Although known primarily among a coterie of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time of his death in 1965, Jack Spicer has slowly become a towering figure in American poetry. He was born in Los Angeles in 1925 to midwestern parents and raised in a Calvinist home. While attending college at the University of California-Berkeley, Spicer met fellow poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan. The friendship among these three poets would develop into what they referred to as “The Berkeley Renaissance,” which would in turn become the San Francisco Renaissance after Spicer, Blaser and Duncan moved to San Francisco in the 1950s.
Jack Spicer Checklist:
Section A: Books, Chapbooks, and Pamphlets
Section B: Broadsides, Posters, and Postcards
Section C: Contributions to Books and Other Publications
Section D: Contributions to Periodicals
Section E: Miscellaneous Prose
At Berkeley, Spicer studied linguistics, finishing all but his dissertation for a PhD in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. In 1950 he lost his teaching assistantship after refusing to sign a “loyalty oath” to the United States, which the University of California required of all its employees under the Sloan-Levering Act. Spicer taught briefly at the University of Minnesota and worked for a short period of time in the rare books room at the Boston Public Library, but he lived the majority of his life in San Francisco working as a researcher in linguistics.

Spicer helped to form the 6 Gallery with five painter friends in 1954. It was at the 6 Gallery during Spicer’s sojourn east that Allen Ginsberg first read Howl. As a native Californian, Spicer tended to view the Beats as usurpers and criticized the poetry and self-promotion of poets like Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as the Beat ethos in general. Always weary of labels and definitions, Spicer tended to associate with small, intimate groups of poets who lived in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Spicer acted as a mentor and teacher to these young poets by running poetry workshops and providing (sometimes caustic) advice for young poets.
In a 1975 New York Times article, Richard Ellman concluded: “Jack Spicer’s poems are always poised just on the face side of language, dipping all the way over toward that sudden flip, as if an effort were being made through feeling strongly in simple words to sneak up on the event of a man ruminating about something, or celebrating something, without rhetorical formulae, in his own beautiful inept awkwardness. It’s that poised ineptitude and awkwardness of the anti-academic teacher, the scholar of linguistics who can’t say what he knows in formal language, and has chosen to be very naive and look and hear and do. Spicer was not a very happy poet. He was obsessed with possibilities he could only occasionally realize, and too aware of contemporary life to settle for anything less in his work than what he probably could not achieve. He must have been a great spirit.”
Further Reading:
Herndon, James. EVERYTHING AS EXPECTED
San Francisco, Winter 1973
Foster, Edward Halsey. JACK SPICER
Boise: Boise State University, 1991
Killian, Kevin and Lewis Ellingham. POET BE LIKE GOD: JACK SPICER AND THE BERKELEY RENAISSANCE
Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998
Gizzi, Peter. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT THE COLLECTED LECTURES OF JACK SPICER
Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998
Gizzi, Peter and Kevin Killian. MY VOCABULARY DID THIS TO ME: THE COLLECTED POETRY OF JACK SPICER
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008
Online Resources:
Academy of American Poets
The Bancroft Library – Jack Spicer Papers 1939-1982
Book Forum
Emory University – Jack Spicer Papers
Jacket Magazine – excerpt from Vancouver Lecture 3
Penn Sound – audio recordings
Poetry Foundation
University of Buffalo
References Consulted:
Clay, Steven and Rodney Phillips. A SECRET LOCATION ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE: ADVENTURES IN WRITING, 1960-1980
New York: New York Public Library / Granary Books, 1998
Dorbin, Sanford. A CHECKLIST OF THE PUBLISHED WRITING OF JACK SPICER*
Sacramento: California Librarian, October 1970
[* the first (and only?) checklist of Jack Spicer’s writing]
Johnston, Alastair. A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE AUERHAHN PRESS & ITS SUCCESSOR DAVE HASELWOOD BOOKS
Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 1976
Johnston, Alastair. A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WHITE RABBIT PRESS
Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 1985
Lepper, Gary M. A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEVENTY-FIVE MODERN AMERICAN AUTHORS
Berkeley: Serendipity Books, 1976