The Poetry of Jack Spicer

This is the first full-length critical monograph on Jack Spicer's work. In the years since his death from alcohol poisoning, San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) has gradually come to be recognized as one of most intriguing, demanding, and rewarding of the so-called 'New American Poetry' poets who were first published in Donald Allen's historic anthology of that name. Informed by much archival material only recently made available, The Poetry of Jack Spicer, 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.