My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Spicer, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819568872 ISBN 13: 9780819568878

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009)
Winner of the American Book Award (2009)

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.

About this title

About the Author

JACK SPICER (1925–;1965) published books including After Lorca (1957), Billy the Kid (1959), and The Holy Grail (1962). PETER GIZZI is a poet and author of numerous books, including The Outernationale (2007), who lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts. KEVIN KILLIAN is a poet, novelist, critic, and playwright living in San Francisco.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The Los Angeles–born Spicer died young, at age 40 in 1965, of acute alcoholism. In his lifetime, he published six books of poems with tiny presses. Though he was influential, he operated in a small circle, mostly in Berkeley. It was at the Six Gallery he cofounded that Ginsberg gave the first reading of Howl in 1955; he was very close to the poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, but as the editors of this extraordinary collection point out, Spicer was never fully embraced within the official culture or counter-culture of the period. This remarkably fresh assemblage, which gathers from two earlier posthumous (and now out-of-print) collections and adds many unpublished poems and sequences, will dramatically expand Spicer's influence. Like the work of Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats, Spicer's poems still seem to come from somewhere else (in fact, Spicer claimed he received Martian signals). But what a reader finds here is a poet deeply engaged with language, a gay man consumed by desperate affairs of the heart and flesh, a lover of jazz and baseball and weather, and possessed of the tenderest lyricisms and biting wit. His After Lorca series still shocks with its bold presumption of the dead Lorca's voice; many of the previously unpublished one-night stand poems are marvelous (see Any fool can get into an ocean...) and the Letters to James Alexander, found by the editors amid the Spicer collection at Berkeley, is Spicer at his best—rendering letters as poems, cauterizing the wound of a love affair: Dear James/ It is absolutely clear and sunny as if neither a cloud nor a moon had ever been invented. (Dec.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0819568872
• ISBN 13: 9780819568878
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 508
• Editor: Gizzi Peter, Killian Kevin