Jack Spicer was a San Francisco poet who rejected the traditional centers for poetry--academia and the established publishing houses, using the phrase "English Department" as a derogatory description for analytical approaches to poetry and having his...

Jack Spicer's relationship to the San Francisco Beat movement was ambivalent, to say the least. Perhaps his main connection was his enthusiastic support of "Blabbermouth Night," which became an institution at The Place, a favorite North Beach bar....

Jack Spicer was born on 30 January 1925 in Los Angeles, where his father managed a hotel. The job provided a good income, and even during the Depression the family lived comfortably. Spicer's only sibling was a brother, who became a college instructor...

Jack Spicer (1925–1965) American poet, novelist, and essayist. Spicer was associated with the Beat Generation primarily because of his social activities and attitudes, his friendships with Bay-area poets, and his involvement with several small...

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco...

Al Young, though born in Mississippi, has lived much of his life in California, where he teaches at Stanford University. "For Jack Spicer" pays homage to the Bay Area poet whose work influenced the development of the San Francisco Renaissance. When Young published...

Noted American poet Jack Spicer made four lectures from Jun 13 to Jul 14, 1965 shortly before he died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 40. The first three lectures were done as a series which he delivered every time to a roomful...

Spicer taught a version of antinomianism which encouraged learning through opposition and confrontation…. [He] wanted, through his poetry, to defamiliarize language, to "spook" words into new contexts for which the criteria of truthfulness were not at issue. (p. 105) Language cannot fill that absence which the poet feels between God and himself; it cannot replace one absence with another. It can only record its own coming-to-be, its own incarnation, in the poem. Spicer's Logos is...

The Holy Grail is the summation of Jack Spicer's explorations into perception-as-love; it is a complete phenomenology of purpose which culminates his attention to the poetic act in all his previous books. (p. 163) [In The Holy Grail we find] a more direct engagement with experience, and … a total language generated on the spot, without recourse to prosaic modes of reference and mimicry. It no longer works through a negative to reach the positive. Also, as Spicer's principal struggle wit...

My essay [is] watchful of the context of the poetry and of the composing "real" that is Jack's concern. His ignorance is not one of lack of assurance. He knew the good and size of his work and he had assurance to give away to others. His ignorance seems to have been of the cost of this venture which he turned into a narrative. It is part of his notion that poetry is necessary to the composition or knowledge of the "real" and this drew him into a combat for the context of p...