The Poetry of Jack Spicer

About the Book

The first full critical study of this San Francisco Renaissance poet
In the years since his death from alcohol poisoning, Jack Spicer (1925-1965) has gradually come to be recognized as one of most intriguing of the so-called 'New American Poetry' poets. This study places Spicer's work in the context of the San Francisco Renaissance and contemporary movements with which he was in dialogue such as the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the 'New York School'. It also explores his relationship to the major modernists from whom his innovative poetics derived. Informed by archival material only recently made available, the book 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - “All is Not Well”; Chapter One - The Early Poetry: Cartography, Seriality, Time; Chapter Two - Correspondence and Admonition; Chapter Three - The Metasexual City: Politics, Nonsense, Poetry; Chapter Four - From Mythopoetics to Pragmatics: The Holy Grail and A Red Wheelbarrow; Chapter Five - The Poetry of Language and the Language of Poetry: Language and Book of Magazine Verse; Coda: 1958; Bibliography.

About the Author :
Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett, American Modernism's Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation, and The Poetry of Jack Spicer.

Review :
Katz has delivered many lovely glosses and tools throughout his study to approach moments in Spicer’s life and in his poems. ... this is a focused study that elucidates some of the most important concepts and practices of Spicer’s poetry in five interconnected essays that deal with Spicer’s life and work in distinct, chronological periods. Katz’s book is thorough, thoughtful and brilliantly argued … will help to assure Spicer the place he deserves alongside other major American poets born into the 1920s such as Frank O’Hara, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. Katz’s book is thorough, thoughtful and brilliantly argued. Daniel Katz's superb new study of Jack Spicer's poetry surveys and synthesizes pioneering work of earlier critics, even as it advances his own distinctive views about, for example, Spicer's development of epistolary and serial forms. Katz avoids the temptation to mask or resolve the contradictory nature of Spicer's poetics, thereby yielding a poet of greater scope and complexity. Acutely intelligent and elegantly written, Katz's book will be essential reading for the many readers discovering Spicer's poetry for the first time and for those aiming to advance the leading edge of Spicer studies. This brilliant study of Jack Spicer’s poetry will be an essential companion for anyone reading his poems. Particularly impressive is the way Daniel Katz’s incisive close readings of the poems always respect both the intelligibility and the opacity of Spicer’s inventiveness. Katz convincingly demonstrates that Spicer’s intelligence, passion, dialogues with other poets, and questionings of the aesthetic make him a crucial modern American poet. Katz’s book is thorough, thoughtful and brilliantly argued … will help to assure Spicer the place he deserves alongside other major American poets born into the 1920s such as Frank O’Hara, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley and John Ashbery.