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robertlashley's review against another edition
5.0
Spicer is ignored by many beat-o-phobes who see any one involved in the SF School, New York School, and Beats as part of the same gang of nonsense avant-gardeists. That is a god damm shame.
I see his work as a progression of the conversation that Charles Olson started. One of the most moving subtexts of The Kingfishers was in the internal parodies of the crap pastoral poems so popular in American literature for a hundred years. Not just for it's snark, but it's underlying subtext, that the horrors of war and western civilization throughout history were so breathtakingly awful that to capture humanity in a soupy lyric language and imagery was dishonest. I see the best of Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser as an attempt to create a language in poetry that responded to Olson's implied call, the need for a poet to have the RIGHT word instead of the most musical or comfortable one.
"My Vocabulary Did This To Me" is carried by an fine ear and dexterity. There is no "spicer poem" in the book. Whether or not he in conventional free verse, form, prose poem or a open field lyric, his style (At his best) serves only the particular dynamic of the poem he is writing about. Even when poems don't work, it's a pleasure to read them, because you don't know what is going to come next.
Are their misses in this book, and might they have been influenced by booze? Yes, but I'm not in the business of bean counting like that. There is a trove of great poetry in "vocabulary" and a lot of that he grappled with as an artist-America, sexuality, modern poetry, experimental dynamics, and a complex relationship with the lyric poets of the past( particularly Auden and Lorca)-all of it worth a serious readers time.
I see his work as a progression of the conversation that Charles Olson started. One of the most moving subtexts of The Kingfishers was in the internal parodies of the crap pastoral poems so popular in American literature for a hundred years. Not just for it's snark, but it's underlying subtext, that the horrors of war and western civilization throughout history were so breathtakingly awful that to capture humanity in a soupy lyric language and imagery was dishonest. I see the best of Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser as an attempt to create a language in poetry that responded to Olson's implied call, the need for a poet to have the RIGHT word instead of the most musical or comfortable one.
"My Vocabulary Did This To Me" is carried by an fine ear and dexterity. There is no "spicer poem" in the book. Whether or not he in conventional free verse, form, prose poem or a open field lyric, his style (At his best) serves only the particular dynamic of the poem he is writing about. Even when poems don't work, it's a pleasure to read them, because you don't know what is going to come next.
Are their misses in this book, and might they have been influenced by booze? Yes, but I'm not in the business of bean counting like that. There is a trove of great poetry in "vocabulary" and a lot of that he grappled with as an artist-America, sexuality, modern poetry, experimental dynamics, and a complex relationship with the lyric poets of the past( particularly Auden and Lorca)-all of it worth a serious readers time.
mattleesharp's review against another edition
4.0
I began reading this idly at about two in the morning. A huge mistake. Spicer's poetry is difficult to put down. I finished this book in a daze with a couple dozen nearly indecipherable notes scrawled into a notepad. This stuff works in mysterious ways. It does all the wrong things and still keeps you engaged. Jack Spicer is rightly excluded from the big poetry movements of his era (I think) partly because he so often foregoes real artistry for some pretty bald, ugly, and clearly autobiographical grudges. It's often difficult to determine the audience for some of this work. He is constantly in conversation. Sometimes with himself. Sometimes with dead idols. Sometimes bitterly with contemporaries.
Spicer's poetry is fundamentally lonely from its beginning. It circles round and round, stopping only at the places where he knows he will be safe. Many of these poems deal with the vast and permanent ocean, a place where all of his poems bubble and bounce off each other. Or they deal with the moon, the large yellow eye of God, watching and recording but never playing anything back. It's a record not a memory. And all of those conversations that pass as poems and particularly the prose poetry feel like the writing of a man desperate to connect in a meaningful way, but I don't think it ever really happened like he imagined it could. The most powerful expression of this comes in the Imaginary Elegies where he laments that he would rather just write about the sun and the water in California because everyone beside him in his bed at night will inevitably be gone by morning.
This guy is a heartbreaker of a poet, but spends a little too much time writing about writing or writing at someone or something in artless anger to earn a full 5 star rating. Still very much worth the read.
Spicer's poetry is fundamentally lonely from its beginning. It circles round and round, stopping only at the places where he knows he will be safe. Many of these poems deal with the vast and permanent ocean, a place where all of his poems bubble and bounce off each other. Or they deal with the moon, the large yellow eye of God, watching and recording but never playing anything back. It's a record not a memory. And all of those conversations that pass as poems and particularly the prose poetry feel like the writing of a man desperate to connect in a meaningful way, but I don't think it ever really happened like he imagined it could. The most powerful expression of this comes in the Imaginary Elegies where he laments that he would rather just write about the sun and the water in California because everyone beside him in his bed at night will inevitably be gone by morning.
This guy is a heartbreaker of a poet, but spends a little too much time writing about writing or writing at someone or something in artless anger to earn a full 5 star rating. Still very much worth the read.
ombudsman's review against another edition
3.0
I think you have to be a little in love with Jack to get through this collection. A singular voice.
