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My Vocabulary Did This to Me
The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
Wesleyan Poetry Series
Edited by Peter Gizzi , Kevin Killian
Sales Date: 2010-08-15
An essential collection of a highly original American poet
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.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
About This Edition
BERKELEY RENAISSANCE (1945 – 1950)
Berkeley in Time of Plague
A Girl's Song
Homosexuality
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Landscape
An Apocalypse for Three Voices
One Night Stand
An Answer to Jaime de Angulo
A Lecture in Practical Aesthetics
Dialogue Between Intellect and Passion
A Night in Four Parts (Second Version)
Orpheus in Hell
Orpheus After Eurydice
Orpheus' Song to Apollo
Troy Poem
"We find the body difficult to speak . . ."
"They are selling the midnight papers . . ."
"Any fool can get into an ocean . . ."
The Scrollwork on the Casket
The Dancing Ape
Imaginary Elegies (I, II, III)
Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
MINNESOTA POEMS (1950 – 1952)
Minneapolis: Indian Summer
Watching a TV Boxing Match in October
Portrait of an Artist
Sonnet for the Beginning of Winter
On Reading Last Year's Love Poems
Orpheus in Athens
Train Song for Gary
A Second Train Song for Gary
BERKELEY / SAN FRANCISCO (1952 – 1955)
A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance
A Poem for Dada Day at The Place, April 1, 1955
"The window is a sword . . ."
Imaginary Elegies (IV)
NEW YORK / BOSTON (1955 – 1956)
IInd Phase of the Moon
IIIrd Phase of the Moon
IVth Phase of the Moon •Some Notes on Whitman for Allen Joyce
The Day Five Thousand Fish Died Along the Charles River
Hibernation—After Morris Graves
Éternuement
Song for the Great Mother
"The city of Boston . . ."
Five Words for Joe Dunn on His Twenty-Second Birthday
Birdland, California
"Imagine Lucifer . . ."
The Song of the Bird in the Loins
Babel 3
They Murdered You: An Elegy on the Death of Kenneth Rexroth 64A Poem to the Reader of the Poem
Song for Bird and Myself
A Poem Without a Single Bird in It
The Unvert Manifesto and Other Papers Found in the Rare Book Room of the Boston Public Library in the Handwriting of Oliver Charming. By S.
SAN FRANCISCO (1956 – 1965)
Poetry as Magic Workshop Questionnaire
AFTER LORCA
ADMONITIONS
A BOOK OF MUSIC
Socrates
A Poem for Dada Day at The Place, April 1, 1958
BILLY THE KID
For Steve Jonas Who Is in Jail for Defrauding a Book Club
FIFTEEN FALSE PROPOSITIONS AGAINST GOD
LETTERS TO JAMES ALEXANDER
APOLLO SENDS SEVEN NURSERY RHYMES TO JAMES ALEXANDER
A BIRTHDAY POEM FOR JIM (AND JAMES) ALEXANDER
Imaginary Elegies (V, VI)
"Dignity is a part of a man . . ."
HELEN: A REVISION
THE HEADS OF THE TOWN UP TO THE AETHER
LAMENT FOR THE MAKERS
A RED WHEELBARROW
Three Marxist Essays
THE HOLY GRAIL
GOLEM
MAP POEMS
LANGUAGE
BOOK OF MAGAZINE VERSE
Chronology
Notes to the Poems
Bibliography
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
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.
"As a measure of our historical distance from Spicer's personality, a new generation of editors, the poets Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, moves beyond the Spicer 'legend' in order to present the full range of his poetry to readers both familiar and unfamiliar with his work."
~Zach Finch, Boston Review
"The book is one of the most important volumes of poetry published in the past 50 years. The poems are simply wonderful, and Spicer's mature work is some of the best ever written by an American."
~Ron Silliman
""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 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 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.""
~Ted Butler, Oyster Boy Review
"An epic of irritation by a poet who professed no epic intent, the collected poetry of Jack Spicer is essential reading. Acerbic, wary, aggressive, aggrieved, it rides and puts it own spin on a recovering (would-be recovering) romanticism, a signal travail informing twentieth-century poetics.""
~Nathaniel Mackey
""His vocabulary did indeed do this to him, but perhaps with this handsome edition, love and reappraisal will let him go on.""
~Edward Champion, The Los Angeles Times
""You finish My Vocabulary Did This to Me feeling you've come in contact with an original artist and a genuine one, a writer who is, to borrow from Wordsworth, 'fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy'. You also finish the book thinking that these poems are ready to find a new audience.""
~Dwight Garner, The New York Times
""As a measure of our historical distance from Spicer's personality, a new generation of editors, the poets Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, moves beyond the Spicer 'legend' in order to present the full range of his poetry to readers both familiar and unfamiliar with his work.""
~Zach Finch, Boston Review
""My Vocabulary Did This To Me These final words serve as an apt title for Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian's wonderfully edited Spicer collection, the first thorough gathering of the poet's extraordinary and challenging writing to appear since the '70s.""
~Erik Davis, Bookforum