Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

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 1945-1960, his works were disseminated during his lifetime through a coterie of initiates and small presses. Along with friends Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, Spicer came to be known as a foundational figure of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance, contemporaneous to the Beats but without the bells and whistles of widespread public acclaim. There is a prophetic and telling moment, one which reveals much about the precarious nature of literary reputations, in Poet Be Like God, the decade-old biography of Spicer written by Killian and Lewis Ellingham, where famous beat poet and publisher of City Lights Lawrence Ferlinghetti asks: "Why would anyone want to publish a biography of Spicer? He's almost forgotten nowadays, isn't he?" Were it not for the acumen and diligent grunt work of friends, associates, and admirers, Spicer's now-growing legacy as a seminal twentieth-century poet might have remained an insider's secret. Here, Gizzi and Killian draw on both The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Robin Blaser for Black Sparrow in 1975, and Donald Allen's editing of One Night Stand & Other Poems in 1980, both long out of print, along with the discovery of a veritable goldmine of notebooks and other ephemera in the Spicer archives to create the definitive and lasting collection of Spicer's poetry. The secret is finally out and it's spreading like wildfire. Ferlinghetti who?

Jack Spicer Joins the Canon
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 marginalia at the edges of the principle discussion as to what poetry was and ought to be, and as becomes clear as we read, his counter assertions, his asides, his declarations had more self contained clarity and vision than much of the stuff he looked askance at.


Interrogation of received notions was his on going theme, and `though the practice of making literary practice the unifying metaphor in a body of work tends to seal off poetry from an readership that could benefit from a skewed viewpoint--unlocking a door only to find another locked door, or a brick wall, ceases to be amusing once one begins to read poets for things other than status--Spicer rather positions the whole profession and the art as an item among a range of other activities individuals take on to make their daily life cohere with a faint purpose they might feel welling inside them. Spicer, in matters of money, sexuality, poetry, religion zeros on the neatly paired arrangements our language system indexes our hairiest ideas with and sniffs a rat when the description opts for the easily deployed adjectives, similes and conclusions that make the hours go faster.




Thing Language

By Jack Spicer

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.



There is reservedly antagonistic undercurrent to Spicer's work, the subtle and ironic derision of the language arts that, as he sees them practiced, is locked up in matters of petty matters of status, property, the ownership of ideas, the expansion of respective egos that mistake their basic cleverness for genius. The world, the external and physical realm that one cannot know but only describe with terms that continually need to be resuscitated, is, as we know, something else altogether that hasn't the need for elaborate vocabularies that compare Nature and Reality with everything a poet can get his or her hands on. What this proves, Spicer thinks (it seems to me, in any event) is that we know nothing of the material we try to distill in verse; even our language is parted out from other dialogues.


The Sporting Life

By Jack Spicer



The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios
don't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a
transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram
burns out replacable or not replacable, but not like that
punchdrunk fighter in a bar. The poet
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him
in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with
a champion.

Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the
scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the
invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of
them.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even
know they are champions.


Spicer is an interesting poet on several levels, all of them deep and rich with deposits that reward an earnest dig. He is , I think, on a par with Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams with the interest in grilling the elaborative infrastructure of how we draw or are drawn to specialized conclusions with the use of metaphor, and it is to his particular brilliance as a lyric poet, comparable to Frank O'Hara (a poet Spicer declared he didn't care for, with O'Hara thinking much the same in kind) that the contradictions, competing desires and unexpected conundrums of investigating one's verbal stream are made comprehensible to the senses, a joy to the ear. No one, really no one wrote as distinctly as the long obscure Spicer did, and editors Gizzi, Killian and publisher Wesleyan Press are to be thanked for restoring a major American voice to our shared canon.

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, andcured 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.

indispensable new edition
This gorgeous new collection is superbly presented and edited, and contains a great deal of previously unpublished material, as well as the contents of both "The Collected Books" and "One Night Stands."An outstanding edition of an astonishing poet, whose importance is increasingly coming to be recognized. ... Read more

Product Description
Illuminates Jack Spicer's provocative lectures on radical poetics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

the house that jack built
A must for anyone interested in 1 of the 3 greatest poets [writing in english] circa 1950 to present. Gizzi's essay is illuminating and steers clear of obfuscating what Spicer meant by "dictation" and the "outside".

Dynamics of Dictation and The Love of the Game
The House That Jack Built is a must have for any serious poet or reader of poetry and poetics.Spicer's lectures on dictation, the serial poem, and the practice of reading lay a foundation for the art of writing poetry that is without default.His ideas are instrumental in poetry's process.Peter Gizzi's afterword enlivens the spirit of Spicer's practice and makes it available to the reader.Exhibiting a close relationship with Spicer's work and method, Gizzi both completes and opens the material discussed in the lectures.A stellar accomplishment.

A wonderful book until Gizzi starts writing
This book is simply amazing as Jack Spicer had amazing martian forces driving him. The lectures are excellently transcribed and annotated. This part of the book holds amazing inspiration. Where the book fails is thatGizzi decided to start writing about Jack. I could hardly begin to read histacked on essay before putting the book down in disgust. Jack spoke forhimself just fine. The essay belongs somewhere else.

