Jack Spicer—poet, bohemian, linguist, alcoholic, and early gay-rights activist—died of alcohol poisoning in San Francisco in 1965, at the age of forty. It is reported that his penultimate words, uttered in agony on his deathbed, were: “My vocabulary did this to me.” His inclusion in a study of expatriate Modernists may seem anomalous. Not only was he not an expatriate, he hardly even crossed the borders of the United States. Moreover, born in 1925, he is usually grouped with the “New American Poetry” poets, and more specifically, the San Francisco Renaissance coterie, which consisted largely of former students of the University of California at Berkeley, like Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser, and refugees from the experimental Black Mountain College, where Charles Olson had been rector. What I hope to demonstrate here, however, is the extent to which his aggressively regionalist poetics, in its dialectic with an “Outside” enacted notably through translation, is a clear inheritance of the expatriate modernists of the previous generation. Writing Spicer into the network of issues we have been studying is not meant to imply a seamless appurtenance to “modernism,” but rather to stress how any “post-modernism” invoked regarding his work must mean a deep critical dialogue with those predecessors. In Spicer, the typically modernist double engagement with the foreign, implying a new elaboration of the domestic, could be said to come home. Spicer posits translation as central to his project in a manner wholly deriving from Pound, while his emphasis on the “Outside,” on a regional grounding established through the necessity of its negation, jibes with much of what we have seen in our examination of Stein.