PETER GIZZI is the author of six collections of poetry including Threshold Songs and In Defense of Nothing. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
"As a measure of our historical distance from Spicer's personality,
a new generation of editors, the poets Peter Gizzi and Kevin
Killian, moves beyond the Spicer 'legend' in order to present the
full range of his poetry to readers both familiar and unfamiliar
with his work."--Zach Finch, Boston Review
"Spicer is an interesting poet on several levels, all of them deep
and rich with deposits that reward an earnest dig. He is, I think,
on a par with Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams in
grilling the elaborative infrastructure of how we draw or are drawn
to specialized conclusions with the use of metaphor, and it is to
his particular brilliance as a lyric poet, comparable to Frank
O'Hara that the contradictions, competing desires and unexpected
conundrums of investigating one's verbal stream are made
comprehensible to the senses, a joy to the ear. No one, really no
one wrote as distinctly as the long obscure Spicer did, and editors
Gizzi, Killian, and publisher Wesleyan Press are to be thanked for
restoring a major American voice to our shared canon."--Ted Butler,
Oyster Boy Review
"His vocabulary did indeed do this to him, but perhaps with this
handsome edition, love and reappraisal will let him go on."--Edward
Champion, The Los Angeles Times
"You finish My Vocabulary Did This to Me feeling you've come in
contact with an original artist and a genuine one, a writer who is,
to borrow from Wordsworth, 'fierce, moody, patient, venturous,
modest, shy'. You also finish the book thinking that these poems
are ready to find a new audience."--Dwight Garner, The New York
Times
"As a measure of our historical distance from Spicer's personality,
a new generation of editors, the poets Peter Gizzi and Kevin
Killian, moves beyond the Spicer 'legend' in order to present the
full range of his poetry to readers both familiar and unfamiliar
with his work."--Zach Finch, Boston Review
"My Vocabulary Did This To Me These final words serve as an apt
title for Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian's wonderfully edited Spicer
collection, the first thorough gathering of the poet's
extraordinary and challenging writing to appear since the
'70s."--Erik Davis, Bookforum
"The book is one of the most important volumes of poetry published
in the past 50 years. The poems are simply wonderful, and Spicer's
mature work is some of the best ever written by an American."--Ron
Silliman
"An epic of irritation by a poet who professed no epic intent, the
collected poetry of Jack Spicer is essential reading. Acerbic,
wary, aggressive, aggrieved, it rides and puts it own spin on a
recovering (would-be recovering) romanticism, a signal travail
informing twentieth-century poetics.""--Nathaniel Mackey
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