The Poetry of Jack Spicer - Hardcover

Daniel Katz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0748640983 ISBN 13: 9780748640980

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2013

Synopsis

In the years since his death from alcohol poisoning, Jack Spicer (1925-1965) has gradually come to be recognized as one of most intriguing of the so-called 'New American Poetry' poets. This study places Spicer s work in the context of the San Francisco Renaissance and contemporary movements with which he was in dialogue such as the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the 'New York School'. It also explores his relationship to the major modernists from whom his innovative poetics derived. Informed by archival material only recently made available, the book examines Spicer's post-Poundian translation projects, his crucial theories of the 'serial poem' and inspiration as 'dictation', his contrarian take on queer poetics, his insistently uncanny regionalism, and his elaboration of an epistolary poetics of interpellation and address.

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Review:

Daniel Katz's superb new study of Jack Spicer's poetry surveys and synthesizes pioneering work of earlier critics, even as it advances his own distinctive views about, for example, Spicer's development of epistolary and serial forms. Katz avoids the temptation to mask or resolve the contradictory nature of Spicer's poetics, thereby yielding a poet of greater scope and complexity. Acutely intelligent and elegantly written, Katz's book will be essential reading for the many readers discovering Spicer's poetry for the first time and for those aiming to advance the leading edge of Spicer studies.--Daniel Tiffany, University of Southern California

This brilliant study of Jack Spicer's poetry will be an essential companion for anyone reading his poems. Particularly impressive is the way Daniel Katz's incisive close readings of the poems always respect both the intelligibility and the opacity of Spicer's inventiveness. Katz convincingly demonstrates that Spicer's intelligence, passion, dialogues with other poets, and questionings of the aesthetic make him a crucial modern American poet.--Peter Middleton, University of Southampton

Katz's book is thorough, thoughtful and brilliantly argued.--Simon Smith"New Statesman" (01/01/0001)

About the Author:

Daniel Katz was educated at Reed College and Stanford University, and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on twentieth-century literature, and is the author Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett and American Modernism s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0748640983
• ISBN 13: 9780748640980
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256