Hey, Jack Spicer is still the hidden force of US poetics!
Hey, Jack Spicer is still the hidden force and westcoast "genisu loci" of US poetics, and Peter Gizzi has done a yeoman's job of putting these probing and lost lectures together to do new work.The poesygame will not be disturbed however, and putting J Spicer on cover ofAmerican Poetry Review will not alter the pastoral fact and fate ofdownfall and lost aura.Still, this is must reading. ... Read more

Product Description
The first biography of poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), a key figure in San Francisco's gay cultural scene and in the development of American avant garde poetries.Amazon.com Review
From the time it first emerged as a renegade liberating voicein the early 1950s, beat writing changed the American social literaryscene. Poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti altered thesound of U.S. poetry while Jack Kerouac's bebop chant--particularly inhis classic On the Road--literally changed how Americansspoke. The beats' fame became so great so quickly that their criticsaccused them of hypocrisy. Not so Jack Spicer; while Ginsberg andKerouac were busy publishing and promoting their work, Spicer--whoseoriginal lyric voice and gay content still resonate today--spent mostof his time disdaining the publishing world and making enemies. InPoet Be Like God, journalist Lewis Ellingham and experimentalnovelist Kevin Killian have produced not only a fully realizedportrait of Spicer, but a complexly woven historical and literarytapestry.Spicer emerges here as a brilliant, difficult, and largelyunlikable man whose talent for writing matched his inability tofunction in the world. Ellingham and Killian are equally concernedwith explicating the San Francisco renaissance and charting theemergence of North Beach as a gay neighborhood; Poet Be LikeGod thus rediscovers Jack Spicer for a new generation of readersand presents us with a unique and startling look at gay and literaryhistory. --Michael Bronski ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

"Another Tin Ear Review from Kirkus"
In"Poet Be Like God" on the poet Jack Spicer, ever thornily but true to his own unique and innovative poetic vision, Kirkus yet again hits dead middle (with the emphasis on "dead") in displaying its tin ear and mean-spiritedness.Spicer, for all his personal flaws, was, and continues to be, an inspirational and influential poet to young and old writers and readers.

Spicer's Gnosticism
Spicer and Ginsberg influenced one another, as is clearly shown in this book.Ginsberg stole a lot of his ideas from Spicer, but he was still the greater poet because he touched upon the conversation of his times, while Spicer went whacko and had no real impact on his culture.Academics have taken up Spicer, but this has again had no echo at all in the popular culture.

It's particularly interesting to study the automatic side of Spicer's poetics from surrealism forward -- the relinquishing of choice for a ouija board automaticism that resulted in odd nonsense that probably did not come from the dead, but resulted in an arcane verse that did indeed catalyze some of the lazier aspects of SF poetry but which was a dead end.

Magisterial biography that brings to life a tormented alcoholic who was not even trying to be nice, or even well-dressed, enough, to enter into the public forum.

His best work is the discussions he offered in The House that Jack Built -- astounding to see what he could do when he DID enter into the public conversation.Too often in his poetry he seems to be mumbling to himself.Poets need to reconnect to the real world -- because the world is real -- it has an ecology and texture, and the poets who got this will survive.Others form dead ends into their lost selves.

Gnosticism is a dead end.

Essential Reading (Not An Exaggeration)
Poets in the 1950s and 1960s have been well served by some of their biographers, and in this thrilling critical treatment of Jack Spicer and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Ellingham and Killian join theranks of Peter Davison (The Fading Smile: Boston Poets from Lowell toPlath) and Bill Berkson and Joe LeSeur (Homage to Frank O'Hara) inmagically capturing the soul of an important school in the poetic fermentof those years. The San Francisco circle around Spicer was intense,prolific and inspired, but they didn't get the publicity that the New Yorkpoets received or that the Beats had showered on them. Lack of mediaattention didn't stop them. They were dedicated to a pure vision of poetryas an almost religious vocation. On his hospital death bed in 1965 (he diedat 40 from acute alcohlism), Spicer told friend Warren Tallman, "I wastrapped inside my own vocabulary." His genius/mania to use thatvocabulary in service of the Muse produced great work and reminded othersof the seriousness of their purpose. Spicer, in all his contradictions anddrives, leaps from these pages. The book as a whole bristles with the veryenergy it celebrates, both poetic and sexual (intrigue was in their blood),and is essential reading for all of us interested in the circles thatnurture poetry in every creative center. As if that is not enough, thequotations from a vast number of interviews of the surviving participantsmake this a delicious oral history as well as a compendium of hair-raisinggossip of the wild times in North Beach before tourists took it over fomartists.

