by Jack Spicer
1949: In the spring Spicer has a troubled romantic affair with writer and heiress Catherine Mulholland, enters psychotherapy at UC Cowell Hospital Annex, and writes “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” Hosts a folk music show at KPFA, Berkeley; connects with archivist/artist Harry Smith and participates in the record hunts that would result in the Smithsonian release of Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). Studies with David Reed, soon to become his mentor in Linguistics. Writes “The Scrollwork on the Casket.”
1950: Receives M.A. degree. Loyalty Oath controversy at UC Berkeley; Spicer’s refusal to sign propels him out of the Ph.D. program and into Minnesota, where no Loyalty Oath was required of graduate students or professors. With David Reed, Spicer attends December convention of the Language Society of America in Manhattan (his first trip to the East Coast). Three of the “Imaginary Elegies” are completed.
1951: Duncan and Spicer debate the Berkeley Renaissance in letters. With David Reed, he publishes article on “Correlation Methods of Comparing Ideolects in a Transition Area,” in Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America. In the summer, Spicer’s father dies in Los Angeles. Arthur Kloth introduces Spicer to Gary Bottone, with whom he conducts a long distance romance. While in Minnesota, writes poems for Bottone (“Sonnet for the Beginning of Winter,” “Train Song for Gary,” and so forth).
1952: Returns to Berkeley from Minnesota. Social life revolves around two gay bars: the Black Cat in San Francisco and the White Horse in Berkeley.
1953: Lives in Berkeley, working as a teaching assistant for Thomas Parkinson’s large literature courses at UC Berkeley. A student, Richard Rummonds, inspires a love poem and features Spicer, Duncan, Landis Everson, and Blaser in a “Four from Before” retrospective in Berkeley student magazine Occident. Involved in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco branches of the Mattachine Society, an early gay liberation group based in Los Angeles. Teaches humanities at California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco (afterwards San Francisco Art Institute); becomes intimate with three students, John Allen Ryan, Graham Mackintosh, and Allen Joyce. Spicer plays bridge in Berkeley every Friday night. Begins writing epic play Troilus.
1954: Spicer moves to 975 Sutter Street in San Francisco. April 1, one of his favorite meeting places, The Place, opens. By the end of the summer, Spicer has completed his play Pentheus. Poetry Center at San Francisco State College opens, bringing international poets to read in the Bay Area, including W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, and others, many of whom Spicer meets. With five visual artists from CSFA, Spicer opens the 6 Gallery on Halloween at the site of the former avant-garde gallery space King Ubu. For a 6 Gallery event, Spicer tapes poetry to improvised backing by Lloyd Davis, Dave Brubeck’s drummer.
1955: Fired from CSFA in June. In the spring, acts in Robert Duncan’s “Faust Foutu” with Larry Jordan, Michael McClure, Helen Adam, Jess, and Duncan. Writes “Imaginary Elegy IV” and finishes Troilus in the summer before leaving for New York. Through painter John Button, meets Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Joe LeSueur; O’Hara’s poem “At the Old Place,” written July 13, mentions Spicer cattily. To Jasper Johns, O’Hara writes, “[Spicer] always disappoints me, but others think him very important.” To make ends meet, Spicer assists Hungarian émigré Eugene de Thassy in writing an autobiographical account of Parisian life, later (1960) published as Twelve Dead Geese and including some of Spicer’s poetry as the poetry of the “poet” character. On October 7, one of Spicer’s letters is read aloud at the momentous 6 Gallery group reading in San Francisco, at which Ginsberg reads “Howl.” In New York, writes “Some Notes on Whitman for Allen Joyce” and the sequence “Phases of the Moon.” In November, moves to Boston and joins the poetry circle including John Wieners, Joe Dunn, Steve Jonas, and Robin Blaser, which is connected to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Duncan are teaching. Begins the poems of After Lorca. Falls in love with the young, straight, married Joe Dunn.
1956: In this period Spicer undertakes several large-scale projects with Blaser, but only “A Semperrealistic Poem for Jo Miles” is finished. Writes his amorphous, unfinished, proto-serial project “Oliver Charming.” That summer Black Mountain College closes; from this point onward a flood of “Black Mountain Refugees” washes up against the bohemias of New York and San Francisco, including painters Basil King, Tom Field, and Paul Alexander, and poets Ebbe Borregaard, Dunn, and Wieners. In November, Spicer returns by plane to the Bay Area with Joe and Carolyn Dunn.