Favourite sections: Letters to James Alexander, The Holy Grail, Map Poems, Language
For Steve Jonas who is in Jail for Defrauding a Book Club (c. 1958)
And you alone in Federal prison saying
That the whole State is based on larceny
Christ who didn’t know that, Steve?
The word steals from the word, the sound from
the sound. Even
The very year of your life steals from the last one. So
Do you have to get put in jail for it? Finding
Yourself a martyr for a cause that you and your
jury and your heartbeat all support. All
This crap about being a human. To tell the
truth about our State.
So—
You would say—
It is better than going to Europe.
Intermission I (c. 1965)
“The movement of the earth brings harmes and fears.
Men wonder what it is and what it meant.”
Donne
In the next line
Contrasts this with “the celestial movement of the spheres.”
Rhyme soothes. And in a book I read in college fifteen years
ago it said that this was an attack on the Copernican theory
and a spidery hand had penciled in the margin
“Earthquake.”
Where is the poet? A-keeping the sheep
A-keeping the celestial movement of the spheres in a long,
boring procession
A-center of gravity
A-(while the earthquakes of happiness go on inside and outside
his body and the stars in their courses stop to notice)
Sleep.
Favourite sections: Letters to James Alexander, The Holy Grail, Map Poems, Language
For Steve Jonas who is in Jail for Defrauding a Book Club (c. 1958)
And you alone in Federal prison saying
That the whole State is based on larceny
Christ who didn’t know that, Steve?
The word steals from the word, the sound from
the sound. Even
The very year of your life steals from the last one. So
Do you have to get put in jail for it? Finding
Yourself a martyr for a cause that you and your
jury and your heartbeat all support. All
This crap about being a human. To tell the
truth about our State.
So—
You would say—
It is better than going to Europe.
Intermission I (c. 1965)
“The movement of the earth brings harmes and fears.
Men wonder what it is and what it meant.”
Donne
In the next line
Contrasts this with “the celestial movement of the spheres.”
Rhyme soothes. And in a book I read in college fifteen years
ago it said that this was an attack on the Copernican theory
and a spidery hand had penciled in the margin
“Earthquake.”
Where is the poet? A-keeping the sheep
A-keeping the celestial movement of the spheres in a long,
boring procession
A-center of gravity
A-(while the earthquakes of happiness go on inside and outside
his body and the stars in their courses stop to notice)
Sleep.
bzt's review
3.0
As with most complete collections, there's good and there's bad. I liked Dillinger and The Grail.
mattleesharp's review
4.0
I began reading this idly at about two in the morning. A huge mistake. Spicer's poetry is difficult to put down. I finished this book in a daze with a couple dozen nearly indecipherable notes scrawled into a notepad. This stuff works in mysterious ways. It does all the wrong things and still keeps you engaged. Jack Spicer is rightly excluded from the big poetry movements of his era (I think) partly because he so often foregoes real artistry for some pretty bald, ugly, and clearly autobiographical grudges. It's often difficult to determine the audience for some of this work. He is constantly in conversation. Sometimes with himself. Sometimes with dead idols. Sometimes bitterly with contemporaries.
Spicer's poetry is fundamentally lonely from its beginning. It circles round and round, stopping only at the places where he knows he will be safe. Many of these poems deal with the vast and permanent ocean, a place where all of his poems bubble and bounce off each other. Or they deal with the moon, the large yellow eye of God, watching and recording but never playing anything back. It's a record not a memory. And all of those conversations that pass as poems and particularly the prose poetry feel like the writing of a man desperate to connect in a meaningful way, but I don't think it ever really happened like he imagined it could. The most powerful expression of this comes in the Imaginary Elegies where he laments that he would rather just write about the sun and the water in California because everyone beside him in his bed at night will inevitably be gone by morning.
This guy is a heartbreaker of a poet, but spends a little too much time writing about writing or writing at someone or something in artless anger to earn a full 5 star rating. Still very much worth the read.
Spicer's poetry is fundamentally lonely from its beginning. It circles round and round, stopping only at the places where he knows he will be safe. Many of these poems deal with the vast and permanent ocean, a place where all of his poems bubble and bounce off each other. Or they deal with the moon, the large yellow eye of God, watching and recording but never playing anything back. It's a record not a memory. And all of those conversations that pass as poems and particularly the prose poetry feel like the writing of a man desperate to connect in a meaningful way, but I don't think it ever really happened like he imagined it could. The most powerful expression of this comes in the Imaginary Elegies where he laments that he would rather just write about the sun and the water in California because everyone beside him in his bed at night will inevitably be gone by morning.
This guy is a heartbreaker of a poet, but spends a little too much time writing about writing or writing at someone or something in artless anger to earn a full 5 star rating. Still very much worth the read.
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