The Space Between: Proper Names and Other Disturbances in Jack Spicer's Poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Proper names in Jack Spicer's poems mark areas of uncertainty, spreading. This uncertainty stems not only from the divide between the names (sometimes the same name), but also by their use as "disturbances," exacerbating this already disorderly space above the real. This article, in search of the real Spicer spoke of, turns to this unstable gulf itself, and through the disturbances that mark it, explores a poetics that breaks from the crystalized structure of William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" and diverges from the Modernism that preceded it.