The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer

Preface

PREFACE Acknowledgments A special thanks to Robin Blascr for his generous support and advice, for preserving and opening Spicer's archive, and for his permission to bring this edition into print; to Donald Allen for discovering a generation and for his permission to reprint from Spicer's early poems One Night Stand; to Warren Tallman (in memoriam), without whom these lectures would never have happened; and to John Martin for keeping The Collected Books of Jack Spicer in print these past twenty-three years. I'd like to thank my dissertation committee: Charles Bernstein, Robert Creclcy, and Susan Howe of the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Because I've been working simultaneously on two Spicer projects (the lectures and the letters), the following acknowledgments reflect support for both projects. I'd like to thank the following agencies: The Graduate Student Association of SUNY Buffalo for a Mark Diamond research grant, the English department at Brown University for the appointment ofVisiting Scholar (1994-1995), the Humanities division of the Universityof California , Santa Cru/, for a COR travel grant, and, last but not least, Robert Hunter of the Rex Foundation. I would also like to thank the following librarians and collections: Charles Watts of the Special Collections of the Bennett Library at Simon Fraser University, Robert J. Bertholf and Michael Basinski of the Poetry/Rare Books Room at SUNY Buffalo, Bonnie Ilardwick of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and Emily Wolff of the California Historical Society. Thanks to Kevin Killian for sharing early drafts of his work on Spicer's biography, for ongoing discussion, and for reading over six hundred pages of both the lectures and letters manuscripts. Of the many who have contributed information, advice, citations, interviews , discussion, and genuine interest, I would like to thank: Bruce Boonc, xii Preface Angela Bowering, George Bowering, David Bromige, Julie II. Brower, Lori Chamberlain, Joseph Conte, Clark Coolidgc, Stephen Cope, Michael Davidson, Tim Davis, Steve Dickison, Ulla Dydo, Lew Lllingharn, Steve Evans, Larry Fagin, Ed Foster, Raymond Foye, Alan Gilbert, Michael Ci/zi, the late John Ilalverson, Gladys Hindrnarch, Lisa Jarnot, Ricky Jay, Stephanie Judy, Joanne Kyger, Nathaniel Mackey, Graham Mackintosh , Torn Marshall, Andrew Maxwell, Eileen McWilliam, Andrew Mossin, A. L. Niclson, Linda Norton, Loisa Nygaard, Michael Palmer, Bob Perclman, Marjoric Perloff, Stan Persky, Kristin Prevallet, Jamie Reid, Aaron Shurin, Juliana Spahr, Holt Spicer, George Stanley, Catriona Strang, Ellen Tallman, Karen Tallman, Suzanna Tamminen, James Taylor, Joe Torra, Arthur Vogelsang, Tom Voglcr, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barrett Wattcn, Charles Watts, and John Wieners. I'd like to thank the individuals in my classes at Brown University and UCSC who read, discussed, and "got" with Spicer's poetry. In particular I'd like to mention Chris Brignctti, MacGregor Card, Bill Grcgoire, Mike Grinthal, Stephanie Ilindley, Kelly Holt, Eleana Kim, Jon McCoy, Karen Pittelman, Bianca Pulitzer, Sam Truitt, and Magdalena Zurawski. And finally, a personal thanks to Elizabeth Willis for allowing a ghost into our house, for two years of generative conversation and unconditional support, and for her assistance in preparing the final manuscript. Preface xiii A /Vote on the Text For such a noncanonical figure, Spicer has elicited a significant number of remarkable essays, many of which refer to the lectures. But often the text that has been cited is the abridged version of the first lecture, which was published in Caterpillar 12, or the excerpts printed in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, and a more complete edition of the entire series of talks has been long overdue. In the notes and Afterword to the lectures 1 have tried to illuminate various traditions and countertraditions that informed Spieer's period and to share some of the "correspondences" that occurred when researching specific facts, restricting myself primarily to books and information that would have been available to Spieer in his lifetime. The notes and commentary are by no means exhaustive, as Spieer's field of reference continues to resonate in further ways. The difficulty of both transcribing and editing an oral or performative text into print media has been discussed by Dennis Tcdlock, Jerome McGann , and others. Spieer's lectures are authentic oral texts—that is, he was not reading from notes —but they are texts in which the performative aspects of the text (the room tone, hesitations in speech, audience laughter , etc.) are of only peripheral interest. It was clear to the audience that...