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Be Brave to Things
The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer
Edited by Daniel Katz
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 2023-10-10
Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American master
Be Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Much of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer's growing readership to savor and enjoy.
"When your body brushed against me. . ."
When your body brushed against me I remembered
How we used to catch butterflies in our hands
Down in the garden.
We were such patient children
Following them from flower to flower
Waiting and hoping.
With our cupped hands we used to catch them
And they answered us with a soft tickle
For they never stopped flying.
In bed I remembered them and cried for
The touch of their fast wings, the impatience
Of their bright colors
I am too old for such games
But even tonight, now your body has reminded me of butterflies
I lie here awake, pretending.
JACK SPICER (1925—1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry. DANIEL KATZ is professor of English at the University of Warwick. His latest book is The Poetry of Jack Spicer and he is the Founding Editor of the book series Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics. He lives in Leamington Spa, England.
"This superb collection, along with its incisive introduction, offers previously uncollected and/or unpublished work by a poet whose time has come. Queer, out and proud in the 1950s; erudite and populist; fiercely local but grand in visionary ambition—Jack Spicer speaks anew through this eloquent volume."
"Have you read a poet and suddenly feel the shoulders you stand on? Jack Spicer does this to many of us, and now there are more poems! Oh, more treasure! Magic is not a metaphor, and 'Time does not finish a poem.' Jack says, 'Like a herd of reindeer / No one knows your heart."
"Be Brave to Things is a welcome addition to Jack Spicer's noncanonical canon, edited with scrupulous attention to a poem's provenance and publishing history. Daniel Katz's introduction is one of the best summaries of Spicer's poetics we have."
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