After Jack

This title is not merely an homage to Jack Spicer, but also a tribute to his Orphic conception of the serial poem. "After Jack" is a palimpsestuous attempt to achieve the dark art of nekuia, to dial in his poetic transmissions, and to divine the polyphony of Federico Garcia Lorca and Jack Spicer as their voices interweave, transform, and become inexorably entangled with a fresh, peculiar, and disturbingly profane authorial voice. Only by the enchanted act of re-writing can Billy the Kid make explicit the homosexual subtext of Gore Vidal's 1955 TV play "The Left-Handed Gun"; Walt Whitman turn into an apocalyptic figure; or the knights of the Round Table turn into the enlightened circle of the poet's friends. But then, as Jack said, 'we were never friends'.