My Vocabulary Did This to Me: Collected Poems

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. While The First Part Of This Edition, 1945-1956, Doesn't Include Every Poem He Wrote At This Time, Our Aim Has Been To Make A Judicious Selection Of Single Poems From One Night Stand [1980] And From Notebooks And Manuscripts In Order To Provide Something More Than An Adequate Sense Of Spicer's First Decade Of Writing. Therefore This Edition Is Not A 'complete' But A 'collected' Poems. ... The Second Part Of This Book Gathers A More Complete Picture Of The Second Half Of Spicer's Writing Life. ... It Is Our Aim In This Volume To Present A Comprehensive Edition Of Spicer's Work From 1945-1965 And To Establish A Fair Text Of His Major Poems, Creating, In Effect, His First Collected Poems To Function As A Standard Reading Edition.--about This Edition, P.xxviii-xxx. I. (1945-1956). Berkeley Renaissance (1945-1950) -- Minnesota Poems (1950-1952) -- Berkeley / San Francisco (1952-1955) -- New York / Boston (1955-1956) -- Ii. (1956-1965). San Francisco (1956-1965) -- Chronology -- Notes To The Poems -- Bibliography. Edited By Peter Gizzi And Kevin Killian. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 455-456) And Index. 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. "While the first part of this edition, 1945-1956, doesn't include every poem he wrote at this time, our aim has been to make a judicious selection of single poems from One Night Stand [1980] and from notebooks and manuscripts in order to provide something more than an adequate sense of Spicer's first decade of writing. Therefore this edition is not a 'complete' but a 'collected' poems. ... The second part of this book gathers a more complete picture of the second half of Spicer's writing life. ... It is our aim in this volume to present a comprehensive edition of Spicer's work from 1945-1965 and to establish a fair text of his major poems, creating, in effect, his first collected poems to function as a standard reading edition."--"About this edition," pages xxviii-xxx

An essential collection of a highly original American poet