My Vocabulary Did This to Me

"While the first part of this edition, 1945-1956, doesn't include every poem he wrote at this time, our aim has been to make a judicious selection of single poems from One Night Stand [1980] and from notebooks and manuscripts in order to provide something more than an adequate sense of Spicer's first decade of writing. Therefore this edition is not a 'complete' but a 'collected' poems. ... The second part of this book gathers a more complete picture of the second half of Spicer's writing life. ... It is our aim in this volume to present a comprehensive edition of Spicer's work from 1945-1965 and to establish a fair text of his major poems, creating, in effect, his first collected poems to function as a standard reading edition."--"About this edition," p.xxviii-xxx.