I picked up a copy of Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This To Me. This was an “it” book a while back, so I am totally just following the herd on this one. Except, I waited until it came out in softback and was significantly cheaper. What can I say?

My time living in California was a wonderful and creatively fertile experience for me. Spicer primarily interests me as someone who saw himself as a regionalists – almost never selling his books outside of the greater San Francisco area during his lifetime. Of course, I am also interested in periods like the Berkeley Renaissance of the late forties and fifties as an example of those glorious moments in literary history that I keep on missing.

Stylistically, I can appreciate Spicer as synthesizing Language Poetry (which I don’t always understand/appreciate) and Surrealism (which I generally feel that I do understand/appreciate).