Customer Reviews

The Collected Books of Jack Spicer

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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 this reputation rests, one of the most searing and terrifying (and beautiful) collections ever written in English.

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.

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.

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.