Spicer taught a version of antinomianism which encouraged learning through opposition and confrontation…. [He] wanted, through his poetry, to defamiliarize language, to "spook" words into new contexts for which the criteria of truthfulness were not at issue. (p. 105) Language cannot fill that absence which the poet feels between God and himself; it cannot replace one absence with another. It can only record its own coming-to-be, its own incarnation, in the poem. Spicer's Logos is...

The Holy Grail is the summation of Jack Spicer's explorations into perception-as-love; it is a complete phenomenology of purpose which culminates his attention to the poetic act in all his previous books. (p. 163) [In The Holy Grail we find] a more direct engagement with experience, and … a total language generated on the spot, without recourse to prosaic modes of reference and mimicry. It no longer works through a negative to reach the positive. Also, as Spicer's principal struggle wit...

My essay [is] watchful of the context of the poetry and of the composing "real" that is Jack's concern. His ignorance is not one of lack of assurance. He knew the good and size of his work and he had assurance to give away to others. His ignorance seems to have been of the cost of this venture which he turned into a narrative. It is part of his notion that poetry is necessary to the composition or knowledge of the "real" and this drew him into a combat for the context of p...

          For the beginning is assuredly          the end—since we know nothing, pure          and simple, beyond          our own complexities…. This quotation from [William Carlos Williams&#...