The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer

Illuminates Jack Spicer's provocative lectures on radical poetics

The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.
Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.

JACK SPICER (1925–1965) was an American poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and the Berkeley Renaissance. His writing and his ideas about writing have had a deep and lasting impact on American poetry. PETER GIZZI is the winner of the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for his book Fierce Elegy. He is author of many collections of poetry, including Now It's Dark (2020); Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for a National Book Award; Threshold Songs (2011); and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014), a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize. He is the series editor of The Collected Works of Jack Spicer.