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Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance
Jack Spicer, unlike his contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, was a poet who disdained publishing and relished his role as a social outcast. He died in 1965 virtually unrecognized, yet in the following years his work and thought have attracted and intrigued an international audience. Now this comprehensive biography gives a pivotal poet his due. Based on interviews with scores of Spicer's contemporaries, Poet Be Like God details the most intimate aspects of Spicer's life--his family, his friends, his lovers--illuminating not only the man but also many of his poems.
Such illumination extends also to the works of others whom Spicer came to know, including the writers Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Helen Adam, Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, Philip K. Dick, Richard Brautigan, and Marianne Moore and the painters Jess, Fran Herndon, and Jay DeFeo. The resulting narrative, an engaging chronicle of the San Francisco Renaissance and the emergence of the North Beach gay scene during the 50s and 60s, will be indispensable reading for students of American literature and gay studies.
Such illumination extends also to the works of others whom Spicer came to know, including the writers Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Helen Adam, Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, Philip K. Dick, Richard Brautigan, and Marianne Moore and the painters Jess, Fran Herndon, and Jay DeFeo. The resulting narrative, an engaging chronicle of the San Francisco Renaissance and the emergence of the North Beach gay scene during the 50s and 60s, will be indispensable reading for students of American literature and gay studies.
461 pages, Hardcover
First published May 15, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 6, 2018
To like this book you have to be interested in the art scene in the Bay Area in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. You also might have an interest in poetry and gay history, but most importantly you should be interested in how language becomes a way of communing with forces greater than the self.
The central figure is the poet Jack Spicer. Known to all the cognoscenti in North Beach and Berkeley as a force of nature, Spicer was a powerful influence on many of the great poets who lived in the Bay Area during this time.
I love histories of almost any sort and write and read poetry so my rating reflects these biases. But this said, Poet Be Like God is a labor of love. It is extremely well researched and the material that's been quoted is always appropriate. Most importantly, one feels this love in the writing, which is beautifully rendered. There is hardly an yeoman's turn of phrase. And we get all the gossip and changing relationships that occurred during this whirlwind.
Like New York, San Francisco was a hotbed of poetic innovation from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The movements in New York have always been better documented, so this book is critical to understanding poetry in the United States.
Writing no long produces heroic avant-garde movements. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Poetry is now more Catholic in its tastes than the Pope, so diverse with such a massive production of work it is impossible to keep tract of the varying styles. Poet Be Like God makes me nostalgic for a time when there was, at least for a brief moment, a variety of poetic directions that could be counted on one hand. It provides all interested parties with an incredible foundation for understanding 20th Century poetics in the United States.
The central figure is the poet Jack Spicer. Known to all the cognoscenti in North Beach and Berkeley as a force of nature, Spicer was a powerful influence on many of the great poets who lived in the Bay Area during this time.
I love histories of almost any sort and write and read poetry so my rating reflects these biases. But this said, Poet Be Like God is a labor of love. It is extremely well researched and the material that's been quoted is always appropriate. Most importantly, one feels this love in the writing, which is beautifully rendered. There is hardly an yeoman's turn of phrase. And we get all the gossip and changing relationships that occurred during this whirlwind.
Like New York, San Francisco was a hotbed of poetic innovation from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The movements in New York have always been better documented, so this book is critical to understanding poetry in the United States.
Writing no long produces heroic avant-garde movements. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Poetry is now more Catholic in its tastes than the Pope, so diverse with such a massive production of work it is impossible to keep tract of the varying styles. Poet Be Like God makes me nostalgic for a time when there was, at least for a brief moment, a variety of poetic directions that could be counted on one hand. It provides all interested parties with an incredible foundation for understanding 20th Century poetics in the United States.
June 5, 2008
This was a great read. I love the underlying sort of obsession with Spicer's sex life. Very fun and dirty and full of early poetry drama. Excellent source for Spicer nuts like myself.
August 28, 2007
A great, sometimes heartbreaking portrait of Spicer. (The book might have benefited from better editing, but it is still a compelling read.)
January 3, 2026
A work that triumphs in so many ways at once. I will never forget it.
First, as the story of Jack Spicer, it's incredible, revealing new layers of the obstinate and lonely king-of-the-hill via loose chronology and pages of love/hate testimony. By the end you feel you've been at the table with Spicer at Gino & Carlo's all those years, drinking brandy with water, your backs piggishly turned to the threat of the jukebox, and you're clocking what irresistible force guides him down what he surely knew would be the last existential alley he'd walk in precious North Beach.
Second, it shapes an exquisite portrait of the ensemble players of the Berkeley / San Francisco Renaissance. Blaser, Persky, Duncan, Jess, FitzGerald, Adam, Kyger, Herndon, and even Don Allen and Charles Olson, they just come alive in this. Petty bitches, mom/friend overriders, the exasperated, the saintly, the kinky and by golly doing something about it (FitzGerald), the chronically pining and not able to do much about it (Spicer), the traditionalists, the radicals -- they're all here. What struck me most wasn't that they were so miserable, antagonistic, or predatory, because they seemed broadly shitty and bored, but perhaps that they still constantly returned to each other through the haze of opposition in the earnest name of the poetry that was everything to them. That was beautiful and touching.
Third, as a book about San Francisco and the Bay after the Second World War but before the explosion of tie-dye and patchouli, there surely is nothing like it. North Beach was already a psychically powerful spot, but now I'll never look/walk down Broadway Tunnel without the unintentional romanticism of this book in my body.