1957: Spicer reads at Berkeley and San Francisco State to great acclaim. Takes a job at SF State, teaching two courses, one of them the “Poetry as Magic” workshop, which attracts Helen Adam, Robert Duncan, Jack Gilbert, George Stanley, Joe Dunn, James Broughton, Ebbe Borregaard, and others. Charles Olson delivers Whitehead lectures at San Francisco Poetry Center, with Spicer in attendance. That summer, the Howl Trial begins in San Francisco. Spicer attends group reading at Kenneth Rexroth’s apartment, reads “Song of the Bird in the Loins,” is photographed for Life magazine. Joe Dunn establishes White Rabbit Press. The Sunday poetry meetings commence. Spicer attends rehearsals of Duncan’s Medea I and II. That fall, Evergreen Review’s “San Francisco Scene” issue appears with accompanying LP, both featuring Spicer’s poems. Begins work on linguistic atlas with David Reed at Berkeley. Enters a romantic relationship with Philadelphia-born painter Russell FitzGerald, who moves in with Spicer—the poet’s only extended sexual affair. Assembles a selection of his own best work for a projected volume of selected poems. Admonitions and A Book of Music written. After Lorca published.
1958: January, insults visiting poet Denise Levertov by reading “For Joe” at a party in her honor. Blabbermouth Night becomes a regular feature at The Place. Duncan attempts to arrange meeting between Spicer and Louis Zukofsky, who is visiting San Francisco and teaching a poetry workshop at San Francisco State. Spicer is romantically involved with Russell FitzGerald until FitzGerald’s July fling with rival poet Bob Kaufman “flips” Spicer. Billy the Kid written. Fifteen False Propositions Against God written (1958–59). Spicer writes six chapters of a detective novel, posthumously published as The Tower of Babel.
1959: One of Spicer’s muses, James Alexander, moves to Fort Wayne, sparking an important series of epistolary poems from Spicer. With the artist Fran Herndon, Spicer edits the mimeo-magazine J, issues 1–5. Spicer writes the poems of “Homage to Creeley” (without the attending “Explanatory Notes”). Fran Herndon works on lithograph illustrations for “Homage to Creeley.” At a drunken party in Berkeley, Allen Ginsberg attempts to fellate Spicer in public in the name of love, peace, and understanding; gets rejected. Robin Blaser returns to the Bay area after close to five years in Boston. Spicer writes Apollo Sends Seven Nursery Rhymes to James Alexander. Billy the Kid is published. “Imaginary Elegies V & VI” are published in J. Fifteen False Propositions Against God appear in Beatitude 3.
1960: “White Rabbit College” is proposed for the art space Borregaard’s Museum. In May The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen is published, including Spicer’s first four “Imaginary Elegies.” In summer, Spicer’s “gay rabbi” and long-term bridge partner, George Berthelon, dies. New series of poetry meetings limited to Jim Herndon, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Landis Everson. Homage to Creeley (without “Explanatory Notes”) is privately published in a small mimeo edition by Harold and Dora Dull. Spicer writes Helen: A Revision. Writes The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether.
1961: In January, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether is first “performed” at Borregaard’s Museum. Professor and poet Tom Parkinson is shot in his office at Berkeley and survives. Plans for “White Rabbit College” evaporate in disputes, with only a few events held as scheduled. In December Helen Adam’s San Francisco’s Burning! opens at the Playhouse in San Francisco. Spicer writes Lament for the Makers. Two-volume anthology The Californians (ed. Robert Pearsall
and Ursula Spier Erickson) appears, reprinting three of Spicer’s poems.
1962: Publishes “Three Marxist Essays” in George Stanley’s magazine N—San Francisco Capitalist Bloodsucker. In summer, poet Ron Primack becomes Spicer’s roommate and writes For the Late Major Horace Bell of the Los Angeles Rangers. In August, Spicer reads The Holy Grail at Blaser’s apartment; angers Duncan and Jess. In October, George Stanley and Stan Persky, instigated by Spicer, picket the opening of Duncan’s play Adam’s Way. Graham Mackintosh revives dormant White Rabbit Press. In “Hypocrite Women,” in her volume O Taste and See!, Denise Levertov responds poetically to the blistering invective of Spicer’s earlier (1958) poem “For Joe,” from Admonitions. Writes A Red Wheelbarrow, The Holy Grail, and Golem. The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether is published. Lament for the Makers is published.
