In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INTRODUCTION Although the American poet Jack Spicer was born in 1925 in Los Angeles, California, he claimed his birth year to be 1946, when he met the poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser at the University of California, Berkeley . Out of the intense fraternity of these three eccentric young men, clubbed the "museum poets" for their bookishness, was born the "Berkeley Renaissance." Spicer would spend the rest of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area, with only a few brief departures. Most notably his excursion to New York and Boston in 1955-56 would prove to be a defining moment in the development of his poetic vision, as it further solidified his allegiance to the American West and his identity as a California poet. He lived in San Francisco and worked as a researcher in linguistics at UC Berkeley until shortly before his death by alcohol poisoning in 1965 at the age of forty. He is survivedby roughly four hundred pages of poetry, some still unpublished; a detective novel; a handful of essays; some two hundred letters; at least three plays; four lectures, which were given shortly before he died; and a legacy of poets and readers to whom these lectures were and are delivered. The four lectures took place within a thirty-day period from June 13to July 14, 1965. The casual seriousness of these talks is typical of Spicer's public style and should not be interpreted as offhand; they are the only authoritative account of his poetics outside of his poems and letters.Although Spicer was noticeably intoxicated and disheveled, he took these events seriously and made sure that they were being taped. As transcriptions of oral texts recorded at the end of the poet's life, the lectures gain a certain oracular power and finality: Spicer's statements are not prophetic but contrary, allusive,and purposeful. His humor or "wicked wit," as Warren Tallman put it, is charismatic. He has that particular gift of being both irreverent and to the point. As a public speaker he is not the "roman candle " type, as he disarming]}' claims in the second lecture; instead, he says, xx Introduction he simply wants to he honest, and this struggle sometimes ties his sentences in knots. He writes to Graham Mackintosh before giving a lecture in 1954: "There's a big difference between talking as a teacher, which is easy, and talking as a poet, which is heartbreakingly difficult if yon want to talk honestly." Because of the difficult honesty of their pitch, these talks are also riddled with disappointment and uncertainty about the future of the poet—that is, the poet as a cultural figure in general and the poet as Jack Spiccr in particular, a highly intelligent, lonely, middle-aged, gay, baseball-loving alcoholic, one of the great poets of his time, recently unemployed , dying, and at the height of his poetic powers. The first three of these talks, which have come to be known as Spicer's lectures, were announced in Vancouver as "semi-public readings with commentary," and formally they retain the quality of talking marginalia on Spicer's own poetry as he attempts to discuss his poetic practice and life experience with his audiences. While Spicer foregrounds the practice of writing poetry, there is an avuncular tone throughout that shows Spicer's deep concern with the business of being a poet, particularlya young poet, who must learn how to manage the destructive force of the poem. At times the surface of the talks seems resistant to both newcomers and initiates. Because they are offered as "readings," some familiarity with Spicer's work —particularly the poems he reads—is necessary to grasp the extensive network of references he enacts within the course of the talks. As he says in Lecture i, the poems arc right where the commentary is wrong. It becomes clear by the final Vancouver talk that he is at times less interested in delivering an expose of his practice than in getting some feedback about his poetry from the audience. As a good teacher he wants to see whether or not they've "got" it, and as a poet he wants to begin to establish a vocabulary through which to discuss it. The spirit of the talks is essentially that of Spieer's "letters to a young poet." He is sympathetic to the concerns of the young and is aware of their struggle for reality. In fifteen False Propositions Against God, he writes from...

Share