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Final Project Proposal: The Book as Seance

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For my final project, which will take the form of a scholarly essay, I would like to examine the relationship that poets have with text, specifically by viewing The Book as a Seance, the writer as a medium, and translation as a form of incorporeality. I will be primarily focusing on the poetics of Jack Spicer and his serialized poems that ‘translate’ the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, yet at the same time continue and add on to many of his famous poems, which creates a conversation between a living poet and a dead one(at the time). This conjuring and subsequent seance create a space where time means nothing and words mean everything, with translation almost transcending the text. Through this poetic lens, I will demonstrate how Spicer pushes the book past its physical medium and uses it as a conjuring tool, acting as a literary medium and transforming the Book as an object into a Seance. Focusing on translation, I will examine how Jack Spicer’s book transcends it from a physical medium to a site of linguistic and poetic transmediation.

Current Thesis: Jack Spicer’s translations of Federico Garcia Lorca reconceptualize Spicer’s poetic book as a seance where the poet becomes a medium conjuring a dialogue with the dead. This process transforms translation from a linguistic act to create a continuous living conversation. Ultimately, it demonstrates how the book can transcend its physical form to become a site of poetic transmediation

Annotated Bibliography

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

Borsuk’s book is a foundational text in our class and will serve as the main reference for my examination of the book as a seance.

Benjamin, Walter. “‘THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR.’” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 172–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrwt2.32.

Benjamin’s chapter on translation focuses on how essential it is for the translatability of a work to be most accurate in essence rather than straight diction in order to echo the original’s. This serves as a foundation for my assertion of translation as incorporeality.

Chamberlain, Lori. “Ghostwriting the Text: Translation and the Poetics of Jack Spicer.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 26, no. 4, 1985, pp. 426–42. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1208115.

Examines the complex methodology and language used to make sense of the ‘bastardized’ poems of Jack Spicer, hidden within and throughout Lorca’s translated poems.

CLARKSON, ROSS. “Jack Spicer’s Ghosts and the Immemorial Community.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 34, no. 4, 2001, pp. 199–211. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44029930.

Clarkson explores the relationship Jack Spicer has with the dead poet Federico Garcia Lorca and how his book After Lorca is a product, or rather, ‘instance of community’.

Eshleman, Clayton. “The Lorca Working.” Boundary 2, vol. 6, no. 1, 1977, pp. 31–50. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/302470. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.

This essay is a rather straightforward examination of Jack Spicer’s After Lorca and examines how the serialized poems took on book form, as well as analyzes and differentiates Spicer’s poems and Lorca’s.

Finkelstein, Norman M. “Jack Spicer’s Ghosts and the Gnosis of History.” Boundary 2, vol. 9, no. 2, 1981, pp. 81–100. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/303037.

In this essay, Finkelstein places Spicer in a historical perspective and analyzes how his poetry is a synthesis of modern/objectivist & romantic poetry, along with the notion of having created a new dialectical paradigm for understanding contemporary poetry.

Katz, Daniel. “‘JACK SPICER’S AFTER LORCA: TRANSLATION AS DECOMPOSITION.’” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 201–06. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrwt2.37.

Katz uses the contemporary lens of ‘translation as decomposition’ as well as poetry as ephemeral, specifically honing in on the language and diction found within Spicer’s book ‘After Lorca’.

Spanos, W. V. “Jack Spicer’s Poetry of Absence: An Introduction.” Boundary 2, vol. 6, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1–2. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/302467.

Spanos provides insight into the climate of poetry during a transitional period in the 1970’s providing a brief but critical examination of Spicer’s use of language in his poetry.

Digital Literature is Cool!

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The first time I ever heard about digital literature was when I received an email from the College of Arts and Letters, calling for art submissions. In my head, digital literature didn’t make sense because I had only ever thought of literature on a physical page in a book. I thought: How can literature be digital (besides me typing a story or poem on my computer)? It confused me as to how anyone could go beyond that, even though I had already seen versions of digital literature without knowing. 

Unfortunately, I cannot remember the exact museum I went to, but I do remember the art piece. I was in a dark room with a video playing on one screen. In the video, a woman sat in a kitchen and picked items up one at a time, naming them. You couldn’t really predict what she would show you next and, quite frankly, it was hard to discern any true rhyme or reason to which objects she would choose. That was so until she had listed perhaps 16 items and I had realized she was listing them all in alphabetical order. There was something quite eerie about the recording considering there was no ‘typical’ story besides the one you imagined. Not only did this story of sorts force me to listen in a very specific way but it also encouraged me to view these words with a specific emotion attached to them. Where “apron” might just be any other word, it was the beginning of her story.

The electronic literature displayed in Professor Pressman’s lecture reminded me a lot of this experience. I found that by watching and reading these pieces, I was experiencing something far more profound than a book. While both literature in books and digital literature are art, they convey different messages because of the medium they are attached to. I recognize that there are limitations to art based on what message should be presented to the audiences. The digital literature artists could not have performed these stories without the technology they used. It’s quite simple when you think about it, as a painter can’t make a painting with paints and a canvas. Otherwise, it would be an entirely new art medium. These digital writers are using digital technologies to play with audiences’ reception of the art, to change the way readers consume, to redefine what it means to read words in a specific order and speed.

With the alphabet story, I believe I felt uncomfortable listening to it, not only because of her listing objects without explaining a motive, but because of the pace she chose to read them at. It was a slow process, getting through the alphabet in roughly five minutes. It demanded my attention yet also forced me to listen and think. In the silence, she gave me time to consider the story between the lines. Similar to “Pry” that engages readers by having them actively pry out more information from between the lines, this video encouraged me to make my own story from the omission of filler words.