The Poetry of Jack Spicer

我的项目包括研究和撰写一本学术专著，暂定名为《杰克·斯派塞的诗歌》（The Poetry of Jack Spicer），目前已与爱丁堡大学出版社签约，定于2012年出版。杰克·斯派塞（1925-1965）是20世纪五六十年代“旧金山文艺复兴”的重要人物，这是美国战后最重要的诗歌运动之一。尽管斯派塞长期以来一直受到实践诗人的尊敬，并且一直是许多重要期刊和学术出版社发表的评论文章和书籍章节的主题，但我的书将是第一本对他的作品进行全面研究的书。鉴于最近出版的《我的词汇对我起了作用：杰克·斯派塞诗集》（卫斯理大学出版社，2008年）在商业和评论界都取得了巨大的成功，这样一个项目尤其及时，但考虑到他的作品最显著的特点，对斯派塞进行深入研究的必要性早就很明显了。斯派塞创新的翻译项目，他从五十年代一个公开的同性恋诗人的立场上对同性恋诗学的独特的，相反的看法，他对地方和区域的强调，他在抵制文学商品化的过程中拒绝版权，以及他对电信隐喻的一贯依赖，使他的作品处于一些最具活力的当代批评趋势的中心，比如酷儿研究，翻译研究，新媒体研究，各种思想流派都在重新阐述国家，地区，语言，方言，文化和地方之间的关系。我的书将对杰克·斯派塞的作品进行概述和分析，从他最早的歌词到他最后的系列作品或“书”，包括对他在诗学方面有影响力的“讲座”、他的信件、他未完成的侦探小说、他的短文和散文的讨论。这本书将以评论家和诗人对斯派塞的重要研究为基础，同时也试图勾勒出斯派塞在20世纪美国诗歌中的整体地位。因此，除了在“旧金山场景”的背景下讨论斯派塞，就像迄今为止大多数关于他的最好的作品一样，我还将研究他的作品与关键的现代主义祖先（叶芝，庞德，W. C.威廉姆斯，H.D.）和“旧金山场景”之外的本世纪中叶同时代人（首先是罗伯特·克里利，詹姆斯·斯凯勒和弗兰克·奥哈拉）的关系。我还计划组织电台广播和学生主导的播客项目，以配合出版，进一步传播杰克·斯派塞的杰出作品。当斯派塞因酗酒引起的并发症而弥留之际，他对他的密友、诗人罗宾·布莱泽（Robin Blaser）低声说的最后一句话是：“我的词汇把我变成了这样。”你的爱会让你走下去的。”斯派塞性情乖戾、脾气暴躁、长期抑郁、性沮丧、酗酒，他留下了大量具有解放意义和创造性的作品，这不仅体现在他对诗歌可能性的重新想象上，也体现在他对可能性本身的沉默上。斯派塞坚决反对垮掉派同时代人和熟人艾伦·金斯伯格（Allen Ginsberg）等人过于轻率的乐观主义，他也拒绝以一种玩世不恭、不被人怀疑的立场来安慰自己，这种立场将世界不可避免的失败视为不与之斗争的充分理由。很少有诗人能比他更坚定地捍卫诗歌的重要性，尽管诗歌不可避免地被边缘化，但也正因为如此；这是斯派塞在一个典型的结语中表达的矛盾立场：“没有/没有人听诗。”斯派塞的作品不仅试图给我们提供词汇，还试图给我们提供一整套成语，让我们不仅能说，还能听。只有在倾听自己和他人的空间里，我们的爱才会让我们继续前进。

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.