A word-wielding warrior

But these jolly hostilities originated from an inveterate playfulness. Spicer offered an "unvert manifesto" sustained by "mertz," a nonsensical term that involved "linking the sexual with the greatest cosmic force in the universe." Unverts had the power to defy easy classification as inverts, outverts, perverts or converts, but one suspects that all this jocosity enabled Spicer to casually throw away the forms he'd worked in before. Spicer's 1957 collection, "After Lorca," not only includes an introduction from the Spanish poet written two decades after his execution but also includes several letters to him from Spicer.

"We are polite," wrote Spicer, "but it is as if we were trading snapshots of our children -- old acquaintances who disapprove of each other's wives. Or were you more generous, Garcia Lorca?"

Spicer's stand-alone poems, the "one night stands" from before, would no longer do. And he took to thematic works like "The Holy Grail" with powerful but mixed results. He was aware of poetry's difficulties, but refused to be glib about it. In the previously unpublished "Helen: A Revision," Spicer responds to Robert Frost's claim that "any damned fool can get into a poem but it takes a poet to get out of one." He points out that "getting out of a poem is no more difficult than answering a lying obvious answer to a lying obvious question in an intelligence test or a lover."

But Spicer did not discount the classics. He frequently evoked Orpheus and Eurydice, with a particular fixation upon music playing in hell. Where Ginsberg railed against Walt Whitman in the neon fruit supermarket, Spicer took a more empathetic view in a long ode, acknowledging Whitman's lost America while noting that his tongue was "invoking / Comrades to keep vigil over your gazelle without body."

While time has been kind to Spicer, his reputation has not quite soared with his apparent martyrdom. His vocabulary did indeed do this to him, but perhaps with this handsome edition, love and reappraisal will let him go on.