The House That Jack Built collects for the first time 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 long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.

Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.

PREFACE
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
KEY
INTRODUCTION
VANCOUVER LECTURE 1
Dictation and "A Textbook of Poetry"
VANCOUVER LECTURE 2
The Serial Poem and The Holy Grail
VANCOUVER LECTURE 3
Poetry in Process and Book of Magazine Verse
CALIFORNIA LECTURE
Poetry and Politics
AFTERWORD
Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading
APPENDIX
Uncollected Prose and Final Interview
Bibliography and Works Cited
Index