematically and relentlessly seeks as an author. An orphic poet, as the Orphée character in Jean Cocteau's film says, is a vacant