Spicing the Grail

Here's a project that I've been working on. It's supposed to be the beginnings of a hypertext edition of a poem. The poem is by Jack Spicer. Jack Spicer was a real person. Jack Spicer was a poet. He wrote many influential poems. He was associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. He believed that poetry is dictated. He took dictation from Martians.

The poem is called "The Holy Grail". Spicer wrote it from 1961 to 1962. It was published in 1964. First editions are rare. There is a "pirate" edition in the Columbia Rare Manuscript Library. How does a "pirated" edition find its way into the Rare Book collection of a venerable academic institution? The word "venerable" reminds me of The Name of the Rose. It reminds me of "Venerable Jorge". Another pirated edition, another work.

I am only slightly embarrassed that my interest in this coincides with Tom Hanks and bad hair. But there are many grails. It is a poem in seven "books". Each book has seven parts. Spicer called this a "serial" poem.

The point of this edition are the annotations. There are many references in the poem to Arthurian legend. I tried to track down these references. I annotate non-traditionally. I used a code that enables "one-to-many" links. It is quite novel. Suat, a frequent tagger on right, helped with making the code work properly. Many thanks, Suat.

At this point, only the first two "books" are annotated. There is much to be done. But you can read through the whole poem if you like. The best browser to use to view these pages is Firefox. They work fine with Netscape as well. You will run into problems if you use Internet Explorer.

Spicing the Grail