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A review by mattleesharp
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry by Jack Spicer
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.