My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry)
A collected edition of Jack Spicer’s poetry that gathers published poems, fragments, and notebooks into a single volume.
Work Information
A gathered body of work that lets Spicer’s voice be read anew.
Edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, this substantial collection presents Jack Spicer’s poetry in a fuller, more coherent arc.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Wesleyan Univ Pr
- Published
- 2008-11-30
- Pages
- 465 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.88 x 3.81 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780819568878
- ISBN-10
- 0819568872
- Price
- 6410 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
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.
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.
Reviews
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Un must
Ten stars out of five. I'm sick of the invisible world and all its efforts to be visible. Hope it works
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A great collection of major works by San Francisco poet Jack Spicer
This is a collection of all the major works by the marvellous and underrated San Francisco poet Jack Spicer. The book features a superb introduction by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. The book arrived on time and in excellent condition. Thankfully, Qatar customs did not slash its cover or contents, as they are sometimes wont to do with books they deem suspicious.
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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 to hip-hop, and perhaps more importantly, their eclectic, immediate, deeply personal, free-spirited outpourings drowned out the recondite, referential, fascist, formalist modernism exemplified by Eliot and Pound, and cured American poetry of the disease that continued to plague our architecture and our prose. (Notice there's no "postmodernism" in poetry--"Howl" made it irrelevant.) Jack Spicer is the self-selected black sheep of the group. His poems are stubbornly self-reflexive: they are about poetry and poets, and the struggle to the death between them. He likes to quote Pound. He disses New York. He writes "A band of faggots. . .cannot be built into a log-cabin in which all Western Civilization can cower." (Take THAT Ginsberg and O'Hara.) He talks about being in hell. He sees ghosts. In his pity, privacy, and focus on writers and death, he reminds me of Roberto Bolano and David Markson. But there is also an energy, a wealth of invention, and a darn human likeability to his work that. . . well, maybe there was something in the air in mid-twentieth century America, which we can all breathe even now by reading these poems. "Love makes the discovery wisdom abandons." Ahh--joy. "Two loves I had, one rang a bell/connected on both sides with hell." Who of us hasn't been there? And as for modernism--"Love ate the red wheelbarrow." Yes again. Thank the ghosts. Read this and breathe.
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Happy
Very happy. A very nice copy. Arrived quickly and safely.
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Es geht rund
Hätte man nicht schreiben müssen, konnte man aber. Muss man nicht lesen, kann man aber. Und dann kommte das vergnügen. So langsam krabbelt es, dann schneller schon kratzt es, schließlich brummt's im Schädel wie dölle. Wenn man etwas Rotwein dazu trinkt ( ich möchte mittelgewichtigen Zweigelt empfehlen ), erinnert der Genuss manchen vielleicht an ein Rehbeuschl. Trinkt man reschen Weißwein dazu, werden eher Reminiszenzen an Kutteln nach Art von Caen erweckt. Es ist schon ein verwirrend vielschichtiges werk.