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Finding Aid to the Jack Spicer Papers, 1939-1982, bulk 1943-1965
BANC MSS 2004/209
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Collection Title: Jack Spicer papers
Date (inclusive): 1939-1982,
Date (bulk): bulk 1943-1965
Collection Number: BANC MSS 2004/209
Creator :
Spicer, Jack
Extent:
Number of containers: 32 boxes, 1 oversize box
Linear feet: 12.8 linear ft.
Repository: The Bancroft Library
Berkeley, California 94720-6000
Abstract: The Jack Spicer Papers, 1939-1982, document Spicer's career as a poet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Included are writings,
correspondence, teaching materials, school work, personal papers, and materials relating to the literary magazine
J. Spicer's creative works constitute the bulk of the collection and include poetry, plays, essays, short stories, and a novel.
Correspondence is also significant, and includes both outgoing and incoming letters to writers such as Robin Blaser, Harold
and Dora Dull, Robert Duncan, Lewis Ellingham, Landis Everson, Fran Herndon, Graham Mackintosh, and John Allan Ryan, among
others. Also included are writings by other Bay Area writers, including Blaser, Duncan, and a significant amount by Stephen
Jonas.
Languages Represented: Collection materials are in English
Physical Location: Many of the Bancroft Library collections are stored offsite and advance notice may be required for use. For current information
on the location of these materials, please consult the library's online catalog.
Collection is open for research.
Copyright has not been assigned to The Bancroft Library. All requests for permission to publish or reproduce must be submitted
in writing to the Head of Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000. Permission
for publication is given on behalf of The Bancroft Library as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include
or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the reader.
Copyright restrictions also apply to digital representations of the original materials. Use of digital files is restricted
to research and educational purposes.
[Identification of item], Jack Spicer Papers, BANC MSS 2004/209, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
There are no alternate forms of this collection.
Jack Spicer papers, [1956]-1963, BANC MSS 99/94 c
Jack Spicer letters to Allan Joyce : New York and Boston, 1955-1956, BANC MSS 71/288 z
Jack Spicer letters to Myrsam H. Waxman, 1955-1956, BANC MSS 92/905 c
Jack Spicer papers, 1954-1964, BANC MSS 71/135 c
Smaller, yet still significant collections of Spicer material may be found in archives including the Poetry/Rare Books Collection
at SUNY Buffalo; the Archive for New Poetry at UCSD, and Special Collections at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British
Columbia.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.
Spicer, Jack
Authors, American--20th century
Poets, American--20th century
Poets, American--California--San Francisco Bay Area
Spicer, Jack. Book of magazine verse
Spicer, Jack. Language
Spicer, Jack. Lament for the makers
Spicer, Jack. Homage to Creeley
Spicer, Jack. Admonitions
The Jack Spicer Papers were given to The Bancroft Library by Holt V. Spicer on March 10, 2004.
No additions are expected.
Processed by Kevin Killian and Jocelyn Saidenberg in 2005.
John Lester Spicer was born on January 30, 1925, in Hollywood, California, where his parents managed a small hotel. He attended
Hollywood and Fairfax High Schools from 1939 to 1943, then University of Redlands, California from 1943 to 1945.
After a brief period as a private detective (1943-1944), Spicer attended the University of California at Berkeley, from 1945
to 1950, receiving his B.A. in 1947 and his M.A. in 1950. As a young Berkeley student in the late 1940s, Spicer quickly met
other gay male poets, including Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Landis Everson. They began a lifelong association which
Spicer half-seriously called
The Berkeley Renaissance. His poetry of this period is elegiac, lyrical, magic-with little of the formal innovations developed later in the 1950s-and
heavily homoerotic. He studied Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and German to prepare for a career in linguistics.
After graduating, Spicer found work as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, from 1947 to 1950 and 1952 to 1953. Politically
an anarchist, Spicer found his academic career stalled after he refused to sign the Loyalty Oath, a provision of the Sloan-Levering
Act that required all California state employees (including graduate teaching assistants at Berkeley) to swear loyalty to
the United States. Just as problematic in terms of a career was his open and avowed homosexuality.
