In the 10 April issue of the TLS, Ian Pindar crafts a thorough and sensitive review of My Vocabulary Did This To Me Neverwas on dvd , the new Wesleyan University Press collection of San Francisco poet Jack Spicer’s work. Pindar’s portrait covers many aspect of this somewhat tortured figure, ultimately observing the problems Spicer had with relationships – the problems everybody has, only heightened to a poet’s degree:

… many of his poems take the form of urgent and arresting arguments with lovers, ex-lovers and friends. A Spicer poem often begins with a lyrical statement and ends in anger, as if reflecting his own yearning for conversation and a companion who never comes or never stays for long.

In the January 2009 issue of Open Letters

How to Steal a Million

, Jared White also took in My Vocabulary Did This To Me, and among many other things (White has much more space in which to do justice to the book and Spicer; you can read his essay here), he, too, notices the particular strangulations the poet felt toward affection:

…artificial effects of pathos and bathos are at their most manifest in Spicer’s magnificently torqued use of the word “love” in his poems. Again and again, the monosyllabic word arrives with a kind of promiscuous open-endedness even as it seems always deliberately earnest and lacerating. (Besides “poetry” and “love” the only word that appears to me nearly as conspicuously in these poems is “shit.” This is Spicer at his essence: half-heart, half-spleen.)

Pindar claims Spicer’s poems “do not deliberately court unreadability,” and White guardedly concurs. The book itself is available from Powell’s.