My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many helped us in the years during which we edited this book. First of all, we would like to thank Robin Blaser, who shepherded these materials for forty years and whose edition of Spicer’s Collected Books (1975) was a landmark volume. Blaser’s kindness is legendary, but it’s real. The late Donald Allen, Spicer’s friend and editor, answered a hundred questions with patience. The present volume builds on the work he did in the 1957 “San Francisco Scene” issue of Evergreen Review, in his anthology The New American Poetry, and in One Night Stand, the volume of Spicer’s shorter poems he published in 1980. To the painter Fran Herndon, we owe the survival of The Holy Grail manuscript, as well as the “Fix” sequence known as Golem, and the files of J, the magazine she and Spicer edited in 1959. Lewis Ellingham established chronologies, elucidated texts, sought out informants, shared his knowledge intimate and arcane, kept the flame alive—an invaluable resource in every conceivable way. A special thanks to Anthony Bliss and Tanya Hollis of the Bancroft Library; without their generosity and vision this book could not have come to pass. At the Bancroft we owe thanks all around, and especially to Bonnie Bearden, Steven Black, Bonnie Hardwick, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Teresa Salazar, Dean Smith, and Susan Snyder. At the Special Collections and Rare Books Department of Simon Fraser University Library in Burnaby, British Columbia, we were fortunate in working with the late Charles Watts and with his successor, Tony Power. Robert Bertholf and Michael Basinski showed us many kindnesses at the Lockwood Library at SUNY Buffalo. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page ix ix Thanks to Aaron Kunin for his work transcribing and inputting manuscript material newly discovered at the Bancroft in the summer of 2004. Similar help came from a crew of artists and poets including Brandon Brown, Simon Evans, Kelly Holt, David Hull, Charles Legere, Jason Morris, John Sakkis, and Logan Ryan Smith. Many others—too many to name here—aided us with information about Spicer’s life and work, alerted us to potential leads, provided cultural context for this material, made comments on the text, put us up while we were away from home on this quest, published our preliminary findings, and/or answered questions cheerfully over the past ten years. Beyond those already mentioned, we would like to thank Christopher Alexander, Joshua Beckman, Dan Bouchard, George Bowering, the late Jess Collins, the late Robert Creeley, Clark Coolidge, Beverly Dahlen , Michael Davidson, Richard Deming, Steve Dickison, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ernesto Edwards, Steve Evans, Thomas Evans, the late Landis Everson, David Farwell, Dora FitzGerald, Nemi Frost, Jack Gilbert, John Granger, George Herms, Susan Howe, Andrew Hoyem, Lisa Jarnot, Kent Jones, Daniel Katz, Joanne Kyger, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael McClure, Ben Mazer, W. S. Merwin, Alvin William Moore, Jennifer Moxley, Barbara Nicholls, Miriam Nichols, Geoffrey O’Brien, Michael Ondaatje, John Palattella, Ariel Parkinson, Kristin Prevallet, Peter and Meredith Quartermain, Tom Raworth, Adrienne Rich, Jim Roberts, Jennifer Scappettone, Don Share, Ron Silliman, Rod Smith, Matthew Stadler , George Stanley, Ellen Tallman, Glenn Todd, John Emil Vincent, Tom Vogler and Mary-Kay Gamel, Christopher Wagstaff, Anne Waldman, Rosmarie Waldrop, Emily Warn, and Scott Watson. For their assistance in final manuscript and galley preparation we thank Sean Casey, Matthew Gagnon, Jay Johnson, Aaron Kunin, Steve Zultanski, and especially Lori Shine and Elizabeth Willis for their crucial work. Thanks also to the folks at Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, but primarily to Suzanna Tamminen, Director and Editor-in-Chief at Wesleyan, for her good will, vision, and ongoing commitment to publishing Spicer’s work. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page x x Acknowledgments Since we began working on this collection, a number of poems have appeared in the following publications, sometimes in altered form: The Chicago Review, “They Murdered You: An Elegy on the Death of Kenneth Rexroth”; Eleven Eleven, “IInd Phase of the Moon,” “IIIrd Phase of the Moon,” “IVth Phase of the Moon”; Fulcrum, “Imagine Lucifer . . .”; Golden Handcuffs Review, “Map Poems”; Harper’s, “The city of Boston . . .”; Jubilat, “Letters to James Alexander”; The Massachusetts Review, “Homosexuality,” “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Landscape,” “The city of Boston . . .”; The Nation, “Two Poems for the Nation”; Nest, “For Steve Jonas Who Is in Jail for Defrauding a Book Club,” “A Birthday Poem for Jim (and James) Alexander”; The...