Jack Spicer was not a Beat poet.
I have read Poet Be Like God, and I wish neither to rate it (but there'sno option available that allows one to opt out of the rating game) norreview it, but to make a correction to the idiotic Kirkus review: JackSpicer was NOT a "Beat" poet. There were a group of Beat poets inSan Francisco in the late 1950s, early 1960s (e.g.,Bob Kaufman), but Spicerwasn't one of them. His intentions in poetry were different from theirs;naturally, so was his aesthetic. Spicer was part of a triumverate of poetsthat included Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser who met at the end of WorldWar II in Berkeley, Ca., and were sometimes known as the BerkeleyRenaissance group, or more simply, and more accurately, as part of the SanFrancisco poetry scene (which was part of the New American Poetrymovement). That the Kirkus reviewer could make such an elementary andstupid mistake should be taken as a clear indicator of the idiocy of therest of the Kirkus piece of schlock.

Important biography of crucial postmodern poet
I find that the Kirkus review available here does ill-service to this important biography of Jack Spicer. One would have no inkling, from reading this review, that Spicer's poetry is one of the most influential sources for postmodern poetry and poetics in the 1990s. It is not some recent academic fad to study Spicer; rather, Spicer has been a crucial poet for many younger writers for over three decades. This biography, published at the same time with his collected lectures, should provide the opportunity for even more serious study of his work. ... Read more

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w/Blaser's essay "The Practice of Outside" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

In everything.
Art is fun. Ghosts are all around making poetry with us. Is his I there? Maybe that is the trail he is sending us on. There is a great deal of hell in everything. Somehow, THAT is made beautiful. Love and hate have no place in poetry. Contradict oneself. Are you?

"Textbook of Poetry" and "Fifteen False Propositions Against God" are the stellar poems here, but each page is full of voice. No poet has inspired me as Spicer has. I am continually returning to him.

November 30th, 2008: a complete collection of Spicer's poems is coming out through Wesleyan titled, "My Vocabulary Did This To Me."If you are thinking about purchasing this volume (which is out of print now (hence the high price)), I would wait for that one and get it. I know that Peter Gizzi (who also collected Spicer's Vancouver lectures in a volume, "The House That Jack Built") has spearheaded this project, and I think we can expect something magnificent. Do not miss Spicer's poetry.

"Heads Of the Town Up to the Aether" may be the best SF poem
ever written or collaged or dictated into existence even if the "imperial city"/ "civitas dei" could not recognize itself in these antilyrical and mock Spicerian deformations and post-Beat revelations into the "afterlife" ghosts and Logos/lowghosts and proud slums of 1960.If this is not US poetry equal to the severe decreations of Wallace Stevens in "The Rock," then I do not know what poesy is nor SF might be as imagined into a city of imagination, vision, and mongrel community.

A bible of inspiration
This is a book of divinely inspired material. The poems obviously come from something transcendent; something undefinable (what Jack calls the Martians). Poets or artists of any sort should defintely have a copy,because like I say, it is a bible of inspiration.

One of the great books of the 20th century
When Jack Spicer died in August, 1965, he was known only to initiates of the new American poetry. Since then, his reputation has grown posthumously in a fashion unequaled since Dickinson. This is the book on which thisreputation rests, one of the most searing and terrifying (and beautiful)collections ever written in English. ... Read more

Product Description
Jack Spicer's lost detective novel found ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Spicer's Novel Rewarding On Many Levels
There are basically three sorts of readers who will pick up Jack Spicer's posthumously published, unfinished detective novel, THE TOWER OF BABEL. First of all, of course, are mystery enthusiasts, of which Spicer himself was one (as it explains in the afterword: Hammett and Chandler wereparticular favorites of his). Second, readers with an interest in the poetsand artists of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and '60's--TOWEROF BABEL is both a portrait of that scene, and a critique of it.Finally,anyone who is an enthusiast for Spicer's strange, hermetic, brilliantpoetry will want to see what he was like as a prose writer.

Of the threereaders, perhaps only the mystery enthusiast will be disappointed, becauseTOWER OF BABEL--like Charles Dickens' MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD--ifunfinished.But the writing is very fine, witty, discerning--poets oftenmake the best novelists, because of their care for individual words,individual sentences--and Spicer's characterizations are brilliant.Myfavorite is Henry, the one-armed letter-writer.Anyway, find it and readit.And, as the editors suggest, make up your own ending. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

if you find, snap it up
Midway through his poetic "career," Jack Spicer decided that writing poetry in extended sequences was the only satisfying way for him. He called his subsequent sequences "books"; hence his "collected books," also a wonderful collection. Many of his "books" were originally published as small, actual, extremely-limited-edition books.

In one of his writings, he referred to single, non-sequential poems as "one night stands."

This book is his collected one night stands.

In addition to his incisive, bitter, loving, witty, intellectually stimulating poems, the book provides poignant & insightful introductory commentary from two of Spicer's close friends: the great poet Robert Duncan and the famous editor Donald Allen, both of whom knew Spicer from his college years.

Highly recommended.This review refers to the paperback edition. ... Read more

Product Description
A Reading Spicer and 18 Sonnets
by Beverly Dahlen
New West Classics Series: Book 3
2004, poetry, 29 pages
ISBN 0-925904-30-9; tradepaperback; $12

... Read more