1963: Winter, Spicer breaks his ribs in a car accident in San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel. That summer, Russell FitzGerald, his former lover, elopes to New York with Dora Dull, and Ron Primack moves out of Spicer’s apartment. Spicer works on the Map Poems and begins Language, which will be largely serialized in the monthly Open Space.
1964: Fired from his job at UC Berkeley, Spicer panics, then takes a part-time job at Stanford. That summer begins psychotherapy at Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco. Moves to 1420 Polk Street, his last residence. Open Space magazine published, edited by Stan Persky. Dear Ferlinghetti/Dear Jack (correspondence) published in Open Space and, separately, by White Rabbit Press.
1965: In February, Spicer attends the Vancouver Poetry Festival, reads Language to a young and enthusiastic crowd, stays with US émigrés Warren and Ellen Tallman. Ends therapy. In spring and summer, writes Book of Magazine Verse. In June visits Vancouver a second time; reads at New Design Gallery with Robin Blaser and Stan Persky; delivers the “Vancouver Lectures” at the Tallmans’ home. In June, Poetry magazine rejects Spicer’s offer of “Six Poems for Poetry Chicago.” White Rabbit Press publishes Language. July 14–15, Spicer gives a reading and his fourth and final lecture, “Poetry and Politics,” at the Berkeley Poetry Conference. He is one of seven poets (including Duncan, Gary Snyder, Olson, Ed Dorn, Ginsberg, and Creeley) who give individual readings and lectures at the conference. Late July, Spicer is found comatose in the elevator of his building, taken to San Francisco General Hospital and treated for liver failure. Dies on August 17. “My vocabulary did this to me,” he tells Blaser at his deathbed. “Your love will let you go on.” Buried anonymously in San Francisco.
1966:Book of Magazine Verse published.
NOTES TO THE POEMS
Spicer Manuscripts
The Bancroft Library began collecting Spicer’s papers in the 1970s, and we have relied heavily on four large manuscript collections, beginning with MSS 71/135C, which includes Spicer’s letters to the artist and printer Graham Mackintosh and to the poet James Alexander. In Robert Duncan’s papers (MSS 78/164C) there are dozens of Spicer’s poems and letters. More recently, the Library purchased Fran Herndon’s Spicer files, including the holograph manuscripts for The Holy Grail and Golem (MSS 99/94C). In 2004 Robin Blaser (representing the literary estate of Jack Spicer), made a gift of MSS 2004/209, including the papers left in Spicer’s hotel room trunk at his death in 1965, and a number of other manuscripts and letters collected by Blaser in the years after Spicer’s death in preparation for Blaser’s own edition of Spicer’s poems (The Collected Books of Jack Spicer) in 1975. The manuscripts of Spicer’s final books, Language and Book of Magazine Verse, are owned by Simon Fraser University in British Columbia (Jack Spicer fonds, MsA 20, Contemporary Literature Collection, Special Collections and Rare Books, W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University).
Abbreviations in the Notes
ms
Refers to both typed and holographic manuscripts.
CP 45–46
Collected Poems 1945–1946, in an edition of one, was handmade as a Christmas gift (1946) to his Berkeley poetry teacher Josephine Miles. The manuscript of Collected Poems is at the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Library at University of California, San Diego (MSS 397). After Spicer’s death, the book was printed in facsimile by Oyez/White Rabbit Press in 1981.
ONS
One Night Stand & Other Poems, ed. Donald Allen, San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1980.
CB
The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser, Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.
WRP
White Rabbit Press.
JSP 2004
Jack Spicer Papers MSS 2004/209, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
JSP 99
Jack Spicer Papers MSS 99/94C, The Bancroft Library.
JSP 71
Jack Spicer Papers MSS 71/135C, The Bancroft Library.
JSF 20
Jack Spicer fonds, MsA 20, Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University.
Previously uncollected in CB or ONS.
