"The Grail Is the Opposite of Poetry": The Medieval Coterie in Jack Spicer's The Holy Grail (A Performance and Roundtable)
Sponsoring Organization(s)
eth press
Organizer Name
Daniel Remein, Chris Piuma
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Massachusetts-Boston, Univ. of Toronto
Presider Name
Chris Piuma
Paper Title 1
Spicer’s Grail in the Boston Public Library
Presenter 1 Name
Alex Mueller
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Massachusetts-Boston
Paper Title 2
Discussant
Presenter 2 Name
Laurie A. Finke
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Kenyon College
Paper Title 3
Discussant
Presenter 3 Name
Martin B. Shichtman
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Eastern Michigan Univ.
Paper Title 4
Discussant
Presenter 4 Name
Daniel Remein
Start Date
14-5-2016 10:00 AM
Session Location
Schneider 1280
Description
Jack Spicer—a key mid-twentieth–century poet and a member of the “Berkeley Renaissance”—drew upon his obsession with Arthurian romance and the logic he saw in that tradition when he wrote his serial poem The Holy Grail (1962). The book consists of seven poems (“The Book of Percival”, “The Book of Gwenivere”, and the like), each in seven parts. It is clearly a “medievalist” poem, but it is one that is not particularly “driven by the nostalgia of popular culture”, as Nickolas Haydock has said of movie medievalism. However, because scholars of the middle ages have largely ignored the poem, there has not been an adequate examination of the nature of the poetic medievalism at play in the poem and how it might help us think with the medieval texts. This session will include recordings of the poet reading the text, as well as scholars working on medieval (and later) Arthurian literature and on the unexpected ways Spicer and the poets in his circle drew upon medieval texts more generally.
"The Grail Is the Opposite of Poetry": The Medieval Coterie in Jack Spicer's The Holy Grail (A Performance and Roundtable)
Schneider 1280
Jack Spicer—a key mid-twentieth–century poet and a member of the “Berkeley Renaissance”—drew upon his obsession with Arthurian romance and the logic he saw in that tradition when he wrote his serial poem The Holy Grail (1962). The book consists of seven poems (“The Book of Percival”, “The Book of Gwenivere”, and the like), each in seven parts. It is clearly a “medievalist” poem, but it is one that is not particularly “driven by the nostalgia of popular culture”, as Nickolas Haydock has said of movie medievalism. However, because scholars of the middle ages have largely ignored the poem, there has not been an adequate examination of the nature of the poetic medievalism at play in the poem and how it might help us think with the medieval texts. This session will include recordings of the poet reading the text, as well as scholars working on medieval (and later) Arthurian literature and on the unexpected ways Spicer and the poets in his circle drew upon medieval texts more generally.