The old saying goes that you don’t read those in your own backyard. In other words, for some reason we tend not to read the work of writers who have lived in the same area in which we live. As a lifetime Midwesterner, I have found myself in Berkeley, California for a couple of years, and I have been trying to buck this trend by seeking out poets who are either from here or have spent a chunk of their writing careers here. It’s sort of like the slow-food movement, only I’m reading locally instead of eating. So a slow-poetry movement. I think Berkeley is rubbing off on me…
Anyway, I have found that the joy of reading local writers is two-fold: first, you read people you never would have discovered otherwise. Secondly, you start to make connections between the writing and you’re the places you encounter in everyday life. The Berkeley writers that I have read the most of so far are the three poets who made up the core of the Berkeley Renaissance in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. Of the three, Duncan has maintained the most fame, with most of his books still in print and a new biography due out soon written by the wonderful poet Lisa Jarnot. I spent much of last year catching up with his poetry, and was moved the magic (literal and metaphoric) of it.
Right now I am trying to reckon with the figure of Jack Spicer. I can’t really articulate why, but Spicer has become a huge fascination for me. While Duncan has deservedly stayed on the radar of many readers, Spicer has not, mainly because his work is simply not available. But there was a time when Spicer could have been considered to have been as influential as Ginsberg, Olson or Creeley. A collected poems of Spicer has been long in the making, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian and coming out on University of California Press, but for whatever reason, it has not appeared yet. So the curious reader can either pay the heavy price for his out of print Collected Books, or try to read a poem here and there where they can be found. Jacket magazine ran a special on Spicer in their seventh issue, here: http://jacketmagazine.com/07/index.shtml
His page at the Electronic Poetry Center is here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/spicer/
I have been reading Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian’s terrific biography of Spicer, Poet Be Like God (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). The book recounts the early Berkeley days of the Blaser/Duncan/Spicer triumvirate, the influx of the Beats into the Bay Area, and all of the glorious in-fighting that happened in the 50s and 60s in the West Coast poetry scene that produced so many great poems. And luckily for me, the authors include some of the addresses that Spicer et al. lived and congregated.
So today I checked out 2018 McKinley, where Spicer lived in 1947, when he was 22. Spicer’s house-mate at this address? Science fiction heavyweight Philip K. Dick (Bladerunner, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, etc.), then only 19 years old. How cool is that? From my house, this is a 10 minute walk. McKinley is a short but very pretty street that runs between University and Dwight. When I’m out jogging, sometimes I go out of my way to run down McKinley, because it is generally not crowded and has a cozy, family feel. As soon as I saw this address in the biography, I start to fantasize that I have run by the same house that Spicer lived in dozens of times and have never known it until now.
But, of course, when I track down the address, it no longer exists. At some point, the block of McKinley between University and Addison where the house stood was turned into apartment buildings. So passes another literary landmark“Anyways, it is still exhilarating to think that Spicer once lived near a place I know well. Next on my list of addresses is 2029 Hearst, where Duncan lived and Spicer visited nightly to argue about poetry and magic at a large round table.
Of course, reading locally is wonderful if the place where you live has a rich literary tradition. But I would wager that no matter where you live, there are some fascinating connections to be drawn between the places you know well and a writer worth reading. And this seems like a worthy goal as a writer: to leave some traceable mark on a place that can be followed by someone, and hopefully even inspire that someone to go even further than you did.