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My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry (2008)

by Jack Spicer(Favorite Author)

4.5 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0819568872 (ISBN13: 9780819568878)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Wesleyan University Press

review 1: I wasn't familiar with the poetry of Jack Spicer, so this has been a treat. Take a look especially at "After Lorca," in which he invents a letter from Lorca (actually a forward that Lorca is supposed to have written), as well as letters to Lorca and "translations" of Lorca poems. Read too his "Letter to Robin" in "Admonitions," in which he calls for poetry that's connected, poems that "echo and re-echo" against each other rather than individual lonely lyrics.
review 2: i'm not giving this text a rating because one minute i felt very close to loving the text and then shortly thereafter somewhat exacerbated by the obtuse bitterness of it. NEways, lets look at what Spicer is working with, in my opinion, since i've both read and listened to and really took to h... moreeart his lectures as a (slightly) younger poet. Spicer thinks of poetry as a series of, really, martian transmissions invading the poet's consciousness and compelling him to scribe these transmissions as poem. He also has a penchant for believing that poetry could also be closely analogous to spooks, more specifically an infamous incident involving WB Yeats' wife, in which, on a train, Yeats' wife basically started going crazy or losing her shit or whatever and muttering and moaning then she began to speak. Yeats' asked his wife what kind of message these invading spooks' were here to deliver, and she replied 'we are here to give metaphors to your poetry'. So there you have it, poetry demons as a precursor to Yeats' wife (and others') psychosis. What this essentially means is that Spicer is viewing poetry as a force coming from the exterior, the outside and thus we are at the mercy of these transmissions instead of our own interior and ever-suffering, feeling and precious emotions. Does Spicer deliver on his maxim in his own poetry? Well, yes and no. There are a lot of poems in here that seem to be evident of Spicer's internal precious language, specifically dealing with lovers and bitterness. Yet even these are fragmented and somewhat cold, sarcastically analyzed. Then there are the fragments and calloused transcriptions, all over the place, from conversations, to baseball standings to crass paraphrasings of old texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Night or other such grail legends. What Spicer wants to accomplish with all this is to make a poetry that is neither special nor underwhelming, to put it just so, at the level of lived consciousness. He mainly succeeds, the only pitfall for me is that his pervasive cynicism is less than becoming. Yet it's also authentic. However, we must ask ourselves, is his obtuseness also becoming of the level of consciousness and portrayal of the whiles of memory which Spicer is attempting to get across? Well once again, yes or no. He had some shining perfect lines in those poems, yet also lost me often with those previously described traits. Yet one thing that does come across in this collection is a sense of authenticity. I can't describe it, but he definitely has his own voice. This collection is always interesting, sometimes conversational and dryly charming, sometimes so cynical almost to be unappealing. Definitely a worthwhile read, yet I found myself picking it up sometimes honestly not out of eagerness but out of dedication to my own little project of reading what is really a very interesting of the life project of one Jack Spicer. Still... less

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