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After Lorca

After Lorca

by Jack Spicer, preface by Peter Gizzi

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$14.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Literature in English Poets & Poetry
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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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681375410
Pages: 96
Publication Date:

Praise

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

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