After Lorca - by Jack Spicer (Paperback)

About the Book

"Like all of Spicer's best work, After Lorca is "an argument between the dead and the living." He was haunted by Jean Cocteau's image of Orpheus as a poet taking dictation from the beyond through radio broadcasts only he could hear-he liked to say his own messages might be coming from Martians. But as he wrote in his 1965 book Language, "The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios/ don't develop scar tissue.""--

Book Synopsis

Out of print for decades, this is the legendary American poet's tribute to Federico García Lorca, including translations of the great Spanish poet's work.

Jack Spicer was one of the outstanding figures of the mid-twentieth-century San Francisco Renaissance, bent on fashioning a visionary new lyricism. Spicer called his poems "dictations," and they combine outrageous humor, acid intelligence, brilliant wordplay, and sheer desolation to incandescent effect.

"Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume," writes the dead Federico García Lorca at the start of After Lorca, Spicer's first book and one that, since it originally appeared in 1957, has exerted a powerful influence on poetry in America and abroad. "It must be made clear at the start that these poems are not translations," Lorca continues. "In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had written it. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another of his own, giving rather the effect of an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes that they must be his)." What so puzzles Lorca continues to delight and inspire readers of poetry today.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.