Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The House That Jack Built (New Edition): The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer

The House That Jack Built (New Edition): The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer

Spicer, Jack
Gizzi, Peter
Gizzi, Peter

Hardcover

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0819502375
ISBN13: 9780819502377
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: Sep 9 2025
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.36
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.06 Depth: 8.19
Language: English

Illuminates Jack Spicer's provocative lectures on radical poetics

The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called the practice of outside, is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.
Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.

2 different editions

Also available

Also from

Spicer, Jack

View All

Also in

Poetry Criticism

View All