The first biography of poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), a key figure in San Francisco’s gay cultural scene and in the development of American avant garde poetries.
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.
Endorsements:
“Any book this long and this thorough that is also this readable is a wonder to be praised. Poet, Be Like God makes the art and passion of Jack Spicer luminously legible. This is a grand biography; it is also a deeply searching delineation of an epoch, deploying living and vivid narratives of the San Francisco Renaissance. Here is the life every aspiring poet must know if she or he would risk self and soul in the mills of American art.”—Samuel R. Delany
“No American writer since World War II has proven to be more complicated or mysterious than Jack Spicer. . . . Lew Ellingham and Kevin Killian have worked for years to give us this absolutely essential portrait of a man as badly misunderstood in his own day as Gertrude Stein was in hers—and whose writing may ultimately have as deep an impact on the culture of the 21st century.”—Ron Silliman
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
Awards/Recognition:
Asian American Literary Award Finalist, by the The Asian American Writers’ Workshop 2003
PEN Center USA's Literary Award in Poetry Finalist 2003
|
|
LEWIS ELLINGHAM is a freelance editor and writer and author of The Jefferson Airplane (1972). Writer KEVIN KILLIAM’s recent books are Little Men (1997), Arctic Summer (1997), and Argento Series (1997). Both live in San Francisco.
|
