The Collected Books

by Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser (Editor)

The Collected Books includes all the poems written from After Lorca (1957) up to the poet's early death, including Admonitions (1958), A Book of Music (1958), Billy the Kid (1958), and The Holy Grail (1962).

Genres: Poetry, Literature, Queer

382 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.[1] Spicer's poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement.

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this book as a teenager and it made a huge impression on me. I am not sure if I still have the orignal Black Sparrow edition or not. If not, that makes me sad. But what impressed me is how Spicer sort of used his world to make something of it - via his poetry. I liked how he used the language of newspapers (like Blaise Cendrars) to write poetry. It made me realize that I could go outside 'myself' for material for my own poetry at the time. And that stayed with me.... forever!

[Joseph Pfeffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry so fresh, brilliant, evocative, strange and transformational they're new every time you read them. Spicer is obscure in the best sense: he takes the reader into his language, lets the reader divine the meaning. He was the best of the beat poets, better than Ginsberg, Snider, Ferlinghetti, the other high profile ones. Only Corso can get near him. This is a book that never gets old.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read this book, I discover the poems as if I've never read them before. They have facets like diamonds, each facet taking years to sink in well enough to be seen. I take these poems to be textbooks of poetry. My friend Arthur Trupp read one of these to me one day in the summer of 78, while we were both at Naropa, and I was forever hooked to Spicer. The essay by Robin Blaser in the back, The Practice of the Outside, is equally essential reading. I have returned to this book hundreds of times.

[MKMKMK · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is little better than the collected Spicer. The poems in here are the perfect poke between calculated and accidental. After Lorca will rip your soul off your head and shit down your throat. It is the greatest. Blaser essay in this book is fun and long as shit. I like poetry that sort of almost escapes the poet. I think that was Spicer's intention. But of course, it was coming from the ink in his pen. Regardless of the means or presence (or lack thereof) an author, these poems make me happy to know I can be a poet. Good stuff, mangs.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Collected Books includes
After Lorca , Admonitions , A Book of Music , Billy the Kid , Fifteen False Propositions About God , Apollo Sends Seven Nursery Rhymes to James Alexander , A Red Wheelbarrow , Lament for the Makers , Heads of the Town up to the Aether , The Holy Grail , Language , and Book of Magazine Verse .

In addition, The Collected Books includes an essay on Jack Spicer by (friend of Spicer and editor of The Collected Books), and Spicer's early (unpublished?) writing. My favourite piece of Spicer early writing is called "The Unvert Manifesto", being a clever parody of art/literary movements...

The Unvert Manifesto and Other Papers Found in the
Rare Book Room of the Boston Public Library
in the Handwriting of Oliver Chaarming. By S.

The Unvert Manifesto

1) An unvert is neither an invert or an outvert, a pervert of a convert, an introvert or a retrovert, An unvert chooses to have no place to turn.

2) One should always masturbate on street corners.

3) Unversion is the attempt to make the sexual act as rare as a rosepetal. It consists of linking the sexual with the greatest cosmis force in the universe - Nonsense, or as we prefer to call it, MERTZ.

4) Sex should always be a frightening experience like a dirty joke or an angel.

5) Dirty jokes and angels should be frightening experiences.

6) An unvert must not be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or autosexual. He must be metasexual. He must enjoy going to bed with his own tears.

7) Mertz!

8) All the universe is laughing at you.

9) Poetry, painting, and cocksucking are all attempts of the unvert to make God laugh.

10) The larger the Dada, the bigger the hole.

11) Sidney Mertz was the only man ever arrested for drunken driving of a seam locomotive. He is now the bartender of the American Legion bar in Jackson, Wyoming.

12) Jews and Negroes are not allowed to be unverts. The Jew will never understand unversion and the Negro understands it too well.

13) An unvert only loves other unverts. He will, however, consent to perform an act of unversion with almost anything else except lovers and mountain lions.

14) God loves God.

15) Mertz must be applied to sex. People must learn to laugh into each other's gonads.

16) God is an unvert.

