Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Carter Monroe on Jack Spicer

Here is a link to a post by Carter Monroe on the 9th Street Laboratories blog.  Monroe, as you may know, is a poet, novelist, publisher, and music-expert hailing from North Carolina.  I sometimes refer to him as the sage of N.C., in fact.

Spicer was one of the troubled geniuses of the Beat Movement in San Francisco, pushing the limits of poetry and counter-cultural thought as much as he could and influencing a range of writers, including Robert Duncan. In my view, Spicer also anticipated much of what LANGUAGE poetry has attempted to do.

In the post, Monroe notes Spicer's influence on his own work and places his reading of Spicer in a biographical and cultural context in the 1970s.  The post includes excerpts from Monroe's "Spicer Series" of poems--great work.

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