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. Using a kind of spontaneous and unrehearsed babble, poets would chatter nonsense in the spirit of dada performance. However playful it may have been, "Blabbermouth Night" can be seen as an accompaniment to Spicer's Gnostic poetics in which the poem is regarded as a mysterious code or message coming from an outside voice. Unlike the poetry of the Beats, this verse does not originate from within the artist's expressive will as a spontaneous gesture unmediated by formal constraints. For Spicer, poetry is a foreign agent, a parasite that invades the poet's language and expresses what "it" wants to say. The poet's task, then, is to clear away the intrusive, authorial...