17) Sex without love is better than love without sex. Sec without Mertz is never better than Mertz without sex. Nonsense is an act of friendship.

18) The larger the Dada, the bigger the hole.

19) Nonsense, Mertz, Dada, and God all go to the same nightclubs.

20) So does Graham Macarel.

Excerpts from Oliver Charming's Diary

October 31, 1953
 "I must unvert someone named Graham Macarel. He should be about seventeen or eighteen and have a large Dada. Ii can use him as the hero and victim of my Mertzcycle . . ."

November 5, 1953
 "Laughed all day. The elements of imagination are exhausting as Hell."

November 23, 1953
 "It was more successful than I expected. He is beginning to become mythical. I saw him today and he told me hat he is taking a course in his art school in which he has to clip examples of racial prejudice from Tarot cards and give their exact date. His art school's name is the California School of Fine Flowers. His teacher's name if S. We talked for a while and I am already beginning to destroy his universe. . . . Method is everything.

December 1, 1953
 "Love must only be applies at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It must be thrown at the unsuspecting like a custard pie made of poison . . . Nothing destroys Mertz more than custom. Nothing destroys it less than treason."

December 7, 1953
 "I return to Graham Macarel. (Note - I must be sure to call him Mac. Graham reminds the uninformed imagination of crackers.) he has become a combination of a Boy Scout and a depth charge. He appeals to the primitive source of nonsense and despair. 
 I suspect that his teacher, S., is secretly an unvert - or, at least a spoiled unvert. Something is going on between S. and history. I wonder if Mac realizes that an unvert is an agent of Kubla Khan."

December 9, 1953
 "'An unvert is an angel of Kubla Khan.' - that's what Mac said to me last night in the men's room of the Palace Hotel. At the time he said it he was . . . which is certainly Dada if not Mertz."

December 10, 1953
 ". . . suspect . . ."

December 18, 1953
 "It is Christmas vacation at the California School of Fine Flowers. S. was in the bars last night, very drunk. I think he is planning to unvert somebody."

December 19, 1953
 "I had a conversation with S. late last night. He was again very drunk. 'Why did you have to invent Graham Macarel?' he asked me angrily.
 'I thought it would be good for your poetry,' I answered.
 'Why didn't you invent syphilis. Today I am going to . . ."

December 22, 1953
 "S. is in Los Angeles."

December 23, 1953
 "To appear as human among homosexuals and to appear as divine among heterosexuals . . ."

December 24, 1953
 "Nobody remains in this city and I have done all my Christmas shopping.
 The Dada in painting is not Duchamp. The Dada in poetry is not Breton. The Dada in sex is not De Sade. All these men were too obsessed with the mechanism of their subject. A crime against nature must also be a crime against art. A crie against art must also be a crime against nature. All beauty is at continuous war with God."

December 25, 1953
 "Merry Christmas, Graham Macarel."

December 26, 1953
 "It continually amazed the unprejudiced Mertzian observer that even the people who struggle most against the limits of art are content to have sex in ordinary acedemic ways, as if they and their bed-partners were nineteenth-century paintings. Or, worse, they will change the point of view (top becomes bottom, male becomes female, etc. etc.) and think, like the magic realists that they are, that they have changed something.
 Everybody is guilty of this - from Cocteau to Beethoven."

December 28, 1953
 "A sailor asked me last night what the unvert thought of Kinsey. I told him that we held that Kinsey was a valuable evidence of the boredom of un-unverted sex - that ordinary sex had become so monotonous that it had become statistical like farm income or rolling stock totals. I told him that Kinsey was the Zola preparing the way for the new Lautreamont.
 It is remarkable how even science fiction has developed no new attitudes toward sex. The vacant interstellar spaces are filled with exactly the same bedrooms the rocketships left behind. It is only the unvert who dares to speak Martian in bed. I wonder if Kierkegaard had wet dreams.

