Imagine This as Lyric Poetry

For you I would build a     whole new universe but     you obviously find itcheaper to rent one.     Eurydice did too.     She went back to hell     unsure ofwhat other house Orpheus     would build. “I call it     death-in-life and life-in-death.” ShotIn the back by an arrow     President Kennedy     seemed to stiffen for a     momentbefore he assumed his place     in history. ErosDo that.I gave you my imaginary     hand and you give me     your imaginary hand     and wewalk together (in     imagination) over the     earthly ground.Jack Spicer, “Love Poems”

(1963)¹

“My vocabulary did this to me,” the oft-quoted “last words” of Jack Spicer, first reported by Robin Blaser and certainly to some extent apocryphal, is an ending that is also usefully a beginning, posing the problem of defining a poetics after Spicer. Even as he wrote “The Practice of Outside” in and around 1975, Blaser seemed to recognize and anticipate the limiting powers his essay would have on future Spicer criticism and named what the dual and often contradictory strands of that criticism might look like: “At first this essay was short and simple—about Jack. But that became a reduction which every twist and turn of the work denied—a biography without the world the poet earned or a split between the man and the work which drank him up and left him behind” (3). Due in large part to the limited availability—and difficulty—of Spicer’s body of work, criticism of the poet has been mired in lore, and the phrase “my vocabulary did this to me” has come to name that lore. What we have left behind is exactly what Blaser recognized: “the world the poet earned.”

Recent collections like After Spicer, edited by John Emil Vincent, have attempted to address the need for a new Spicer criticism. The foregoing verse is quoted in Anita Sokolsky’s essay “Character Assassination in the Poetry of Jack Spicer,” which is included After Spicer and which poses and attempts to answer the truly central, even inaugural, questions that the volume seeks to address: “But in the name of what is his work invested in destroying lyric identity? To what end does it appear increasingly to foreground a notion of language as a self-implementing system?” (195). Thus, the “new” era of Spicer criticism that Vincent proposes is the era of the runcible mountain—one in which readers and critics work backward from Spicer’s language, through the poet’s self-erasure of lyric identity and systems of meaning, to the ever-disappearing word.

Vincent’s introduction sets readers on a path through the three sections of text that make up this collection of critical essays by untangling some of Spicer’s more gnarly personal and poetic knots and then retying others for the reader to solve. The first part of the collection is made up of essays that use newly available archival materials to create a critical space wherein readers can examine the “vexed and opaque” relationship between Spicer’s social and academic commitments and his texts and poetic practices (12). Vincent proposes this as the first necessary step toward a Spicer criticism that attends to his poetics in language, since this space opens up for readers a “distance between the poet and the poetry” necessary “in order to let the poetry do its work” (12).

Yet, this reading is still “deeply imbued with the biographical” until Vincent takes the important next step of citing Spicer’s formal contrariness, his devotion to “uncomfortable music” (2). The second group of essays moves forward within the space created by the first to introduce relatively new critical practices to Spicer’s body of work as a whole, approaching his poetics from the “impossible,” “invisible,” and “difficult” orientations of, for example, recent queer theory. Later, Vincent notes that the poems—the work that critics and readers are led back to—were often “read as explanatory” and “transparent...