My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry Series) by Jack Spicer (PDF)

Description

An essential collection of a highly original American poetWinner 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: 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”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”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”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”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 About the Author 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.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Item in great shape, shipped super fast, great seller

⭐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.

⭐”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 was so ahead of his time that only now is he quickly becoming one of America’s most studied poets. This collection (titled after his supposed last words), My Vocabulary did this to Me, is a showcase of both his previously published and unpublished work, giving the reader a strong sense of understanding the shift in poetic nature Spicer makes over time.While I appreciated almost all of Spicer’s poetic musings throughout his career, I find him at his most touching and real in his letters to Lorca and others. These particular moments help reveal what is so important about Spicer as a writer: his own dilemma of what constitutes poetry. Whether or not this reveal of what he defines and sees as poetry strengthens or weakens the arguments for his other poems that do not adopt prose is left up to the reader, then, as one can not help but analyze his poetry in terms of his attempts to define the art in some way.For those interested in writing, reading, and understanding philosophies on contemporary poetry, Spicer is a necessary read, and one certainly worth while. At his best, he is emotionally and philosophically moving, at his worst, he’s still interesting.

⭐Very happy. A very nice copy. Arrived quickly and safely.

⭐This is a collection of all the major works by the marvellous and underrated San Francisco poet Jack Spicer. The book features a superb introduction by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. The book arrived on time and in excellent condition. Thankfully, Qatar customs did not slash its cover or contents, as they are sometimes wont to do with books they deem suspicious.

⭐Ten stars out of five. I’m sick of the invisible world and all its efforts to be visible. Hope it works

⭐Hätte man nicht schreiben müssen, konnte man aber. Muss man nicht lesen, kann man aber. Und dann kommte das vergnügen. So langsam krabbelt es, dann schneller schon kratzt es, schließlich brummt’s im Schädel wie dölle. Wenn man etwas Rotwein dazu trinkt ( ich möchte mittelgewichtigen Zweigelt empfehlen ), erinnert der Genuss manchen vielleicht an ein Rehbeuschl. Trinkt man reschen Weißwein dazu, werden eher Reminiszenzen an Kutteln nach Art von Caen erweckt. Es ist schon ein verwirrend vielschichtiges werk.

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