Ann Vickery at the Sydney Review of Books:
These letters are emblematic of the paradox that is Jack Spicer: the acerbic, deliberately un-PC misanthrope and the imaginative romantic. What they don’t reveal is Spicer the poet, who on his deathbed at the age of forty famously said to fellow poet Robin Blaser: ‘My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will go on.’ Stan Persky wrote of being confused by a Janus-faced Spicer whom he saw as shifting between what he called ‘Dirty Jack and Radiant Jack’. The former could be a manipulative and often cruel alcoholic while the latter championed community and encouraged others toward better writing. With Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, we gain some memorable insights into Spicer’s poetics, literary networks, and contradictions.
They constitute the second half of ‘The Collected Works of Jack Spicer’, joining My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi, and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer, edited by Daniel Katz. The quartet is the result of a labour of love extending across more than a decade.
more here.
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