Indelible image: the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance might've been generators, amplifiers, and/or radios (there you go, Spicer) of intellectual and artistic energy, but they spent so many of their days bored and yearning for a catalyst. Spicer clearly played this role gladly where he could, ungainly king of the Pacific Nation, but he too was bored, penniless, dependent, anxious, and prone to falling into the pull of his shapeless days. As we struggle through what makes a meaningful life in 2026, now that we're well and truly conquered by pulses of dopamine in these hamster wheel cycles, I'll be thinking about the texture of days, and how an artistically and productively full life looks, for those poets, for me, for a good society.
Ps. Now I also understand why I couldn't find much at all by/about Spicer at City Lights Bookstore. Read the book!
First, as the story of Jack Spicer, it's incredible, revealing new layers of the obstinate and lonely king-of-the-hill via loose chronology and pages of love/hate testimony. By the end you feel you've been at the table with Spicer at Gino & Carlo's all those years, drinking brandy with water, your backs piggishly turned to the threat of the jukebox, and you're clocking what irresistible force guides him down what he surely knew would be the last existential alley he'd walk in precious North Beach.
Second, it shapes an exquisite portrait of the ensemble players of the Berkeley / San Francisco Renaissance. Blaser, Persky, Duncan, Jess, FitzGerald, Adam, Kyger, Herndon, and even Don Allen and Charles Olson, they just come alive in this. Petty bitches, mom/friend overriders, the exasperated, the saintly, the kinky and by golly doing something about it (FitzGerald), the chronically pining and not able to do much about it (Spicer), the traditionalists, the radicals -- they're all here. What struck me most wasn't that they were so miserable, antagonistic, or predatory, because they seemed broadly shitty and bored, but perhaps that they still constantly returned to each other through the haze of opposition in the earnest name of the poetry that was everything to them. That was beautiful and touching.
Third, as a book about San Francisco and the Bay after the Second World War but before the explosion of tie-dye and patchouli, there surely is nothing like it. North Beach was already a psychically powerful spot, but now I'll never look/walk down Broadway Tunnel without the unintentional romanticism of this book in my body.
Indelible image: the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance might've been generators, amplifiers, and/or radios (there you go, Spicer) of intellectual and artistic energy, but they spent so many of their days bored and yearning for a catalyst. Spicer clearly played this role gladly where he could, ungainly king of the Pacific Nation, but he too was bored, penniless, dependent, anxious, and prone to falling into the pull of his shapeless days. As we struggle through what makes a meaningful life in 2026, now that we're well and truly conquered by pulses of dopamine in these hamster wheel cycles, I'll be thinking about the texture of days, and how an artistically and productively full life looks, for those poets, for me, for a good society.
Ps. Now I also understand why I couldn't find much at all by/about Spicer at City Lights Bookstore. Read the book!
July 14, 2007
Even if I didn't really need to know how big his penis was, this book did what I didn't think it could do when I first flipped through it somewhat suspiciously: cast light and further resonances upon his works. Lovingly written by Kevin Killian.
July 27, 2012
I was talking to a guy about the new Robert Duncan bio, and it seems like this and that collide in interesting ways, with a secret biography of Robin Blaser existing in between them. Kind of cool that Duncan is the ambassador from Venus and Spicer is an invader from Mars.
July 9, 2007
I love Jack Spicer, but this book makes him out to be less interesting than I had hoped. The writing is bland, but some of primary sources it quotes are great.
November 2, 2007
Seriously entertaining. A page-turner.
January 29, 2018
Comparisons are invidious, but it's hard to follow reading this unbuttoned, witty volume, with the pathography that clogs up Duncan Studies, e.g. Ellingham & Killian (Killian collaborated, also finishing what Ellingham started) have a great subject matter in the Berkeley Renaissance, and they excavate it with joy and an ear for authentic lore. I was re-reading it tonight, checking on some scenes from 1946, but was so enjoying myself I read on and on and on. Jack Spicer was an American Original, an Alex Chilton of West Coast pastoral. The covers we have him between were not reserved for his interment.
February 25, 2023
well, i WANTED to 'like' this book; & i pretty-much DID: but its constant & flippant apologist & FORGIVING of clear Anti-Semitism, & occasional afro-phobia kept making me cringe. -i REALIZE these are the 'views' of Lord Calvinist Jack Spicer, but the authors' treatment made me feel i was reading a 19th Century textbook ..
October 9, 2025
oh i was not made to be a poet :) i cannot restrain the thought "what a miserable guy." but it is touching too, the way we are made to feel spicer's vital forces, which happen to be wholly external, gradually diminish
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September 17, 2020sad shit
about the poet
dying in a two decade
old suit
about the poet
dying in a two decade
old suit
December 18, 2008
You can read my comments on Spicer at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/schwabsky.
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July 30, 2017I’ve always been intrigued & puzzled by the poetry of Jack Spicer, wondering just what he was doing, what was he writing about — & why so many grad student-types were ga-ga over his poems. So when this book jumped out at me at the public library I thought perhaps it would give me some insight. Boy, did it ever. I have a better sense of his poems & will return to them soon.
But as a person, what a slob. He was smelly, unkempt. Spicer was “…envious, scornful & competitive…”, “unpleasant to everyone;” “contempt” was his “personal style.” He — & Duncan & others there — were as clannish as the academic class he so despised. The late David Meltzer called the scene filled with “the barbed wire flak of bitchery.” Spicer was a person I would avoid if I saw him sitting in a bar, & the “scene” was not the kind of arts community I would want to be in.
Glad I read this to put Jack Spicer behind me.
But as a person, what a slob. He was smelly, unkempt. Spicer was “…envious, scornful & competitive…”, “unpleasant to everyone;” “contempt” was his “personal style.” He — & Duncan & others there — were as clannish as the academic class he so despised. The late David Meltzer called the scene filled with “the barbed wire flak of bitchery.” Spicer was a person I would avoid if I saw him sitting in a bar, & the “scene” was not the kind of arts community I would want to be in.
Glad I read this to put Jack Spicer behind me.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews