The Lorca Working

In second letter in Admonitions (1958), Jack Spicer writes: Halfway through After Lorca I discovered that I was writing a book instead of a series of poems, and later, in same letter: all my stuff from past (except Elegies and Troilus) looks foul to me. The poems belong nowhere. Apparently Spicer felt that he had found his own while composing After Lorca. He referred to this way as the serial and it seems to me that if working in series, as opposed to discrete compositions, is discovered in After Lorca, it is first realized in Billy Kid. I take these two books to be two peaks of what might be thought of as first half of Spicer's poetic career (the second half begins with Lament for Makers [ 1961] which appears about two years after Spicer's burst of activity in 1957 and 1958). Any evaluation of what Spicer accomplished at large must take into careful consideration these two books. Here, I am going to be more concerned with After Lorca than with Billy Kid. By going through former book poem by poem, and then comparing earlier poems to poems written after After Lorca, I will hope to show how two connect

Art · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies