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,...

Peter Gizzi's poems move between bewilderment and understanding, anger and astonishment. His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on...

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection fuses documentary truth with imaginative force. The Outernationale locates us "just off the grid," in an emotional and spiritual frontier, where reverie, outrage, history, and vision merge. Thinking and feeling become one in the urgent music of Gizzi's poems. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom. This is both a poetry of conscience and the embodiment of a genuinely poetic consciousness. Objects, images, and their histories are caught here in their half-life, their profoundly...

Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009)
Winner of the American Book Award (2009)

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later,...

Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009)
Winner of the American Book Award (2009)

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later,...

About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken. Check for the online reader's companion at http:...

About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken. Check for the online reader's companion at http:...

Poetry. An abecedarian cento of New York School poems, this piece was first delivered in March 1996 at The Popular Culture Association Conference. As Gizzi notes: "ODE: SALUTE TO THE NEW YORK SCHOOL is a cento, a late Roman verse form made up of lines from other sources. First, I put together a chronological bibliography of over 100 books published by New York poets from 1950 to 1970. Many of these books are deeply out of print so I had to do some real digging. Then I extracted lines from each book to compose the cento. Happily, Clark Coolidge supplied lines from the books I couldn't find....

Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015)

Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance--in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi's poetry enlists the American...

Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015)

Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance--in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi's poetry enlists the American...