From Walking to the Wheel: Surrealism and the Serial Poem

Abstract:In his opening letters to the long-dead Federico García Lorca, Jack Spicer introduced his ideas of tradition, objects, and words. The following essay will explore these concepts in Spicer's poetry and poetics, tracing a tradition that runs through Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, and Spicer, for it is in relationship with Breton's surrealist object that the tradition which infuses Spicer's serial object can be further discerned. From there, the article will conclude with a reading of Spicer's poetry in light of one of his contemporaries who believed himself an inheritor of surrealist practice, Allen Ginsberg.