Berkeley in Time of Plague (p. 5). ONS used as copytext. First privately published in CP 45–46. First published in Evergreen Review, 1.2 “The San Francisco Scene” (1957): 52.
A Girl’s Song (p. 5). CP 45–46 used as copytext.
Homosexuality* (p. 6). JSP 2004 ms. used as copytext.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Landscape* (p. 6). First appeared in Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, edited by Timothy Liu (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2000): 75–78. That version of the poem was prepared from a typescript Robert Duncan gave to Lewis Ellingham in 1983, the original of which is in the Duncan papers at SUNY Buffalo. The present version of “Portrait” incorporates Spicer’s holographic revisions; JSP 2004.
An Apocalypse for Three Voices (p. 10). ONS used as copytext.
One Night Stand (p. 13). ONS used as copytext, except where punctuation and stanza breaks diverge from original JSP 2004 ms.
Ms. variant:
One Night Stand
Listen, you silk-hearted bastard
I said to the boy in the bar
You flutter well
And look like a swan out of water.
Listen, you soft wool-feathered bastard
I myself am more or less like Leda.
I can remember pretending
That your red silk tie is a real heart
That your raw wool suit is real skin
That you could float beside me with a swan’s touch
Of casual satisfaction.
But all deity leaves that bird after the swooping
Waking tomorrow I remember watching
Somebody’s feathers and his wrinkled heart
Draped loosely in my bed.
In spring of 1958, Spicer revised the poem again, giving it a new title, while writing Chapter 6 of his incomplete detective novel. Here is “Leda”:
Leda
I can remember pretending
That your red silk tie was a real heart
That your raw wool suit was real flesh
That you could float beside me with a swan’s touch
Of casual satisfaction.
Waking tomorrow I remember only
Somebody’s feathers and his wrinkled heart.
An Answer to Jaime de Angulo (p. 13). JSP 2004 ms. used as copytext. First appeared in an alternate version in Acts 6 (1987): 8.
Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) was a maverick linguist and cultural anthropologist, once at the University of California, Berkeley. This poem, written in April 1947, appeared in a revised version in ONS as “An Answer to a Jew.” The 1956 version, which begins “When asked if I am of the Jew or Goyim, / When asked if I am an enemy of your people,” employs the same rhetoric and locution as one of the speakers, thought to be Spicer, on the floor of the 1953 Constitutional Convention of The Mattachine Society, the early gay rights organization he supported: “When asked whether I am homosexual, I answered by asking ‘When?’” One of the central questions the Mattachine Society discussed was whether homosexuality was an essential quality or a behavioral characteris
tic. Minutes of Original Convention of Mattachine Society (May 23–24, 1953): 13. Hal Call Papers, One Institute, Los Angeles, California.
A Lecture in Practical Aesthetics (p. 14). ONS used as copytext. First published in Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, An Ode and Arcadia (Berkeley: Ark Press, 1974).
In Spicer’s notes to himself on his own poems, he writes that his discovery of Wallace Stevens led to a “long poem of the witty parallel type,” adding that “A Lecture in Practical Aesthetics” was “the last poem I wrote for almost a year.”
Dialogue Between Intellect and Passion (p. 15). ONS used as copytext. First appeared as “Sonnet” in Berkeley Miscellany 1 (1948): 14.
A Night in Four Parts (Second Version) (p. 16). ONS used as copytext. First appeared in an earlier version in Berkeley Miscellany 1 (1948): 11–12.
Orpheus in Hell (p. 18). ONS used as copytext. First published in Caterpillar 12 (July 1970): 65.
Orpheus After Eurydice (p. 19). ONS used as copytext. An earlier draft exists, entitled “Spicer’s Gallery of Gorgeous Gods” (JSP 2004). First published in Caterpillar 12 (July 1970): 64.
Orpheus’ Song to Apollo (p. 20). ONS used as copytext. First published in Caterpillar 12 (July 1970): 66.
Troy Poem (p. 21). ONS used as copytext. First appeared in Berkeley Miscellany 1 (1948): 13.
“We find the body difficult to speak . . .” (p. 22). ONS used as copytext. First published in Caterpillar 12 (July 1970): 67.
“They are selling the midnight papers . . .”* (p. 22). Previously unpublished; JSP 2004 ms. used as copytext.