After Lorca

“You made Lorca into the poet he always was for you only by your writing After Lorca. Just as the poetry Lorca wrote made him the poet you called forth from the grave… . After Lorca is the book of your books. From here, you knew your direction. Lorca was gone. Rilke was gone. You are gone. The Books stand waiting. What world had you left when you raised your eyes and witnessed After Lorca was there in your hand?” —Patrick James Dunagan, small press traffic

“Spicer’s playful and coruscating collection of translations of, dialogues with, and general inhabiting of the great Spanish poet’s work.” —Mark Scroggins, Hyperallergic

“Mr. Spicer’s love poems curdle around the edges. He was one of America’s great, complicated, noisy and unjustly forgotten poets of heartbreak and abject loneliness … his work was often improbably humane and lovely.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Through parody and pastiche he exploded every form he touched.” —The Nation

“I also find great playfulness, humor and tenderness in some of these poems, and very little shamming, or cant. The first of the Collected Books is After Lorca for which Spicer provided a charming piece of fraudulence, an introductory letter by the dead poet from Andalusia protesting Spicer’s liberties with his poems. Spicer in “After Lorca” was attempting to collaborate with a corpse, rather than merely translate his works. The poets, after all, had certain obvious affinities: an interest in language, their homosexuality, a common derangement of the sensibilities such as that other great homosexual poet, Rimbaud, had recommended.” —Richard Elman, The New York Times

Jack Spicer (1925-1965) was a poet and linguist born in Los Angeles, California. At the University of California, Berkeley, he became close friends with the poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, and with them he went on to play a central role in the San Francisco Renaissance of the late 1940s and the 1950s. During his life, Spicer published six short books of poetry, all with small, local presses. He died of alcohol poisoning in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital.

Peter Gizzi is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Now It’s Dark and Archeophonics (a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award). His editing projects have included The House That Jack Built- The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer and, with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me- The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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