The House That Jack Built: Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer - Hardcover

Gizzi, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819563390 ISBN 13: 9780819563392

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1998

Synopsis

The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic. Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.

About this title

About the Author

PETER GIZZI is the author of six collections of poetry including Threshold Songs and In Defense of Nothing. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819563390
• ISBN 13: 9780819563392
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320