Contents of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
The contents page of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Fifth Printing, 1996) is divided into four sections:
First (1) section
- Reprints twelve books of poetry composed between 1957-1965 and in (for the most part) chronological order.
- (Only the title is listed on the contents page. However, each title page itself lists a date and, in some cases, a subtitle. These are shown below)
- After Lorca, With an Introduction by Federico García Lorca, 1957
- Admonitions, 1958
- A Book of Music, with words by Jack Spicer, 1958
- Billy the Kid, 1958
- Fifteen False Propositions Against God, 1958
- A Red Wheelbarrow, [1968]
- Apollo Sends Seven Nursery Rhymes to James Alexander,
- Lament for The Makers, 1961
- Heads of the Town up to the Aether, ("Homage to Creeley"; "A Fake Novel About The
Life of Arthur Rimbaud"; "A Textbook of Poetry"), 1960–61
- The Holy Grail, ("The Book of Gawain", "The Book of Percival", "The Book of
Lancelot", "The Book of Gwenivere", "The Book of Merlin", "The Book of Galahad", "The Book of the Death of Arthur"), 1962
- Language, ("Thing Language", "Love Poems", "Intermissions", "Transformations",
"Morphemics", "Phonemics", "Graphemics"), 1964
- Book of Magazine Verse, (Poems: "for The Nation", "for Poetry Chicago",
"for Tish", "for Ramparts", "for The St. Louis Sporting News", "for the Vancouver Festival", "for Downbeat"), (no date follows)
Second (2) section
- "The Practice of Outside", an essay by Robin Blaser.
Third (3) section
- "Poems & Documents" which lists the following:
- Imaginary Elegies I-VI
- The Unvert Manifesto
- Song for Bird and Myself
- Poem to the Reader of the Poem
- "Poetry as Magic" Workshop Questionnaire
- The Trojan Wars Reviewed: A Capitulation
- Troy Poem
Fourth (4) section
- "Bibliography of First Editions"
Joanne Kyger was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.
Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She was the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Guild. In 1947, she became the director of the first poetry festival in the United States, laying the groundwork for what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. She was, with Helen Adam, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov, one of only four women whose work was included in Donald Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960).
Robert Kelly is an American poet associated with the deep image group. He was named the first Dutchess County poet laureate 2016-2017.
Jack Spicer 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. He spent most of his writing life in San Francisco.
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests, and new social sensibilities.
Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.
Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.
Trout Fishing in America (1967) is a novella written by Richard Brautigan. It consists of short pieces linked by recurring characters.
Barbara Guest, néeBarbara Ann Pinson, was an American poet and prose stylist. Guest first gained recognition as a member of the first generation New York School of poetry. Guest wrote more than 15 books of poetry spanning sixty years of writing. In 1999, she was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America. Guest also wrote art criticism, essays, and plays. Her collages appeared on the covers of several of her books of poetry. She was also well known for her biography of the poet H.D., Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (1984).
Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.
Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada.
Leonard Wolf was a Romanian-American poet, author, teacher, and translator. He is known for his authoritative annotated editions of classic gothic horror novels, including Dracula, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera, and other critical works on the topic; and also for his Yiddish translations of works ranging from those of Isaac Bashevis Singer to Winnie-the-Pooh. He is the father of Naomi Wolf.
Peter Gizzi is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Donald Merriam Allen was an American editor, publisher and translator of American literature. He is best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), one of the anthologies of contemporary American writing he released.
George Anthony Stanley is a Canadian poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance in his early years. In 1971 he became a resident of British Columbia.
Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist.
David Meltzer was an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians". Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960.
Kevin Killian was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright primarily of LGBT literature. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009.
Leland Hickman was an American poet, editor, actor, and literary magazine publisher. During his lifetime, Hickman was best known as the publisher and editor of the influential magazine Temblor which was noted for the publication of many east and west coast language-related poets. His editorial and publishing activities brought the work of many established and emerging poets into the public view. Hickman has steadily gained posthumous recognition and fame for his poetry.
Fran Herndon was an American artist associated with the central poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Trained at the California School of Fine Arts in print-making and painting, Herndon is known for her lithographs and collages, many of which were produced in tandem with Jack Spicer's poetry, and intended for joint viewing and reading. More recently, Herndon has branched out to work in drawing and pastels.
