The Poetry of Jack Spicer

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My project involves researching and writing a scholarly monograph provisionally titled 'The Poetry of Jack Spicer,' which is now under contract with Edinburgh University Press, and due to be published in 2012. Jack Spicer (1925-1965) was a crucial figure of the 'San Francisco Renaissance' of the nineteen fifties and sixties, which was one of the most important post-War poetry movements in the United States. Though Spicer has long been revered by practising poets, and has been the subject of numerous critical articles and book-chapters published by leading journals and academic presses, my book will be the first full-length study of his work. Such a project is especially timely given the great success, both commercial and critical, of the recent 'My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer' (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), but the need for an extended study of Spicer has long been clear, given the most salient features of his work. Spicer's innovative translation projects, his distinctive, contrarian take on gay poetics from the position of an openly gay poet in the fifties, his stressing of the local and the regional, his refusal of copyright in his resistance to the commodification of literature, and his consistent recourse to the metaphorics of telecommunications, place his work at the centre of some of the most vibrant contemporary critical trends, such as queer studies, translation studies, new media studies, and the various schools of thought now rearticulating relationships between nation, region, language, vernacular, culture, and place. My book will provide an overview and analysis of the work of Jack Spicer, moving from his earliest lyrics through his final serial works, or 'books,' and including discussions of his influential 'lectures' on poetics, his correspondence, his unfinished detective novel, and his short essays and prose. This book will build on important previous work on Spicer by critics and poets, while also attempting to chart out Spicer's place within twentieth-century American poetry as a whole. Therefore, in addition to discussing Spicer within the context of the 'San Francisco Scene,' as has been the case with most of the best work on him to date, I will also investigate his writing in relation to key modernist forebears (Yeats, Pound, W. C. Williams, H.D.) and mid-century contemporaries outside the 'San Francisco Scene' (above all, Robert Creeley, James Schuyler, and Frank O'Hara). I also plan on organising radio broadcasts and student-led pod-cast projects to coincide with publication, and further disseminate the remarkable work of Jack Spicer.When Spicer lay dying of complications of alcohol abuse, his last words, whispered to his close friend, the poet Robin Blaser, were 'My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on.' Surly, grumpy, chronically depressed, sexually frustrated, and alcoholic, Spicer leaves behind a body of work which is remarkably liberating and generative, not only in its re-imagining of the possibilities of poetry, but also in its reticence with regard to the possible as such. Resolutely opposed to what he saw as the too often facile optimism of Beat contemporaries and acquaintances such as Allen Ginsberg, Spicer also refused the comforts of a cynical, disabused position which would view the inescapable failings of the world as sufficient reason not to strive against them. Few poets have more rigorously defended the importance of poetry, not only despite but also because of its inevitable marginalisation; an ambivalent position Spicer expresses in a characteristic enjambment: 'No / One listens to poetry.' Spicer's work attempts to give us not only the vocabulary, but the entire idiom that will allow us not only to speak but also to listen. It is only in the space of this listening--to ourselves as much as to others--that our love will let us go on.