Jack Spicer Books

A must for anyone interested in 1 of the 3 greatest poets [writing in english] circa 1950 to present. Gizzi's essay is illuminating and steers clear of obfuscating what Spicer meant by "dictation" and the "outside".

The House That Jack Built is a must have for any serious poet or reader of poetry and poetics. Spicer's lectures on dictation, the serial poem, and the practice of reading lay a foundation for the art of writing poetry that is without default. His ideas are instrumental in poetry's process. Peter Gizzi's afterword enlivens the spirit of Spicer's practice and makes it available to the reader. Exhibiting a close relationship with Spicer's work and method, Gizzi both completes and opens the material discussed in the lectures. A stellar accomplishment.

This book is simply amazing as Jack Spicer had amazing martian forces driving him. The lectures are excellently transcribed and annotated. This part of the book holds amazing inspiration. Where the book fails is that Gizzi decided to start writing about Jack. I could hardly begin to read his tacked on essay before putting the book down in disgust. Jack spoke for himself just fine. The essay belongs somewhere else.

Hey, Jack Spicer is still the hidden force and westcoast "genisu loci" of US poetics, and Peter Gizzi has done a yeoman's job of putting these probing and lost lectures together to do new work. The poesy game will not be disturbed however, and putting J Spicer on cover of American Poetry Review will not alter the pastoral fact and fate of downfall and lost aura. Still, this is must reading.

Spicer and Ginsberg influenced one another, as is clearly shown in this book. Ginsberg stole a lot of his ideas from Spicer, but he was still the greater poet because he touched upon the conversation of his times, while Spicer went whacko and had no real impact on his culture. Academics have taken up Spicer, but this has again had no echo at all in the popular culture.

It's particularly interesting to study the automatic side of Spicer's poetics from surrealism forward -- the relinquishing of choice for a ouija board automaticism that resulted in odd nonsense that probably did not come from the dead, but resulted in an arcane verse that did indeed catalyze some of the lazier aspects of SF poetry but which was a dead end.

Magisterial biography that brings to life a tormented alcoholic who was not even trying to be nice, or even well-dressed, enough, to enter into the public forum.

His best work is the discussions he offered in The House that Jack Built -- astounding to see what he could do when he DID enter into the public conversation. Too often in his poetry he seems to be mumbling to himself. Poets need to reconnect to the real world -- because the world is real -- it has an ecology and texture, and the poets who got this will survive. Others form dead ends into their lost selves.

Gnosticism is a dead end.

I find that the Kirkus review available here does ill-service to this important biography of Jack Spicer. One would have no inkling, from reading this review, that Spicer's poetry is one of the most influential sources for postmodern poetry and poetics in the 1990s. It is not some recent academic fad to study Spicer; rather, Spicer has been a crucial poet for many younger writers for over three decades. This biography, published at the same time with his collected lectures, should provide the opportunity for even more serious study of his work.

Poets in the 1950s and 1960s have been well served by some of their biographers, and in this thrilling critical treatment of Jack Spicer and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Ellingham and Killian join the ranks of Peter Davison (The Fading Smile: Boston Poets from Lowell to Plath) and Bill Berkson and Joe LeSeur (Homage to Frank O'Hara) in magically capturing the soul of an important school in the poetic ferment of those years. The San Francisco circle around Spicer was intense, prolific and inspired, but they didn't get the publicity that the New York poets received or that the Beats had showered on them. Lack of media attention didn't stop them. They were dedicated to a pure vision of poetry as an almost religious vocation. On his hospital death bed in 1965 (he died at 40 from acute alcohlism), Spicer told friend Warren Tallman, "I was trapped inside my own vocabulary." His genius/mania to use that vocabulary in service of the Muse produced great work and reminded others of the seriousness of their purpose. Spicer, in all his contradictions and drives, leaps from these pages. The book as a whole bristles with the very energy it celebrates, both poetic and sexual (intrigue was in their blood), and is essential reading for all of us interested in the circles that nurture poetry in every creative center. As if that is not enough, the quotations from a vast number of interviews of the surviving participants make this a delicious oral history as well as a compendium of hair-raising gossip of the wild times in North Beach before tourists took it over fom artists.

I have read Poet Be Like God, and I wish neither to rate it (but there's no option available that allows one to opt out of the rating game) nor review it, but to make a correction to the idiotic Kirkus review: Jack Spicer was NOT a "Beat" poet. There were a group of Beat poets in San Francisco in the late 1950s, early 1960s (e.g.,Bob Kaufman), but Spicer wasn't one of them. His intentions in poetry were different from theirs; naturally, so was his aesthetic. Spicer was part of a triumverate of poets that included Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser who met at the end of World War II in Berkeley, Ca., and were sometimes known as the Berkeley Renaissance group, or more simply, and more accurately, as part of the San Francisco poetry scene (which was part of the New American Poetry movement). That the Kirkus reviewer could make such an elementary and stupid mistake should be taken as a clear indicator of the idiocy of the rest of the Kirkus piece of schlock.

ever written or collaged or dictated into existence even if the "imperial city"/ "civitas dei" could not recognize itself in these antilyrical and mock Spicerian deformations and post-Beat revelations into the "afterlife" ghosts and Logos/lowghosts and proud slums of 1960. If this is not US poetry equal to the severe decreations of Wallace Stevens in "The Rock," then I do not know what poesy is nor SF might be as imagined into a city of imagination, vision, and mongrel community.

This is a book of divinely inspired material. The poems obviously come from something transcendent; something undefinable (what Jack calls the Martians). Poets or artists of any sort should defintely have a copy, because like I say, it is a bible of inspiration.

When Jack Spicer died in August, 1965, he was known only to initiates of the new American poetry. Since then, his reputation has grown posthumously in a fashion unequaled since Dickinson. This is the book on which this reputation rests, one of the most searing and terrifying (and beautiful) collections ever written in English.

Midway through his poetic "career," Jack Spicer decided that writing poetry in extended sequences was the only satisfying way for him. He called his subsequent sequences "books"; hence his "collected books," also a wonderful collection. Many of his "books" were originally published as small, actual, extremely-limited-edition books.

In one of his writings, he referred to single, non-sequential poems as "one night stands."

This book is his collected one night stands.

In addition to his incisive, bitter, loving, witty, intellectually stimulating poems, the book provides poignant & insightful introductory commentary from two of Spicer's close friends: the great poet Robert Duncan and the famous editor Donald Allen, both of whom knew Spicer from his college years.

Highly recommended. This review refers to the paperback edition.

There are basically three sorts of readers who will pick up Jack Spicer's posthumously published, unfinished detective novel, THE TOWER OF BABEL. First of all, of course, are mystery enthusiasts, of which Spicer himself was one (as it explains in the afterword: Hammett and Chandler were particular favorites of his). Second, readers with an interest in the poets and artists of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and '60's--TOWER OF BABEL is both a portrait of that scene, and a critique of it. Finally, anyone who is an enthusiast for Spicer's strange, hermetic, brilliant poetry will want to see what he was like as a prose writer.

Of the three readers, perhaps only the mystery enthusiast will be disappointed, because TOWER OF BABEL--like Charles Dickens' MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD--if unfinished. But the writing is very fine, witty, discerning--poets often make the best novelists, because of their care for individual words, individual sentences--and Spicer's characterizations are brilliant. My favorite is Henry, the one-armed letter-writer. Anyway, find it and read it. And, as the editors suggest, make up your own ending.