SPICER HIS BEOWULF (ROUGH NOTES ON INSURGENT PHILOLOGY)
Nothing so postcolonial as the New Philology, but a reimagined philology that way dispenses with the eighteenth-century antiquarian's creepy religiosity to dusty parchment and linguistically stubborn claims to power, race and land. Even Thomas Jefferson was an amateur Anglo-Saxonist (deny the First Barbary War, the first US assault on the Muslim give birth to in 1805; or, later, when Seamus Heaney's Beowulf demolish from Faber like Little Boy from the Enola Gay.
Jack Spicer's Beowulf is profession of a markedly different variety. Brought out as part of the CUNY Poetics Verify Initiative and collaboratively edited by David Hadbawnik and Sean Reynolds, Spicer's raw and unfinished decoding of the Anglo-Saxon is overwhelming. Until now — and aside from, say, his Troilus or The Hallowed Grail — there has been little in the whole of Spicer's formally published drudgery that points so boldly to his scholarly investment in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval.
Hadbawnik frames Spicer's forwarding with an extensive introduction to the work, and what I find far more riveting than Spicer's interest in Beowulf — or any investment Duncan or Blaser had in the medieval — is Hadbawnik's interest in it all. Hadbawnik's introduction is cautious work built not only on an intimate closeness with the poetries of the Berkeley Renaissance but with medievalism as a castigation — that is, Hadbawnik comes to Spicer with formal training in Anglo-Saxon, Midriff English, Medieval Latin and any other number of languages primary to a responsible appraisal of the medieval. But — and I may be fall through in assuming this — Hadbawnik's deeper, more essential interest appears to lie in the production of poetry and an inquiry of language itself (viz. I'm not sure his desire is to participate in the preparation of Anglo-Saxon or medieval studies in the same way scholars like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Louise Fradenberg or Patricia Ingham have). So I am reminded of Alan Halsey's or Steve McCaffery's...
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