<P>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.</P><P>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.</P>

PETER GIZZI is the author of the poetry collections Artificial Heart (1997) and Periplum (1992), and he is the recipient of a Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz

PREFACEAcknowledgementsA Note on the TextKEYINTRODUCTIONVANCOUVER LECTURE 1Dictation and "A Textbook of Poetry"VANCOUVER LECTURE 2The Serial Poem and The Holy GrailVANCOUVER LECTURE 3Poetry in Process and Book of Magazine VerseCALIFORNIA LECTUREPoetry and PoliticsAFTERWORDJack Spicer and the Practice of ReadingAPPENDIXUncollected Prose and Final InterviewBibliography and Works CitedIndex