December 29, 1953
 "How the Zen Masters Taught Sex To Their Disciples - such a book would be the most useful book a man could publish. Sex is a metaphysical experience. Zen taught that man can only reach the metaphysical by way of the absurd. No, absurd is the wrong word. What is the Chinese for shaggy-dog story?
 The book should be illustrated pornographically but the general style of Mad Comics. It should have a blue cover."

December 30, 1953
 "S. is in town again. I saw him at the Black Cat. He looked confused at all the lack of excitement around him, as if he believed that a holiday was like a snowstorm and people should notice it.
 We began discussing homosexuality. I, by bringing in subtle pieces of unvert propaganda, and he, embarrassed and overintellectual a if he thought, or rather hoped, that I was trying to seduce him.
 'We homosexuals are the only minority group that completely lacks any vestige of a separate culture. We have no songs, no folklore, even our customs are borrowed from our upper-middleclass mothers,' he said.
 'What about camping?' I asked. 'Isn't that a cultural pattern worthy at least of Ruth Benedict's cunt?'
 'What about camping?' he asked rhetorically. 'A perpetual Jewish vaudeville joke - or, at the very best, a minstrel show impeccably played by Negroes in blackface.'
 The trouble with S. is that he doesn't understand Martian. I must tell him about the time . . ."

December 31, 1953
 "I rebel against the tyranny of the calendar."

January 1, 1954
 "My analyst is teaching me French."

January 2, 1954
 "S. says that is is inconsistent for an unvert to have a psychiatrist. He does not understand unversion. The relation between the analyst and the patient is the firmest and most hallowed, if the most conventional, sexual relationship in the modern world. This is precisely why it must be shaken. It is our task to experience and unvert all sexual relationships."

January 3, 1954
 "Sometimes, in moments of depression, I think that all this talk of Dada and Mertz is merely the reaction of the unsuccessful cocksucker or artsucker who doesn't understand beauty when it offers itself to him. Witness Western civilization or the bar last night . . ."

January 4, 1954
 "Now that I have Graham Macarel, S., and a psychiatrist, all that I need is an angel. One cannot, however, safely invent an angel . . . Lot was the last person to safely invent an angel. He was bored with his lover, with their children, and with all the inhabitants of the immense and sandy Turkish bath that they were living in . . . He invented an angel and then everybody had to kill him . . . Everybody had to kill him not because the angel was a dangerous as a hydrogen bomb (which he was) and not because the angel was as beautiful as a Florida hurricane (which he was), bu because the angel was a stranger and it is always the habit of Jews and homosexuals to kill strangers . . . They almost caught the angel once in Lot's chimney, and a sailor once managed to catch hold of its groin as it was disappearing into a broom-closet, but soon fire and brimstone were descending on the town and Lot was walking with his lover along a deserted road on the first range of foothills carrying a packed suitcase . . . The lover looked backwards, of course, to make sure that the angel was not following them and was immediately turned into a life-size salt statue. It is very difficult to suck the cock of a life-sized salt statue or sample the delight of sodomy with a pillar . . . Lot left him there and trudged onward alone, with an angel on his back.
 I must take warning from this. There are some inventions even sex does not make necessary.

January 5, 1954
 "No angel as yet. I wonder if I could steal one. By a bit of clever propaganda I have arranged that Mac will have to report on angels to his history class. This should bring things into focus.
 Mac asked me about angels yesterday - whether I thought they really existed, what they did in bed, etc. etc. I told him that very few people under twenty-five had angels at all. That they were like a kind of combination of Siamese cats and syphilis and for him not to worry if they occasionally tugged at his pubic hairs. He was still uncertain: 'How can I find any chronology in it?' he asked plaintively."

January 6, 1954
 "There is a morning when it rains in the corner of everybody's bedroom."

January 7, 1954
 "My psychiatrist, Robert Berg, considers that it is his duty to unvent angels. It must be understood that unvention is as different from unversion as psychoanalysis is from poetry."

January 9, 1954
 "Mac tells me that he saw an angel resting in a tree above his art school. This must be the angel we have been waiting for."

