The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures

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The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures

4.64 of 5 stars 4.64 · rating details · 170 ratings · 14 reviews

Within THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT resides in one volume 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 thorough documentation of Spicer's unorthodox poetic visi...more

Paperback, 290 pages

Published July 29th 1998 by Wesleyan (first published June 1st 1998)

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Jun 14, 2013 M. Sarki rated it 2 of 5 stars

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It is my hope that at least one person will be glad I wrote this review. There will be no need to thank me. First off I want to express the great respect I have for the mind of Jack Spicer, for the seriousness in which he took his poetry, and the demands he placed on his students for them to do their very best work. It is also important to note that reading both the poems and lectures together concurrently offers more to the student of his verse and helps...more

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Feb 27, 2008 Matthew M. rated it 5 of 5 stars

While I have yet to read Jack Spicer’s poems with some kind of regularity over a period of time, I have dabbled here and there through his Collected Poems, reading them aloud, and silently voicing their frayed lines erupting into a disjunctive narrative. This narrative is always at the beginning of something that cannot be precisely named. Any sense of trying to end a poem would have been anathema for Spicer. For his project, as his lectures demonstrate, was a traditional rethinking of how a poe...more While I have yet to read Jack Spicer’s poems with some kind of regularity over a period of time, I have dabbled here and there through his Collected Poems, reading them aloud, and silently voicing their frayed lines erupting into a disjunctive narrative. This narrative is always at the beginning of something that cannot be precisely named. Any sense of trying to end a poem would have been anathema for Spicer. For his project, as his lectures demonstrate, was a traditional rethinking of how a poem comes through a procession of the “real” by way of the “unknown” dictated to the poet. The lectures take up Spicer’s views of dictation, seriality, composing in units and books, and lastly, the relation between politics and poetry. At stake was language itself, and Spicer’s compositional modes were both revealing and seemingly esoteric for his audience, but necessary for Spicer’s particular sensibilities. While Spicer talks a low diction and usefully incorporates vocabulary from popular culture such as baseball, movies, etc., there is an utter seriousness to his words. The employment of humor and negation throughout the lectures is environment-creating. Moreover, his rejection of the would-be vatic poet parallels his dictation that “heroes eat soup like anyone else.” Poets, in Spicer’s cosmology, are thankless for their task as a receiver of transmissions from the outside, but as Robin Blaser writes: “It is part of his notion that poetry is necessary to the composition or knowledge of the ‘real’ and this drew him into a combat for the context of poetry—that it was an act or event of the real, rather than a discourse true only to itself.” However, given the seriousness of creating the “real” Spicer says he has no idea what poetry is for.
Likewise, I would call Spicer’s lectures as a form of combat. It is clear throughout the four lectures that while he generally provokes the audience into dialogue, he is also trying to position himself in opposition to the English Department and larger cultural spaces. This is not argumentation for its own sake, but a way for Spicer to draw differences between the creation of societies, in order to assert his own models of composition. In the first lecture, Spicer resists the idea of the poet as a “beautiful machine which manufactured the current for itself, did everything for itself…instead there was something from the Outside coming in” (5). One might well ask what how Spicer imagined himself in relation to language, since language is the very medium by which a poem comes into being. However, for Spicer, language becomes merely a piece of furniture, which can be moved throughout a room. Or in another way, “language isn’t anything of itself. It’s something which is in the mind of the host that the parasite (the poem) is invading” (9). Spicer is not interested in a poetics of personality, or the interference of self into the poem. Rather, he envisions the poet as an “empty vessel,” whereby the Martians or spooks (the Outside), have their way with the poet so to speak. While the humor is implicit by using these terms, for Spicer it is a way to speak about the essential dislocation of the poet to his resources. It is also way to disturb and rethink the process of reading, which is as much a task as the writing of a poem. Spicer also picks up the image of the poet as a radio. In context, the radio was one of the primary means of distributing information, entertainment programs, and the like. It was used as both a public address system and presented a confluence of the public and the private world. Spicer imagined the poet as the receiver, not the one broadcasting (77).
Spicer’s conception of the serial poem is given ample attention in Lecture 2 where he uses a reading of the The Holy Grail to demonstrate and complicate his compositional modalities rendered in Lecture 1. In the beginning of this lecture, Spicer establishes a scaffolding by which to register exactly how a serial functions and is conceived: “A serial poem…has the book as its unit—as an individual poem has a poem as its unit, the actual poem that you write at the actual time, the single poem. And there is a dictation of form as well as a dictation of the individual form of an individual poem.” At all levels, the poem being written is a product of an outside transmission that determines the form and structure of the poem. For Spicer, this mode of composition was more than methodology or aesthetic. Whether by necessity or by an overriding sense of liberation from the stultifying constraints of the individual as ego, as in “the personal is a big lie,” Spicer talks about the serial poem as an ungrounded listening. Essentially mapless, the poet goes where he is lead. He enters strange lands without knowing where he is and where he is going. This state of dislocation produces a narrative that, according to Spicer, must be chronological in the arrangement of the book. Rearranging the order would foil whatever the dictation might have instructed.
Reading Spicer’s lectures has been amusing, maddening, and instructive. I mean none of these words in the pejorative sense, but want to emphasize that while reading the lectures as transcribed, one can pick up on Spicer’s idiosyncrasies, his and the audiences’ confusion, and a whole range of concerns. In Lecture 4, Spicer’s subject is Politics and Poetry, and quickly explains to his young audience that if a poet intends to write a political poem, it’s likely to be a bad one. Rather, if a poet has something to say at a political level, they should think about writing a letter to the editor or a Congressman. While Spicer’s political understanding is astute, his belief that magazines create their own politicized society is a paramount concern. Rather disparagingly, Spicer cautions the young poets in the audience not to sell out, but paradoxically, insists that they will anyhow. Spicer is included in that charge. His insistence that poetry doesn’t change political will is met with skepticism, and some members of the audience try to give examples contrary to Spicer’s claims. In the end, this particular argument is not resolved, but enlarged by the disparity of opinions. One of Spicer’s strongest appeals to this young audience is the importance of creating a community. Spicer says: “Certainly we belong to a community rather than a society, we poets. But I think every poet has to create actively his own community.”
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Jul 26, 2012 Chris Schaeffer rated it 5 of 5 stars

