Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780819502377

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Gizzi's afterword offers a thorough, detailed appreciation of Spicer that illuminates many textual difficulties. He also includes an appendix of uncollected prose, a final interview, and a useful bibliography....[A] valuable [addition] to all collections of American poetry.""--L. Berk, Choice ""[A]n invaluable addition to the Spicer canon, The House That Jack Built is as instructive for scholars as it is for Spicer enthusiasts.""--John Pallatella, Lingua Franca ""Poet and editor Peter Gizzi has come up with extremely readable transcriptions from old fragile tapes, truly helpful short introductions to each talk, a handful of welcome stray pieces--including the only known published interview (originally in the San Francisco Chronicle), great useful footnotes, and an afterward grappling with the subtleties of Spicer's works.""--Steve Dickison, San Francisco Bay Guardian ""[A]ccompanied by a superbly concise and enlightening commentary by editor Peter Gizzi. Literary publishing doesn't get any better than this""--Bernard Welt, Lambda Book Report ""Peter Gizzi does an exceptionally deft and uniformly excellent job of editing the lectures and providing the personal and cultural contexts for what Spicer had to say. Gizzi's afterword to the lecturesis the best sustained commentary on Spicer's notoriously provocative poetics, especially its central element of dictation.""--Jim Dodge, San Francisco Chronicle ""Here at last we have the poet Jack Spicer's legendary Vancouver and Berkeley lectures given during the turbulent 1960s, now lovingly and meticulously edited (one might say illuminated) by the poet Peter Gizzi. One may quarrel with many of Spicer's often provocative opinions but there is an urgency here, a life-force. These lectures, along with Gizzi's afterword, provide a vital articulation of the poet's profound and necessary calling.""--Susan Howe ""These 'lectures' are unbounded maps of Spicer's experience in his exploratory poetic practice that surprised even himself, as it does us, inside and outside the collapse of language into its materiality, neither transparent nor ideal in political, sacred, or poetic terms. Peter Gizzi's presentation is a tour de force. His 'afterword' offers the most important consideration to date of the genius of Spicer's work and of its dignity in our hearts and minds.""--Robin Blaser ""Spicer is an intriguing and ultimately crucial figure in the history of postwar American poetry. A monastic and (in some ways) abstract poet, he was also extremely funny, harshly serious, absurd when his drive for transcendence required it. Yet in many places his poetry anticipates cultural studies. His lectures on poetry are some of the best from the postwar era. Peter Gizzi's handling does them full justice: he makes the liveliness of the interchange clear and presents Spicer's knottedness helpfully without explaining the difficulties away.""--Bob Perelman

Author Information

JACK SPICER (1925-1965) was an American poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and the Berkeley Renaissance. His writing and his ideas about writing have had a deep and lasting impact on American poetry. PETER GIZZI is the winner of the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for his book Fierce Elegy. He is author of many collections of poetry, including Now It's Dark (2020); Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for a National Book Award; Threshold Songs (2011); and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011 (2014), a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize. He is the series editor of The Collected Works of Jack Spicer.

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