Ellingham, Lewis

Lew Ellingham is a San Francisco writer and critic who has served as book editor for the Sierra Club. He has published poems in numerous magazines and journals and is the author of POET, BE LIKE GOD (1984), an unpublished account of the Jack Spicer circle.

Jack Spicer, 1925-1965, was an influential San Franciso poet celebrated for his experiments with language. The publisher of White Rabbit Press, Spicer became the central figure in a coterie of experimental poets living in San Francisco from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser were other reknowned members of the group.

From the description of Poet, be like God, 1983-1987. (University of California, San Diego). WorldCat record id: 31759306

Biography

Lewis Ellingham, writer of prose, poetry and fiction, was born on 27 February 1933 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was the son of a Protestant small town newspaperman and a German Catholic mother. He attended Campion, a Jesuit residential high school from 1947 to 1951. Upon graduating, he began studies in Bloomington at Indiana University.

The years 1952 through 1965 were most pivotal in influencing Ellingham's writing career -- as is revealed in the following statement he made in 1990:

"In 1952, at age 19, I left home, leaving Indiana University in my first year; avoiding the Korean War draft by declaring myself homosexual at the same time, my student deferment automatically ending once I had left college. I lived briefly in New York's Greenwich Village and Chicago's Hyde Park, where my older brother...attended the University of Chicago. In 1954 I came to Berkeley and, shortly afterward, to North Beach in San Francisco, where... [for the most part] I have lived ever since. The central event of these decades in San Francisco was my close association with Jack Spicer's circle of writers and artists, in my case from 1961 through 1965 [the year of Spicer's death]."

From 1963-1965, Ellingham served as book editor for the Sierra Club, editing various guides and articles as well as the Exhibit Format series. Other than that job, Ellingham has been formally employed only sparingly. His most prolific writing periods have been during the 1960s, and from 1979 to the present. In 1990, he was an organizer of "OutWrite '90," a gay writers' conference in San Francisco, which attracted over a thousand participants.

Ellingham has published poetry, prose poetry and short fiction in the following publications: M (1963); Mythrander (1964); Open Space (1964); Magazine (1965); Cassiopeia and Cassiopeia/Ephemeris (1967-69); Nine Queen Bees (1970); The Jefferson Airplane (booklet, 1971); The Capilano Review (1976); No Apologies (1983-85); Mirage (1985-86); Acts (1983-87); Soup (1984); Ironwood (1987); and Line (1986-88). He has also written these unpublished books: The Wounded Laurel (poetry, 1971); Twenty Years of Writing (1982); ' Mechanically We Move in God's Universe ' (ten stories from the San Francisco Bay Region, 1983); The Bushes They Were Bells (fantasy fiction, 1985); The Countless Unmurmuring Dead (autobiography, 1986); Koot's Death (novel, 1987); Xavier (novel, 1988); and The Rain Column (novel, 1989). In 1984, he wrote Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance which was not published until 1998, (the research materials for this book comprise UCSD's Ellingham collection).

Jack Spicer (1925-1965) was a San Francisco poet who rejected the traditional centers for poetry -- i.e., academia and the large publishing houses. As a result, he devoted his life to writing poetry by day and forging a community of young, experimental poets by night in the North Beach bars. While working as a research linguist at UC Berkeley for David Reed and briefly as an instructor at San Francisco State (1957), he also founded White Rabbit Press and two magazines, J and Open Space, in which he published much of his own work and that of his friends. In 1957, he claimed to experience dictation by voices other than his own, and he began incorporating these voices in much of his work.

Spicer's work is noted for its experimentation with language, form and compositional method, and it often focuses on the dialectic between language and experience and between the self and the outside world. Recently, Spicer's writing has been growing in critical acclaim, even though it has long been revered by many poets.

Lewis Ellingham, who met Spicer in 1961, also came to admire and respect Spicer's work. Out of devotion to Spicer, he decided in 1983 to document the inner workings of the circle of writers that had assembled around Spicer so as to explore the implications for how and why it occurred. Ellingham interviewed over thirty witnesses to the scene - including such notables as Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser - and recorded their comments on cassette tape and in writing.

One of the products of this research was the manuscript Poet Be Like God . Ellingham's approach in creating this book was more sociological than literary. As he wrote in a letter to Michael Davidson, "I did not undertake this work to celebrate these people; they only are a part of my theme, which basically is Proustian of a kind of Left Bank I admire."

From the guide to the Lewis Ellingham's, Poet Be Like God, 1983-1987, (Mandeville Special Collections Library)