He left the Bay Area in 1950 to teach at the University of Minnesota from 1950 to 1952. He returned to the Bay Area as a
lecturer in English at California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) from 1953-55. During this period,
he was a founder and part proprietor of 6 Gallery, San Francisco (1954-1956). Spicer once again left San Francisco to make
a career as a poet in New York City where, with the aid of a Berkeley friend, the painter John Button, he encountered the
poets of the so-called "New York School" and their circle, among them Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, James Schuyler,
and Joe LeSueur. Within months however, Spicer left New York to join the staff of the Rare Book Room at the Boston Public
Library, though this position lasted less than a year.
In 1957, Spicer returned to the Bay Area. He worked once again as a lecturer at San Francisco State University, then as a
researcher in the Linguistics Department at University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1964. A burst of activity ensued,
and a new writing practice began, first with the imitations and translations of
After Lorca (his first published book) which, he claimed, had been "dictated" to him, if not by Garcia Lorca, then by a mysterious unknown
force he sometimes said might be "Martians." In this conceit he was greatly influenced by the French poet Jean Cocteau, whose
1950 surreal film Orphee explores the notion of a poetry given from beyond the grave, and by his poetic hero Yeats, whose
experiments in automatic writing fascinated Spicer. These poems rarely came singly; with Robert Duncan, Spicer conceived
of and developed the 'serial poem': a book-length progression of short poems which combine and re-order themselves into a
whole in the same way that individual words and lines alter one another in a single poem. Spicer's finest early poems are
the
Imaginary Elegies, which became his contribution to Donald Allen's influential anthology
The New American Poetry 1945-1960. "When I praise the sun or any bronze god derived from it," he wrote in the first elegy, "Don't think I wouldn't rather
praise the very tall blond boy/ Who ate all of my potato-chips at the Red Lizard./ It's just that I won't see him when I
open my eyes/ And I will see the sun."
In San Francisco, Spicer began teaching and young poets flocked to him. He wanted to develop a magic school of writing, a
kreis modeled on the Georgekreis, the mystic cult of poetry and love organized by the modernist German poet Stefan George
to preserve the memory of a dead boyfriend. In the last nine years of his short life, Jack Spicer completed a dozen books
of poetry (and left incomplete at least half a dozen more), establishing a poetic tradition on the West Coast that ran parallel,
yet counter, to the contemporaneous Beat movement. Unlike many of his poetic contemporaries, Spicer insisted that poets should
avoid writing from their own experience, since the poet's subjectivity "got in the way of" the poem itself. His anarchist
convictions led him to refuse copyright on his poetry since he believed that he was in no sense its owner, hardly even its
creator. Spicer's own students came to include many of the finest poets, both gay and straight, working in San Francisco.
He founded the magazine,
J, in 1959, to publish their writing, alongside his own, and in 1964 oversaw another influential monthly journal,
Open Space. Spicer died in San Francisco on August 17, 1965.
- Kevin Killian
Scope and Content of Collection
The Jack Spicer Papers, 1939-1982, document Spicer's career as a poet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Included are writings,
correspondence, teaching materials, school work, personal papers, and materials relating to the literary magazine
J. Spicer's creative works constitute the bulk of the collection and include poetry, plays, essays, short stories, and a novel.
Correspondence is also significant, and includes both outgoing and incoming letters to writers such as Robin Blaser, Harold
and Dora Dull, Robert Duncan, Lewis Ellingham, Landis Everson, Fran Herndon, Graham Mackintosh, and John Allan Ryan, among
others. Also included are writings by other Bay Area writers, including Blaser, Duncan, and a significant amount by Stephen
Jonas.
