Abstract: The darkness of Jack Spicer's writing covers an illumination which, as if invisible, infrared light, makes apparent a second realm of meanings. Concentrated darkness (the idea of the alien) disturbs the realm of meanings with which we are familiar: God, love, and so forth. One must first distinguish that which darkens from that which illumines the material of Jack Spicer's dictated books. The idea of the alien suggests a poetics of alien or outside source, and thus a poetics of dictation. Spicer develops from dictation-theory a complicated series of failures. First is the 'failure' of the poet, whose absence at the point of composition keeps origin in mystery. One eventually gets Spicer's gnostic sense of failure: the failure to know, the failure to name God. Jack Spicer does not shy away from the cosmology he implies, and his readers are run through Creation from first flash to last matters. Among the special features of Spicer's creation is its constant division between contrary orders, both of world and of mind. Something bent on freedom crosses something sure of form. The strange, hybrid population of Jack Spicer's dictated books issue forth from their coupling. The large, parrying structure of what Spicer called the real in turn informs the poems. Individual poems carry complicated, half-coded messages, from which we then piece together a sophisticated theory of language, a hermeneutics, and a theology. iii Certain images are invested with such meaning that they come to perform as symbols. Spicer's use of the symbolic carries his work behind division, where contraries are bound and composition starts. Flowing backwards, the symbolic order structures the poems, determines the poetics, and so completes the circling of language and the real.