Name: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: Jack Spicer's Collected Poetry
Item: My Vocabulary Did This to Me
Author: Vagobond

The Beat Century — post 8 of 100. Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me (2008).

Cover of My Vocabulary Did This to Me by Jack Spicer — My Vocabulary Did This to Me, 2008. Cover image via Open Library.

Forty-three years after Spicer drank himself to death at forty, this 2008 collection assembled the work of a poet who refused distribution, insisted his poems were dictated by Martians, and turned out to have been right about almost everything.

Jack Spicer died in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital in the summer of 1965, aged forty, after passing out in the elevator of his North Beach flat. Robin Blaser found him there. What Spicer said to Blaser before losing coherence was: “My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on.”

Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian took the first half of that sentence as the title of the collected poetry they published with Wesleyan University Press in November 2008. It won the American Book Award and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry in 2009. That a major poet’s collected works appeared forty-three years after his death is not an accident of neglect. It is, to a considerable extent, what Spicer arranged.

The Poet Who Would Not Be Distributed

Spicer was hostile to the literary marketplace to a degree that was not a pose. He resisted copyright, discouraged national distribution of his books, and preferred his work to circulate in San Francisco among people who could be argued with in person. Poetry, in his view, was a local activity conducted between a small number of committed people, and a book shipped to a stranger in another state was a category error.

The consequence is that for decades his work was genuinely difficult to obtain. Wesleyan’s volume gathers the full body of it, including previously unpublished material and poems that had become nearly impossible to find, tracing him from the Berkeley Renaissance years through the San Francisco period. Its existence resolves a scarcity Spicer created deliberately — a tension the editors were entirely aware of.

Dictation, Martians, and the Poet as Radio

From After Lorca in 1957 onward, Spicer described his poems as dictated. He did not mean it as a metaphor for inspiration. In the Vancouver Lectures he gave in 1965, months before his death, he elaborated the theory with a deadpan literalism that has kept readers off balance ever since: the poems came from the Outside — from Martians, from the dead — and the poet’s job was to be a radio receiving a transmission, with the furniture of his own mind serving only as available vocabulary for the signal to arrange.

This produced a poetics of aggressive self-effacement. The poet does not express; the poet gets in the way as little as possible. It also produced the joke at the centre of the dying sentence: if the vocabulary is the only part that belongs to the poet, and the vocabulary is what killed him, then Spicer was assigning blame with perfect consistency to the last thing he owned.

The Serial Poem

Spicer’s major formal contribution was the serial poem — the book, not the individual lyric, as the unit of composition. After Lorca presents fake translations of Lorca alongside real ones and letters to a dead poet who writes back in the introduction. Later books proceed as sequences whose parts are unintelligible in isolation and which must be read straight through, accumulating meaning by adjacency rather than argument.

This is why anthologies have always served him badly and why a collected edition matters more for Spicer than for most poets. A single Spicer poem extracted from its book looks like a fragment or a joke. In sequence, the same poem is doing structural work. The books are the poems.

Berkeley, Duncan, Blaser, and the Beats

Spicer belonged to the Berkeley Renaissance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser — a circle sharing an interest in myth, the occult, and the idea of the poem as received rather than made, and connected by the fact that all three were gay men writing in a period when that carried real professional and legal risk. Spicer ran a Magic Workshop and presided over bar-centred gatherings that functioned as an anti-institution, deliberately positioned against the university and the publishing industry both.

His relationship to the Beats was adjacent and prickly. He shared the city and the era with Ginsberg’s circle and disliked what he saw as the Beat appetite for publicity and national attention. Wesleyan’s own framing places him as a poet whose approach to translation, voice and composition challenged his contemporaries in both the New York School and the Beat movement — which is accurate, and which Spicer would probably have regarded as insufficiently rude.

Baseball, Lorca, and the Jokes

A reader arriving from the biography — the dictation theory, the poverty ward, the dying sentence — may expect something solemn. Spicer is not solemn. He is one of the funniest poets of his generation, and the humour is central rather than decorative: deadpan, deflating, and frequently aimed at the poem itself for having shown up in the state it did.

The recurring furniture is domestic and strange. Baseball, which he followed obsessively and used as a structural metaphor for the poet’s helplessness inside a set of rules. Lemons and oranges. Ghosts, radios, the Holy Grail, Rimbaud, and a persistent low-grade quarrel with the reader. The tonal register — grief and gag delivered in the same line without either cancelling the other — is what makes him unlike any American poet before or since, and it is the quality that a collected edition finally made visible.

The Reputation That Arrived Late

The 2008 volume converted Spicer from a specialist’s rumour into a readable body of work, and the reception was emphatic. Ron Silliman called the poems simply wonderful and judged Spicer’s mature work some of the best ever written by an American. Dwight Garner, in The New York Times, wrote that a reader finishes it feeling they have come in contact with an original artist and a genuine one. Nathaniel Mackey described it as an epic of irritation by a poet who professed no epic intent, and called it essential reading.

Mackey’s phrase is the best short account of the work. Spicer is funny, mean, bored, obsessed with baseball and lemons and ghosts, and constantly annoyed at the poem for arriving in the state it does. He denied authorship for a lifetime, discouraged anyone from reading him at a distance, and has ended up with a collected edition, an American Book Award, and a growing readership doing exactly what he tried to prevent.

My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on.

Jack Spicer to Robin Blaser, San Francisco General Hospital, 1965

Where to go next

Pair it with Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field — the same Berkeley circle and the same conviction that the poem is received, taken in a warmer and more architectural direction.

Previous: Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones. Next: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.

Sources

CD Damitio

CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA

CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.

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