I remember being infuriated a lot during my time reading this book, and in a sense I think that if somebody approaches this as just a "how to write poetry" kind of thing they'll walk away a little fleeced. But in terms of understanding Spicer, I love it, and I like it more and more whenever I refer back to it.

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Mar 23, 2012 Ie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, 2012

There is absolutely no retribution, in whatever form, in Spicer's poetics. Authenticity, originality, individuality, talent, skill—these are imaginary concepts in the poetic realm for Spicer. I admire his resilience, imagine his loneliness. He wrote poetry—at least after the solidification of this later belief—drunk, miserable, under the belief that what he was doing served no grand purpose, no important end, not to an audience, or the poet, and perhaps even to its source. I seriously intend to...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Carrie Lorig rated it 5 of 5 stars

LOWGHOSTS martian speak don't let the poem end don't let in anything but everything let it kill you let it arrange your furniture and scare you to death get me a whiskey ok jack i love you so much.

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Dec 06, 2007 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ever since I read the book, I've taught Spicer and the serial poem in tandem with The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which was out of print for a while, perhaps now back in circulation from University of California Press. I also started practicing the serial poem, so it's a big influence. But I still write "one night stands" (individual poems in Spicer's terms). I wonder if we have reached the point where everyone should simply mount each new work, or section of a work, on his/her website or bl...more

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Jan 07, 2009 Steven rated it 5 of 5 stars

Gobbly goo Gobbly goo Martian! Martian! Spicer! Spicer!

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Dec 05, 2007 Logan rated it 5 of 5 stars

this book sort of ruined it for me, for just a bit. i had at the time, apparently, already been speaking to ghosts and martians, but i didn't know it. then when this book made me realize what was happening, they didn't talk to me no mores. i gots real sad for a bit. then i got better. me and the ghosts have us an understanding now. thanks, jack.

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Aug 02, 2007 david-baptiste rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: re-rereading

reading along with reading/rereading the Collected Books of Jack Spicer-some of it towards an essay--
in the new Otolith i have some pieces for Jack Spicer from a series--
http://the-Otolith.blogspot.com

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Oct 05, 2012 and rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

fucking weirdo. brilliant, brilliant weirdo.

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Dec 18, 2008 Barry rated it 4 of 5 stars

You can read my comments on Spicer at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/schwabsky.

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Sep 07, 2007 Nate rated it 5 of 5 stars

I always suspected that Martians were behind it.

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Aug 29, 2007 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, poetry

theory of dictation. yes.

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Oct 04, 2007 Nicolette rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Everyone and their brother

Redonk

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Shelves: kids-1001-5plus

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Shelves: ages-5

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About Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) 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.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of h...more

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My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry

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“And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think it has some definite basis to it. I'm not sure what. It's like telekinesis, which I know very well on a pinball machine is perfectly possible.” — 5 people liked it

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