January 10, 1954
 "I have seen it too. It is a bearded angel, small as a bird, and answers to the name of Heurtebise. S., being what he is, pretends not to believe and says that it is only an owl or some unlucky night creature. He says that he is sorry for it."

January 11, 1954
 "The angel keeps scratching in the tree. It is behaving more and more like a bird. We are doing something wrong . . . Perhaps it isn't our angel."

January 12, 1954
 "I am gradually able to have the most Mertzian sexual

[Matty B · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gay romantic barfly of the 1950s bay area too smart for douchey beat poets and too cool for academic life, as somebody said. Jack Spicer is a populist who I think is lovable and readable to anybody American regardless of whether or not you read poetry. Jack spicers last words were: "My vocabulary did this to me."

[Liana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible! Just to think of these collections and their indelible mix of grace and savagery brings peace to my bones. I am very grateful for this book's existence because it generously fuels my desire for writing. Letters for Lorca alone is beyond words, beyond this world. I'm being serious.

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a course on Jack Spicer with Victor Coleman and Michael Boughn. I found the poetry really demanding, but about half way through the course (about the time the poetry started to open up) I began to really love Spicer. Not easy, but worthwhile.

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Spicer...! Like, whoah!

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll read it over and over for the rest of my life. Spicer's one of the handful of writers who influences me without my noticing it until later.

[Zach]

Amazing. How to write really great/insane poetry.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing work. Spicer still shines, all these years later.

[Sara Saab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of an incredible object of love, and as Robin Blaser says, 'astonishment'.

A journey through the second coming of Spicer's poetry, letters, notes, and annotations. The poems themselves, arranged in books we'd now call pamphlets or chapbooks, are remarkable, the brightest of which for me the pamphlet Fifteen False Propositions Against God. "Dover Beach" from Lament for the Makers also incredible -- generally Spicer's ontology of the sea as a 'living thread' through perception remarkable -- no wonder Blaser is so tempted to write an essay about Spicer and Merleau-Ponty!

The work really is a metaphysics of poetry, and in a refracted way a memoir of the poetry of North Beach and Nob Hill in the 50s, ruined, as Blaser conveys through friends at the time, by the arrival of Beatlemania to the dive bars and Irish pubs. As with many enfants terribles of the past, my sense of Spicer is of someone deeply loved in community for their art but whose views and temperaments were mostly just tolerated. His casual bigotry and antisemitism is definitely on the page at times, as well as his general drunk's cattiness and misanthropy, and whatever is reaching through him for the page in his dictations (to use his framing) is definitely not a universal lovingkindness, but whatever else it might be, it is a force that has obsessed over what the world is, and what the poet is for in this world, to the literal last living fibre of the man Jack Spicer, dead at forty.

The 1975 edition is so beautiful, the pages thick and the type satisfying. It is no surprise to me that Spicer and Duncan and Herndon and others obsessed on the presentation of the original pamphlets, down to trying to mimic the paper of the spoofed magazines when they collected Book of Magazine Verse. Now rereleased as 'My Vocabulary Did This to Me' but I will try to get my hands on an original printing (this was a library book).

[Christoph Girard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned if Vancouver was the place to move to in 1964, then Los Angeles has been long since past dead. I wish I could have attended his magic of poetry class when I went to SF State. Shame I wasn't born in 1943.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I dunno. I should have like it. It's the sort of thing I like. I just never got into it. It's a tad too smart for my old(er) brain. I probably should have read it in college. Maybe I'll try again some other time.

[john steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

spicer's the fundamental good in poetry. go. read.

[david-baptiste · Rating 5 out of 5]

"i have but to cross the room to be in the spice islands"
emily dickinson

well now i am in the spicer islands--and is astonishing!

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Billy the Kid shot Rimbaud but Rimbaud loved Billy and they wrote each other the Book of Music. And then there was Lorca... I love Lorca.

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duh.

------------------
3/1/08

re-reading.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

totally clean copy suckas

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

have read before, but flipping through it again as I read The House That Jack Built.

[Halliday · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book borked my heart, from that day to this.

[Sampson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything.