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    My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
    My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
    My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
    Ebook561 pages4 hours

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

    By Jack Spicer

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateFeb 8, 2012
    ISBN9780819571090
    My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
    Author

    Jack Spicer

    Jack Spicer (1925—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.

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      Book preview

      My Vocabulary Did This to Me - Jack Spicer

      I (1945–1956)

      BERKELEY RENAISSANCE (1945–1950)

      BERKELEY IN TIME OF PLAGUE

      Plague took us and the land from under us,

      Rose like a boil, enclosing us within.

      We waited and the blue skies writhed awhile

      Becoming black with death.

      Plague took us and the chairs from under us,

      Stepped cautiously while entering the room

      (We were discussing Yeats); it paused awhile

      Then smiled and made us die.

      Plague took us, laughed and reproportioned us,

      Swelled us to dizzy, unaccustomed size.

      We died prodigiously; it hurt awhile

      But left a certain quiet in our eyes.

      A GIRL’S SONG

      Song changes and his unburnt hair

      Upon my altar changes;

      We have, good strangers, many vaults

      To keep the time in, but the songs are mine,

      The seals are wax, and both will leak

      From heat.

      A bird in time is worth of two in any bush.

      You can melt brush like wax; and birds in time

      Can sing.

      They call me bird-girl, parrot girl and worth

      The time of any bird; my vault a cage,

      My cage a song, my song a seal,

      And I can steal an unburnt lock of hair

      To weave a window there.

      HOMOSEXUALITY

      Roses that wear roses

      Enjoy mirrors.

      Roses that wear roses must enjoy

      The flowers they are worn by.

      Roses that wear roses are dying

      With a mirror behind them.

      None of us are younger but the roses

      Are dying.

      Men and women have weddings and funerals

      Are conceived and destroyed in a formal

      Procession.

      Roses die upon a bed of roses

      With mirrors weeping at them.

      A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG LANDSCAPE

      Watch sunset fall upon that beach like others did. The waves

      Curved and unspent like cautious scythes, like evening harvesters.

      Feel sorrow for the land like others did. Each eating tide,

      Each sigh of surf, each sunset-dinner, pulls the earth-crop, falls

      A little fuller; makes the sand grain fall

      A little shorter, leaner. Leaves the earth

      A breathless future harvest.

      I watch, as others watched, but cannot stand

      Where others stood; for only water now

      Stands once where Arnold stood, or Lear or Sappho stood.

      Retreating shore (each day has new withdrawals)

      Breaks in feeble song—it sings and all abandoned history is spread,

      A tidal panic for that conqueror.

      I. The Indian Ocean: Rimbaud

      I watched and saw a sailor floating in that sea

      And melt before he drowned.

      Asleep and fragrant as that sleep, he seemed

      To draw the sun within his flesh and melt. He seemed

      To draw the fire from that angel and to melt. Now he is dead.

      To melt is not to drown but is enough

      To shear the body of its flesh; the sea

      Is meant for drowning, but when God is short

      Of waters for his purpose then the sea

      Becomes a pool of fire; angels ride

      Astride their flamy waves

      Pale as desire

      Terrible angel, out of that fire

      Out of the beach-bones, melted like butter

      Out of the blazing waves, the hot tide

      Terrible angel, sea-monster

      Terrible fish-like angel, fire breather

      Source of the burning ocean.

      II. The Atlantic Ocean: Hart Crane

      But I watch slowly, see the sand-grains fall

      A little riper, fuller; watch the ocean fall

      From sunset dinner. Watch the angel leave

      His fire-pleasure.

      Deep in the mind there is an ocean

      I would fall within it, find my sources in it. Yield to tide

      And find my sources in it. Aching fathoms fall

      And rest within it.

      Deep in the mind there is an ocean and below,

      The ocean-ripened sand-grains and the lands it took,

      The statues, and the boundaries and the

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