The Poetry of Jack Spicer

Abstract

In the years since his death from alcohol poisoning, San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) has gradually come to be recognized as one of most intriguing, demanding, and rewarding of the so-called 'New American Poetry' poets who were first published in Donald Allen's historic anthology of that name. This is the first full-length critical monograph on his work, placing it in the context not only of the San Francisco Renaissance and contemporary movements with which Spicer dialogued and often disagreed - such as the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the 'New York School' - but also of the major modernists from whom his innovative poetics derived, differed, and developed. Informed by much archival material only recently made available, The Poetry of Jack Spicer examines Spicer's post-Poundian translation projects; his crucial theories of the 'serial poem' and inspiration as 'dictation'; his contrarian take on queer poetics; his insistently uncanny regionalism; and his elaboration of an epistolary poetics of interpellation and address.