Comprising approximately thirty boxes of material, the collection includes manuscripts and typescripts for nearly every one
of his major projects, with the exception of
The Holy Grail (1962, published 1964), already in the Bancroft's possession and the manuscripts for his two final books,
Language and
Book of Magazine Verse, which are owned by Simon Fraser. In addition, there are papers representing nearly a dozen projects previously unknown,
or thought lost in the general messiness that was Spicer's life. Among them are (each described in more depth later in this
finding aid)
Phases of the Moon,
The Clocks,
A New Poem,
Helen: A Revision,
A Birthday Poem for Jim (and James) Alexander,
Dignity,
For Major General Abner Doubleday,
Spider Music,"
Ten Hokkus for Dorrie (part of an extensive project of "hokku," a Japanese poetry form in which Spicer took a great interest during 1959),
For Harris," and
Map Poems. Beyond these larger works there are hundreds of drafts of single poems known and unknown, doubling or perhaps tripling
the number of poems written by Spicer. At least some of them Spicer himself apparently considered worthy of publication.
In his lifetime he saw to press only a handful of books:
After Lorca,
Billy the Kid,
Homage to Creeley,
The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether,
Lament for the Makers,
The Holy Grail, and
Language. Since his death an equal number have appeared in various small press editions.
Spicer's composition notebooks show us how he wrote his poems and, just as importantly, when. Many tangles in a hitherto
mysterious career chronology straighten themselves out as one peruses the notebooks and discovers the procedural matrix/matrices.
Apparently he could juggle many projects at once, and it was not unusual for him to be composing several serial poems at the
same time. Following the evidence of these notebooks, we can now gather that
The Red Wheelbarrow, for example, followed
The Heads of the Town and
Lament for the Makers--i.e., it can now be thought of as a 1960s poem, not a 1950s poem.
The typescript from which Lewis Ellingham and I prepared our edition of Spicer's incomplete, yet seminal detective novel (published
in 1994 as
The Tower of Babel) is here, and even more amazing, here are the seventeen notebooks in which Spicer wrote it out by hand, composing many of
the poems from
Admonitions,
A Book of Music, and
Billy the Kid sometimes literally in the margins. The manuscripts of many unpublished short stories and short plays (and for his major
theatrical work,
Troilus) shed new lights on Spicer not only as poet but as fiction writer and dramatist. Also included are Spicer's translations
of Stefan George, and of the
Beowulf poem (nearly 2,800 lines complete of the 3,182 line original).
The collection preserves the editorial work performed by Robin Blaser, Spicer's closest friend and literary executor, while
preparing his landmark edition of
The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1975). Blaser spent the better part of ten years in assembling, editing, curating,
and theorizing his late friend's work, and we can follow his intricate, multifaceted decisions right from the start. Blaser
also preserved what he could of Spicer's incoming correspondence, and apparently solicited from Spicer's friends a good number
of his original letters to them, so that in several cases we have both sides of the correspondence (and often enough the notebooks
show us first and second drafts of letters now lost). To a biographer, or social historian, this alone is a great treasure,
and the icing on the cake is that Spicer's letters are themselves often as "poetic" and/or poetically useful as his poems.
The sheer number of drafts and revisions available help give shading to Spicer's theories of "dictation" and show us that,
at any rate, he didn't always practice the doctrine of "first thought best thought." Certainly he did not hesitate to revise,
sometimes drastically, the texts of even his most famous poems: witness how the 1940s poem
One Night Stand" gets whittled down to the tiny, minimalist
Leda" ten years later.
The collection also contains Spicer's side of the editing of the influential mimeo magazine
J, which he shared with Fran Herndon (SUNY Buffalo holds Fran Herndon's
J materials). This includes, most notably, a large amount of poetry submitted to
J by members of the larger Bay Area poetry scene of the late 1950s. Though much of it is dross, it gives a sense of the diamond-out-of-coal
editorial inspirations that
J represented. In the related subseries Works by Others, Spicer used large manila envelopes to hold what he labeled "O.P.P"-
apparently, "Other People's Poetry" - in which he collected the very best poems of the poets in his circle, and includes many
rare, unpublished, and previously unknown poems. This archive alone is a remarkable record of a particularly rich flowering
in the postwar West Coast division of U.S. poetry. The larger cultural context in which Spicer wrote and thought and moved
is preserved in multiple directions and elaborated with a scope unusual for any collection.
- Kevin Killian