Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Jack Spicer
BornJohn Lester Spicer
January 30, 1925 
Los Angeles 
DiedAugust 17, 1965  (aged 40)
Alma materUniversity of Redlands,
University of California, Berkeley

Life and work

Born as John Lester Spicer on January 30, 1925 in Los Angeles to Dorothy Clause and John Lovely Spicer.[1][2] He graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943–1945.[2] He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.[3] Spicer's poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement.[4] In 1955, Spicer moved to New York City and then to Boston, where he worked for a time in the Rare Book Room of Boston Public Library. Blaser was also in Boston at this time, and the pair made contact with a number of local poets, including John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, and Joe Dunn.

Spicer returned to San Francisco in 1956 and started working on After Lorca. This book represented a major change in direction for two reasons. Firstly, he came to the conclusion that stand-alone poems (which Spicer referred to as his one-night stands) were unsatisfactory and that henceforth he would compose serial poems. In fact, he wrote to Blaser that 'all my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus) looks foul to me.' Secondly, in writing After Lorca, he began to practice what he called "poetry as dictation". His interest in the work of Federico García Lorca, especially as it involved the cante jondo ideal, also brought him near the poetics of the deep image group. The Troilus referred to was Spicer's then unpublished play of that name. The play finally appeared in print in 2004, edited by Aaron Kunin, in issue 3 of No - A Journal of the Arts.

In 1957, Spicer ran a workshop called Poetry as Magic at San Francisco State College, which was attended by Duncan, Helen Adam, James Broughton, Joe Dunn, Jack Gilbert, and George Stanley. He also participated in, and sometimes hosted, Blabbermouth Night at a literary bar called The Place. This was a kind of contest of improvised poetry and encouraged Spicer's view of poetry as being dictated to the poet.

After many years of alcohol abuse, Spicer fell into a prehepatic coma in his apartment building elevator, and later died aged 40 in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital on August 17, 1965.[5]

Legacy

Spicer's view of the role of language in the process of writing poetry was probably the result of his knowledge of modern pre-Chomskyan linguistics and his experience as a research-linguist at Berkeley. In the legendary Vancouver lectures he elucidated his ideas on "transmissions" (dictations) from the Outside, using the comparison of the poet as crystal-set or radio receiving transmissions from outer space, or Martian transmissions, the radio oracle derived from Cocteau's film Orphée, often cited by Spicer in his lectures.[6][7] Although seemingly far-fetched, his view of language as "furniture", through which the transmissions negotiate their way, is grounded in the structuralist linguistics of Zellig Harris and Charles Hockett. (In fact, the poems of his final book, Language, refer to linguistic concepts such as morphemes and graphemes). As such, Spicer is acknowledged as a precursor and early inspiration for the Language poets. However, many working poets today list Spicer in their succession of precedent figures.

Since the posthumous publication of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (first published in 1975), his popularity and influence have steadily risen, affecting poetry throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. In 1994, The Tower of Babel: Jack Spicer's Detective Novel was published. Adding to the Jack Spicer revival was the publication in 1998 of two volumes: The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi; and a biography: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

A collected works entitled My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, editors) was published by Wesleyan University Press in November 2008, and won the American Book Award in 2009.[8]

A collection of critical essays entitled After Spicer: Critical Essays (John Emil Vincent, editor) was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2011.

Further reading
  • Blaser, Robin, editor. The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1975
  • A Book Of Correspondences For Jack Spicer. Edited By David Levi Strauss and Benjamin Hollander. San Francisco: A Journal of Acts (#6), 1987; (Note: this is a collection of essays, poetry, and documents celebrating Spicer)
  • Diaman, N. A.. Following My Heart: A Memoir. San Francisco : Persona Press, May 2007
    • _____. The City: A Novel. San Francisco : Persona Press, August 2007
    • _____. Sitting With Jack At The Poets Table. Los Angeles: The Advocate, 1984
    • _____. Second Crossing: A Novel. San Francisco : Persona Press, 1982
  • Ellingham, Lewis, and Kevin Killian. Poet, Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998
  • Foster, Edward Halsey. Jack Spicer. Boise, Idaho : Boise State University, 1991
  • Gizzi, Peter, editor. The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998
  • Spicer, Jack. Jack Spicer’s Beowulf, Part 1, edited by David Hadbawnik & Sean Reynolds, introduction by David Hadbawnik, Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative, New York, 2011
    • _____. Jack Spicer’s Beowulf, Part II, edited by David Hadbawnik & Sean Reynolds, afterword by Sean Reynolds, Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative, New York, 2011
  • Katz, Daniel. The Poetry of Jack Spicer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
  • Tallman, Warren. In the Midst. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992
  • Herndon, James. Everything as Expected San Francisco, 1973
  • Vincent, John Emil, editor. After Spicer: Critical Essays. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011

References
  1. "Jack Spicer papers, 1938-1973". Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. 2016-06-07. Retrieved 2017-08-10.
  2. Allen, Donald; Butterick, George F. (1982). The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised. Grove Press. p. 427. ISBN 0802150357. Retrieved 2017-08-09.
  3. Fredman, Stephen (2005). A Concise Companion To Twentieth-century American Poetry. Blackwell Publishing. p. 110. ISBN 1-4051-2003-7.
  4. Garner, Dwight (2008-12-23). "Sometimes Love Lives Alongside Loneliness". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  5. "Jack Spicer".
  6. Spicer, Jack (June 13–17, 1965). "Vancouver Lectures". PennSound. Archived from the original on 1998. Retrieved 2020-01-19.
  7. Spicer, Jack (1998). The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Wesleyan University Press. pp. passim.
  8. "Wesleyan University Press". Wesleyan.edu. 2010-05-17. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
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