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

"Spicer is an intriguing and ultimately crucial figure in the history of postwar American poetry. A monastic and (in some ways) abstract poet, he was also extremely funny, harshly serious, absurd when his drive for transcendence required it. Yet in many places his poetry anticipates cultural studies. His lectures on poetry are some of the best from the postwar era. Peter Gizzi's handling does them full justice: he makes the liveliness of the interchange clear and presents Spicer's knottedness helpfully without explaining the difficulties away."--Bob Perelman

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.