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

Spicer, Jack; Peter Gizzi (ed.)

ISBN 10: 0819563404 / ISBN 13: 9780819563408

Published by Wesleyan U.P., Hanover, NH, 1998

About this Item

Fine -- photogr. wraps. Edited and with an afterword by Peter Gizzi.

Seller Inventory # 008303

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The House That Jack Built : The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer
• Publisher: Wesleyan U.P., Hanover, NH
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819563404
• ISBN 13: 9780819563408
• Binding: Original Wraps
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

PETER GIZZI is the author of the poetry collections Artificial Heart (1997) and Periplum (1992), and he is the recipient of a Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.