My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.46 (702 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0819570907 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 508 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-02-14 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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remarkably fresh assemblage, which gathers from two earlier posthumous (and now out-of-print) collections and adds many unpublished poems and sequences, will dramatically expand Spicer's influence. His After Lorca series still shocks with its bold presumption of the dead Lorca's voice; many of the previously unpublished one-night stand poems are marvelous (see Any fool can get into an ocean) and the Letters to James Alexander, found by the editors amid the Spicer collection at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. Like the work of Emily Dickinson and W.B. 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
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. 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. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic com
Dmitry Portnoy said The Murderer of Modernism. In the decades following WWII, a tremendous amount of complex, appealing, outward-facing, socially engaged and universally relevant poetry was written in the United States by poets who more or less all knew each other, wrote about each other, and went to the same parties. Ferlingetti published Allen Ginsberg, who staged a happening at the funeral of Frank O'Hara, who was a close friend of John Ashberry, who promoted the books of Kenneth Koch, and so on. Together, these poets' work influenced everything from political speeches. Jack Spicer Joins the Canon Ted Burke I am just finishing the "must read" poetry volume of the year, "My Vocabulary Did this To Me", an anticipated republication of the poems by the late Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, and I have to admit that Spicer's writing has me momentarily forgetting my prejudice against poems about poetry and poets and allowing myself to be knocked by the author's third-rail wit. A singular figure, who didn't fit in with the Beats, the New York School, nor the San Francisco Renaissance, Spicer's poems were a set of ma. "from RFC: Vol. XXIX , #from RFC: Vol. XXIX , #3 Dalkey Archive Annual 3 "If someone doesn't fight me I'll have to wear this armor / All of my life," says Jack Spicer, speaking here with his usual trenchant yet wounded wit in the voice of the Arthurian knight Percival. Indeed, Spicer did spend his short life--he died of alcohol-related complications in 1965 at the age of forty--encased in a kind of metaphorical armor, purposely keeping the business of poetry far from the act of writing it; with the exception of his appearance in Donald Allen's groundbreaking 1960 anthology The New American Poetry . Dalkey Archive Annual from RFC: Vol. XXIX , #3 Dalkey Archive Annual 3 "If someone doesn't fight me I'll have to wear this armor / All of my life," says Jack Spicer, speaking here with his usual trenchant yet wounded wit in the voice of the Arthurian knight Percival. Indeed, Spicer did spend his short life--he died of alcohol-related complications in 1965 at the age of forty--encased in a kind of metaphorical armor, purposely keeping the business of poetry far from the act of writing it; with the exception of his appearance in Donald Allen's groundbreaking 1960 anthology The New American Poetry . " according to buyer. "If someone doesn't fight me I'll have to wear this armor / All of my life," says Jack Spicer, speaking here with his usual trenchant yet wounded wit in the voice of the Arthurian knight Percival. Indeed, Spicer did spend his short life--he died of alcohol-related complications in 1965 at the age of forty--encased in a kind of metaphorical armor, purposely keeping the business of poetry far from the act of writing it; with the exception of his appearance in Donald Allen's groundbreaking 1960 anthology The New American Poetry