The death of Darrell Gray ensured that Actualism could only meet a very different fate than Objectivism. Death enters the equation as well with the disappearance of another literary tendency of the past sixty years: the Spicer Circle. If ever there was a phenomenon that cried out for a large, well researched anthology, this is it.

The Spicer Circle had a significant impact on poetry, both in the U.S. and Canada, but characterizing or analyzing that impact is difficult because so little is adequately understood about the phenomenon by anybody other than those who were there. I wasn’t – I first heard of Spicer at a memorial reading held at Shakespeare & Company books (it may still have called the Rambam in those days) in Berkeley that was held, as best I can recall, around what must have been his birthday in early 1966.

Soon, three key associates of Spicer’s – Robin Blaser, George Stanley & Stan Persky – would move to British Columbia. In the ten year hiatus between Spicer’s death and two events that were to transform his place in literary history, the publication of his Collected Books by Black Sparrow press and the special issue of Paul Mariah’s Manroot magazine that was to place Spicer alongside Whitman & a handful of others as a founder of a gay aesthetic, only Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar 12 was to focus in any serious fashion on the Spicer’s work. While Caterpillar published over 150 pages of Spicer’s early poems, correspondence, a chapter from his detective novel and the first Vancouver lecture, it also positioned Blaser’s own poetry first, with the sole other contribution a four page essay on the pair from the issue’s guest editor, Persky.

In addition to that long silence & Spicer’s own dogged reluctance to permit his work and that of his friends out of the immediate physical confines of San Francisco (refusing, for example, to send his short-lived magazine J by mail), the period between 1965 and ’75 was one of extraordinary transformations in American culture and politics could not help but to reverberate throughout poetry. Spicer, who wrote about the war in Vietnam and the Beatles, was actually one of the first to sense these changes. But others that were to come soon, from Stonewall to Watergate, might have proven more difficult for him to digest and it is not hard to envision a later Spicer in the sort of reactionary alcoholic stupor that befuddled Kerouac before his death just a few years hence.

But the Spicer Circle was something more than just the poetry of Jack Spicer & something other than a Mattachine Society of verse*. Poets as diverse as Joanne Kyger, Larry Fagin and Jack Gilbert actively participated in events that were central to the Spice kreis. Poets who were not primarily San Franciscan, including Steve Jonas & John Wieners, could also be said to have played roles as well. An anthology such as the one I imagine would have to develop a serious & critically defensible definition of what the Spicer Circle actually was before it could go about the task to tracking down and collecting the poetry.

The Manroot issue remains the only hint of what such an anthology might look like**, containing as it does work by Harold Dull, Lew Ellingham, James Herndon, Jonas, Persky, Stanley, Wieners & Spicer, as well as a collaboration by Spicer & Stanley with Ronnie Primack and Bruce Boyd.***

Dull is a good example of what we are missing in not having a far better sense of the Spicer Circle. He published several small books in the 1950s and ‘60s, including The Star Year, The Door, Bird Poems, and The Wood Climb Down Out Of. Then in 1975 he published A Selection of Poems for Jack Spicer on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death. Since then, Dull has only published texts about Watsu, his aquatic bodywork practice that evolved out of Zen shiatsu. Herndon, Primack, James Alexander and Joe Dunn are other members of the Circle whose writing is even more difficult to find.

In 1967, I heard Jack Gilbert introduce George Stanley as “the finest poet now writing.” Today, their work seems worlds apart. A good anthology would in fact demonstrate a world in which that contradiction might not occur. It would have to sort through some infinitely thorny issues, including Robert Duncan’s relationship to the circle (not to mention Blaser’s). I’m not the person to mount that effort, although perhaps someone like Kevin Killian, who helped to shape Lew Ellingham’s drafts into the masterful biography that is Poet Be Like God, is.

* The Mattachine Society was an early gay rights organization, contemporary with Spicer & likewise headquartered in San Francisco.

***Abebooks, the rare books network, lists at least dozen copies of the Spicer issue of Manroot as well as a couple of complete runs of the journal available for sale.

*** Boyd is himself noteworthy as the participant in the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, who disappeared from the scene completely.