My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer [Paperback]

Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009)
Winner of the American Book Award (2009)

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and ’60s, though in many ways Spicer’s innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer’s voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet’s life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.An essential collection of a highly original American poetAcknowledgments
Introduction
About This EditionBERKELEY RENAISSANCE (1945–1950)Berkeley in Time of Plague
A Girl’s Song
Homosexuality
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Landscape
An Apocalypse for Three Voices
One Night Stand
An Answer to Jaime de Angulo
A Lecture in Practical Aesthetics
Dialogue Between Intellect and Passion
A Night in Four Parts (Second Version)
Orpheus in Hell
Orpheus After Eurydice
Orpheus’ Song to Apollo
Troy Poem
“We find the body difficult to speak . . .”
“They are selling the midnight papers . . .”
“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
The Scrollwork on the Casket
The Dancing Ape
Imaginary Elegies (I, II, III)Psychoanalysis: An ElegyMINNESOTA POEMS (1950–1952)Minneapolis: Indian Summer
Watching a TV Boxing Match in October
Portrait of an Artist
Sonnet for thlóå