SPICER, Jack. The Holy Grail. San Francisco: White Rabbit Press. 1964.
8vo. Beige staple bound card wrappers with printed black and red panel to upper cover; [unpaginated]; slight lean to pages; a couple of light spots along spine and outer edges of pages; very small corner crease to the upper corner; a near-fine copy.
First edition, inscribed on the ffep by the British poet Andrew Crozier, "Buffalo '74".
The Holy Grail was written just a year before Jack Spicer's death at the age of just 40 years old. Often assigned to the cohort of poets known as The San Fransisco Renaissance, The Holy Grail is composed of seven sections all collaged together in what Spicer referred to as 'uncomfortable music'. In 1954, Spicer helped to form the 6 Gallery which would prove to be the location for the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and he stoicly refused to have his poetry copywrited, considering the iconic City Lights Bookstore nothing more than a tourist location which he would boycott by refusing to sell his work there. Obsessed with the notion of "dictated" poetry, devoid from the concious authority of the author, in 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer posthumously won the American Book Award for poetry.
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