Jack Spicer

Presents a collection of poems taken from a variety of the author's books along with poems published for the first time.

The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

My Vocabulary Did This to Me

Out of print for decades, this is the legendary American poet's tribute to Federico García Lorca, including translations of the great Spanish poet's work. Jack Spicer was one of the outstanding figures of the mid-twentieth-century San Francisco Renaissance, bent on fashioning a visionary new lyricism. Spicer called his poems “dictations,” and they combine outrageous humor, acid intelligence, brilliant wordplay, and sheer desolation to incandescent effect. “Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume,” writes the dead Federico García Lorca at the start of After Lorca, Spicer’s first book and one that, since it originally appeared in 1957, has exerted a powerful influence on poetry in America and abroad. “It must be made clear at the start that these poems are not translations,” Lorca continues. “In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had written it. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another of his own, giving rather the effect of an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes that they must be his).” What so puzzles Lorca continues to delight and inspire readers of poetry today.

After Lorca

Illuminates Jack Spicer's provocative lectures on radical poetics The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic. Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.

The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer

The House That Jack Built

Collected Books of Jack Spicer

A Book of Music

The Collected Books of Jack Spicer

Fiction. An established writer from an Eastern college returning to his former San Francisco haunts becomes entangled in a labyrinthine series of events that culminate in the sudden violent death of a respected poet. Described by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian as "a satiric look at the private world of poetry gone public in the wake of the Six Gallery HOWL reading of October, 1955," THE TOWER OF BABEL includes finely detailed sketches of the San Francisco poetry world and gay life as they existed then.

The Tower of Babel

The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether

Gertrude Stein

Peter Eleey

Michel Leiris

A Bell is a Cup has been published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition Impressionism by Matt Connors, held at MoMA PS1. Alongside texts by Peter Eleey, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, the publication presents the first comprehensive gathering of Connors' work to date. In his essay, Eleey writes that Connors' paintings "bear traces of one another, but they also sometimes prop each other up or lean into each other, as if to physically reinforce, in painterly terms, Jack Spicer¿s ideas about the interdependence of poems. 'There is really no single poem,' Spicer came to believe; he argued that 'poems should echo and re-echo against each other.'"

Matt Connors: A Bell Is a Cup

Robert Duncan

An Ode and Arcadia

Illuminates Jack Spicer's provocative lectures on radical poetics.

The House that Jack Built

The County Lines phenomenon has become one of the most significant drug market developments in the UK over recent years. This book analyses how it is being responded to by the police in affected provincial areas. Drawing on unique ethnographic fieldwork, it takes readers into police stations and out onto the streets with officers, providing timely insight into the policing of this high profile and challenging drug market context. The book considers the use of new police tactics that have been proposed and familiar methods that officers regularly embarked on. Through a sophisticated theoretical framework it argues that the policing of County Lines can often be considered ‘symbolic’, with concerns regularly placed on sending out strong messages that appear superficial when closely examined. Alongside this, however, there appears to be a progressive shift towards a more pragmatic drugs policing approach that embraces harm reduction principles.This cutting-edge research speaks to academics in Criminology and Policing, and to practitioners and policy makers.

Responses To Evolving Provincial Drug Markets

Policing County Lines

The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic. Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.

Jack Spicer

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