After Language / Letters to Jack Spicer (BlazeVox)
The test of a true poem, Stephen Vincent writes, is how not to die for
it. How can a book that chills you to the bone — As Jack Spicer’s
Language surely does — become a structuring, challenging, politicizing
and even comforting recurring presence through forty years of a life
lived under its spell? With a hard-won, contrarian patience, Vincent
applies the test, and the hope he finds at the end is all the more
convincing for the precariousness of the path it takes through the
silent gap between No and One listens to poetry.
—Peter Manson
Stephen Vincent's engagement with Jack Spicer's poetry goes arguably
farther back than anyone who wasn't a friend or acquaintance. What is
not arguable is the generative richness of that engagement. Having been
sent Spicer's Language by a friend while serving as a Peace Corps
volunteer in a Nigeria poised on the brink of civil war, he finds in its
"uncomfortable music" a poetry uncannily expanding the borders of
meaning. Cast in the creative-epistolary form of Spicer's own After
Lorca, this book is a tactful searching: it respects the intransigence
of the poems, and tries, in the gentlest of ways, to understand the man
who wrote them. After Language is a meditation on interpretive
migration, on the troubled paths of poetic inheritance, and on the
tangled, fraught (and yes, magical) ways that poetry survives it makers.—George Albon
94 pages; $16.
To order, go here: #yiv2100307529 p.yiv2100307529MsoNormal, #yiv2100307529 li.yiv2100307529MsoNormal, #yiv2100307529 div.yiv2100307529MsoNormal {margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Times;}#yiv2100307529 div.yiv2100307529Section1 {}
http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/after-language-letters-to-jack-spicer-by-stephen-vincent-255/
To get a book sense, feel welcome to request (from me) an email example of a sample "letter".
Stephen Vincent
