Spicer, Jack

American poet who worked and resided in San Francisco for much of his adult life.

Biographical Information

John Lester Spicer was born on January 30, 1925, in Hollywood, California, where his parents managed a small hotel. He attended Hollywood and Fairfax High Schools from 1939 to 1943, then University of Redlands, California from 1943 to 1945.

After a brief period as a private detective (1943-1944), Spicer attended the University of California at Berkeley, from 1945 to 1950, receiving his B.A. in 1947 and his M.A. in 1950. As a young Berkeley student in the late 1940s, Spicer quickly met other gay male poets, including Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Landis Everson. They began a lifelong association which Spicer half-seriously called The Berkeley Renaissance. His poetry of this period is elegiac, lyrical, magic-with little of the formal innovations developed later in the 1950s-and heavily homoerotic. He studied Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and German to prepare for a career in linguistics.

After graduating, Spicer found work as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, from 1947 to 1950 and 1952 to 1953. Politically an anarchist, Spicer found his academic career stalled after he refused to sign the Loyalty Oath, a provision of the Sloan-Levering Act that required all California state employees (including graduate teaching assistants at Berkeley) to swear loyalty to the United States. Just as problematic in terms of a career was his open and avowed homosexuality.

He left the Bay Area in 1950 to teach at the University of Minnesota from 1950 to 1952. He returned to the Bay Area as a lecturer in English at California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) from 1953-55. During this period, he was a founder and part proprietor of 6 Gallery, San Francisco (1954-1956). Spicer once again left San Francisco to make a career as a poet in New York City where, with the aid of a Berkeley friend, the painter John Button, he encountered the poets of the so-called "New York School" and their circle, among them Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Joe LeSueur. Within months however, Spicer left New York to join the staff of the Rare Book Room at the Boston Public Library, though this position lasted less than a year.

In 1957, Spicer returned to the Bay Area. He worked once again as a lecturer at San Francisco State University, then as a researcher in the Linguistics Department at University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1964. A burst of activity ensued, and a new writing practice began, first with the imitations and translations of After Lorca (his first published book) which, he claimed, had been "dictated" to him, if not by Garcia Lorca, then by a mysterious unknown force he sometimes said might be "Martians." In this conceit he was greatly influenced by the French poet Jean Cocteau, whose 1950 surreal film Orphee explores the notion of a poetry given from beyond the grave, and by his poetic hero Yeats, whose experiments in automatic writing fascinated Spicer. These poems rarely came singly; with Robert Duncan, Spicer conceived of and developed the 'serial poem': a book-length progression of short poems which combine and re-order themselves into a whole in the same way that individual words and lines alter one another in a single poem. Spicer's finest early poems are the Imaginary Elegies, which became his contribution to Donald Allen's influential anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 . "When I praise the sun or any bronze god derived from it," he wrote in the first elegy, "Don't think I wouldn't rather praise the very tall blond boy/ Who ate all of my potato-chips at the Red Lizard./ It's just that I won't see him when I open my eyes/ And I will see the sun."

In San Francisco, Spicer began teaching and young poets flocked to him. He wanted to develop a magic school of writing, a kreis modeled on the Georgekreis, the mystic cult of poetry and love organized by the modernist German poet Stefan George to preserve the memory of a dead boyfriend. In the last nine years of his short life, Jack Spicer completed a dozen books of poetry (and left incomplete at least half a dozen more), establishing a poetic tradition on the West Coast that ran parallel, yet counter, to the contemporaneous Beat movement. Unlike many of his poetic contemporaries, Spicer insisted that poets should avoid writing from their own experience, since the poet's subjectivity "got in the way of" the poem itself. His anarchist convictions led him to refuse copyright on his poetry since he believed that he was in no sense its owner, hardly even its creator. Spicer's own students came to include many of the finest poets, both gay and straight, working in San Francisco. He founded the magazine, J, in 1959, to publish their writing, alongside his own, and in 1964 oversaw another influential monthly journal, Open Space . Spicer died in San Francisco on August 17, 1965.

- Kevin Killian