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.
Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. 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.[1] 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.
“Well Dennis you don't have to hear anyof the mountain music they play here. Telling the young lies so that they can learn to get old. Favouring themwith biscuits. "It's a mighty rough road from Lynchburg toDanville, declension on a three mile grade." In either casecollision course. You either pick up the music or you don't.”
“Beauty is so rare a th—Sing a new songRealMusicA busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. AVisiting card— from 15 False Propositions Against God [1958]”
“AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry.— from "Thing Language”
“ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN BUT IT TAKES A GODDESS TO GET OUT OF ONE.”
“The poet is stepping out of the airplane. ”
“And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think it has some definite basis to it. I'm not sure what. It's like telekinesis, which I know very well on a pinball machine is perfectly possible.”
“At least we both know how shitty the world is. You wearing abeard as a mask to disguise it. I wearing my tired smile. Idon't see how you do it. One hundred thousand universitystudents marching with you. TowardA necessity which is not love but is a name. ”
“In hell it is difficult to tell people from other people.”
“Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.”
“Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?”
“See how weak prose is.... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose.”