AFTER LORCA

An interview with Dr. Daniel Katz and Jonathan Heron

In conjunction with a 2011 AHRC Fellowship to research and write a monograph on the American poet Jack Spicer, Dr. Daniel Katz (English and Comparative Literary Studies) embarked on a collaboration with Jonathan Heron of IATL, running Student Ensemble workshops that centred on Spicer’s work of 1957, After Lorca. In this interview, Daniel and Jonathan discuss both the workshops and the fascinating poet Jack Spicer.

Spicer himself dubbed After Lorca as a book of 'untranslations', interspersing his translations, adaptations, and deformations of Federico García Lorca’s lyrics with the occasional original poem and a series of letters from 'Jack' to the dead poet - all prefaced by an introduction 'ghost written' by the Spanish poet 'himself'.

In the Student Ensemble workshops, director Jonathan Heron encouraged participants to dwell not only on the difficulties of transporting lyrics to the stage, but also on how to bring to life the crucial epistolary component of Spicer’s project.

From After Lorca:

Juan Ramón Jimenez

A Translation for John Ryan

In the white endlessness
Snow, seaweed, and salt
He lost his imagination.

The color white. He walks
Upon a soundless carpet made
Of pigeon feathers.

Without eyes or thumbs
He suffers a dream not moving
But the bones quiver.

In the white endlessness
How pure and big a wound
His imagination left.

Snow, seaweed, and salt. Now
In the white endlessness.

From My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

Further reading

My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Edited and with an Afterword by Peter Gizzi. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

Poet, Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

You can listen to podcasts of Jack Spicer reading his own work here and here.

Click on the play button below to hear Spicer's poem 'Song of Two Windows' put to music by doctoral student Phil Jourdan.