After Spicer: Critical Essays

The beauty and difficulty of Jack Spicer's poetry continues to resonate with contemporary audiences nearly fifty years after his death. After Spicer brings together work by ten eminent literary scholars to provide a long overdue exploration of Spicer's legacy even as it continues to unfold. As editor John Emil Vincent notes, it is Spicer's "boundary crashing"—in his poetry, poetics, and politics—that makes his work so powerful and relevant today. After Spicer extends the conversation between poet and reader that Spicer considered essential to the composition and survival of poems. Incisive essays by Maria Damon, Norman Finkelstein, Kelly Holt, Catherine Imbriglio, Kevin Killian, Michael Snediker, Anita Sokolsky, and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, provide an overview of Spicer's oeuvre—his poetry, letters, plays, and his only novel—and explore his work in relation to queer theory, audience, religion, the lyric, and seriality. These essays give us crucial insights into Spicer's transition from a regional cult figure to a canonical postmodern poet.