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.
My Vocabulary Did This to Me (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The Los Angeles–born Spicer died young, at age 40 in 1965, of acute alcoholism. In his lifetime, he published six books of poems with tiny presses. Though he was influential, he operated in a small circle, mostly in Berkeley. It was at the Six Gallery he cofounded that Ginsberg gave the first reading of Howl in 1955; he was very close to the poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, but as the editors of this extraordinary collection point out, Spicer was never fully embraced within the official culture or counter-culture of the period. This remarkably fresh assemblage, which gathers from two earlier posthumous (and now out-of-print) collections and adds many unpublished poems and sequences, will dramatically expand Spicer's influence. Like the work of Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats, Spicer's poems still seem to come from somewhere else (in fact, Spicer claimed he received Martian signals). But what a reader finds here is a poet deeply engaged with language, a gay man consumed by desperate affairs of the heart and flesh, a lover of jazz and baseball and weather, and possessed of the tenderest lyricisms and biting wit. His After Lorca series still shocks with its bold presumption of the dead Lorca's voice; many of the previously unpublished one-night stand poems are marvelous (see Any fool can get into an ocean...) and the Letters to James Alexander, found by the editors amid the Spicer collection at Berkeley, is Spicer at his best—rendering letters as poems, cauterizing the wound of a love affair: Dear James/ It is absolutely clear and sunny as if neither a cloud nor a moon had ever been invented. (Dec.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"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
"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
"His vocabulary did indeed do this to hi, but perhaps with this handsome edtion, love and reappraisal will let him go on."--Edward Champion, The Los Angeles Times
"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
"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
"His vocabulary did indeed do this to hi, but perhaps with this handsome edtion, love and reappraisal will let him go on."--Edward Champion, The Los Angeles Times
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By Ted Burke
Format:Hardcover
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.
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.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
By dpk
Format:Hardcover
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
kill your kindle
1 star for the kindle version. not for spicer, who is pure paginated glory, and has no use for any of our stars. Read more
Published 21 months ago by the ghost
1.0 out of 5 stars
Zero Stars Needed
I picked this book up on the new book shelf at my library. I'd never heard of this man and wish I still never had. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Marion
5.0 out of 5 stars
do the flowers change as I touch your skin?
before this was published, i had been searching for it everywhere. it had been stolen out of all the libraries in chicago. Read more
Published 24 months ago by justinez
2.0 out of 5 stars
I'm afraid that two stars may be a gift...
I first heard about this book of poetry, in a publication of the Bancroft Library (University of California), and since that major library has a collection of Jack Spicer's work, I... Read more
Published on March 3, 2011 by David A. Marks
5.0 out of 5 stars
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... Read more
Published on September 12, 2010 by buyer
