Homage to Spicer












Before Manroot 10 (1974/1975), the Black Sparrow Collected Spicer (1975), and Boundary 2 (1977), there was Caterpillar 12, edited by Clayton Eshelman, in July 1970.

Speaking for my own personal knowledge of Spicer publications, there is only static from 1977 to 1998.

In 1998, The House that Jack Built and Poet Be Like God were published.

Then in April 1999 came the Jack Spicer Issue of Jacket Magazine on http://www.jacketmagazine.com/.

Finally in  November 2008, The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer was published by Wesleyan University Press.

About five years ago, I read Caterpillar 12, then quickly followed up with the issue of Jacket, Poet Be Like God, and The House That Jack Built.  In 2009, I read My Vocabulary Did This To Me and boundary 2.

The year ended by acquiring and, in a manner of speaking, re-reading Billy The Kid (1959), The Holy Grail (1962), Language (1965), and Book of Magazine Verse (1966).  But like my recently acquired copy of Dear Ferlinghetti (1964), I read them all for the first time.

I have been wondering lately how I got from there to here, and, more importantly, how did Spicer.

JB

1 comments:

jadecar said...

Yeah, me too.

From there

To hear, I mean

to here. And yes,

more importantly,

how did Spicer.


I wd guess for me sometime early seventies,
probably by Ron Schreiber at UMass/Boston
where he was co-teaching a course in visionary
lit to clueless undergraduates. Somehow Spicer was mentioned, but only just - probably
his Martians to Yeat's spooks, I forget...and then never returned to in class for some reason,- but the name stuck somehow; Ron had, of course, that same year contributed to The Spicer Issue of Manroot, but I never knew it until a couple three years later when a copy of it found its way into my hands after I had already acquired The Black Sparrow Collected;
The Holy Grail for all-things-Spicerian for years...

The earlier Caterpillar 12 had not yet crept into my hands until even later when I started collecting caterpillars; too young, too stupid to buy them in late sixties and seventies as they appeared. Still don't own the entire run...

But don't forget Two for Jack Spicer
by Stephen Jonas, also from ManRoot
in 1974. A beautiful fold-out post-
humous chapbook: " CANTE JONDO FOR
SOUL BROTHER JACK SPICER, HIS BELOVED
CALIFORNIA & ANDALUSIA OF LORCA "


But yr're right again. From like '77
to '98 there was nothing..

just static emanating from Jack's,

or was it Berman's

or Cocteau

's radio.


Later,
John

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