I have written here before that one of the great omissions from the set of Obviously Necessary Resources for poetry over the past half century is a good – or even a mediocre – anthology of the Spicer Circle. For while some members associated with Jack Spicer & his tightly knit of coterie of acolytes, friends, publishers, drinking buddies & lovers went on to become known, some widely, in their own right – Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, George Stanley, Larry Fagin, Steve Jonas, Graham Macintosh, Ebbe Borregaard, John Wieners, Stan Persky – the true shape of this extraordinary community remains largely mysterious to anybody who was not hanging out at Gino & Carlos in the years & days prior to August 1965, when Spicer’s alcohol-wasted body finally gave out at the age of 40. Which works of the above poets, for example, does one include in such a gathering (for Kyger, I believe it would be pieces later gathered into The Tapestry and the Web; for Wieners, The Hotel Wentley Poems, written when he & Spicer both lived in that establishment at the corner of Polk & Sutter in San Francisco)? What about the poets – many of them quite good – who did not go on to become household names: Joe Dunn, Harold Dull, James Alexander, Ronnie Primack, Jim and Fran Herndon, Lew Ellingham, Gerald Fabian, Russell Fitzgerald? How does one account for the presence of Jack Gilbert of all people in Spicer’s Magic Workshop? And where does one situate the third member of Jack’s Berkeley Renaissance trio from his college days at the University of California, Robert Duncan?

The late Paul Mariah -- who arrived in San Francisco from Utah shortly after Spicer died – included many others in his great 1974 special Spicer issue of Manroot, names one recognizes, like Thom Gunn, Tom Parkinson, Ron Loewinsohn, Robert Berner, Faye Kicknosway, Lynn Lonidier, Helen Luster, Robert Peters & even George Bowering, and names that I have hardly ever seen elsewhere, such as Larry Oakner, Peter Bailey, William Barber, Michelle Hickman, James Hoggard, Gary Lawless & Ottone Riccio. What was their relation to this phenomenon? Were they active somehow around the peripheries of this scene, as I suspect Lonidier – perhaps the first true avant-garde lesbian poet after Gertrude Stein – and Robert Berner may have been? Or were they just people who liked Jack’s work, which was almost certainly Parkinson’s role? Mariah did not propose the issue as a portrait of the Circle – only Harold Dull wrote explicitly about it – but rather as a mechanism to get Jack’s name back in front of readers, since at that moment it had been nine years since his death, nine years since his last book large enough to have perfect binding & five since Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar 12 had devoted an issue entirely to Jack & Robin Blaser (with a note from Persky). While the Black Sparrow Collected Books – now out of print again, as the world awaits the newer, bigger UC Press volume – was to appear within a year or so, Paul’s concern was that the person whom he used to characterize as the greatest gay poet since Whitman would become one of poetry’s disappeared.

That has not happened, happily. But the context for Spicer’s writing – the group of poets who met regularly in San Francisco, who together created magazines such as J (that’s the cover of J 5 at the head of this note, designed by Fran Herndon, who co-edited it with Jack) and small presses like White Rabbit & Open Space, who made up the core of the Magic Workshop, and who joined Jack regularly out at Aquatic Park in the afternoon & at Gino & Carlo’s later at night, is becoming ever harder to discern. Many of those concerned – Jack, Jonas, Wieners, Jim Herndon – have already died & the remaining ones aren’t getting any younger. The best one can do at this point is to read the one great about Spicer, the Ellingham-Killian biography, Poet, Be Like God.

Using Abebooks.com, the best used & rare book resource on the web, I’ve been gradually picking up volumes from some of these poets. In the past year, I’ve bought five books by Harold Dull, Jim Alexander & Ronnie Primack. Of these, Primack is probably the least well known. Other than a single poem that appeared in Exquisite Corpse No. 5 by a Ron Primack, who surely must be the same person, referencing as his poem does both “Joanne” and “Jack,” Primack appears to have published just one book, the serial poem entitled For the Late Major Horace Bell of the Los Angeles Rangers, published by Graham Macintosh’s White Rabbit press in 1963 with illustrations – most notably a map printed on something very close to tracing paper – by Macintosh. Historically, Bell (1830-1918) headed up a group of vigilantes in the Los Angeles area in the 1850s, in good part to even the odds against the more well organized gangs of outlaws, especially the one led by Joaquin Murrieta¹. One can see the influence of Spicer all over this book – the serial poem, the old west figure not so unlike Spicer’s own use of Billy the Kid, even the setting in old Los Angeles, Spicer’s home town. Indeed, one of the reasons that it still makes sense fifty years later to call it the Spicer Circle is that one sees his influences here almost anywhere one looks. Another book that took Spicer’s patented serial poem format was Jim Alexander’s The Jack Rabbit Poem, published by White Rabbit in 1966.

The 19 sections of For the Late Major Horace Bell of the Los Angeles Rangers strike me as wildly uneven. A number simply don’t hang together. The best, tho, not only work, but can be read as virtual studies in Spicer’s own methods as a poet:

Mae West gave no secrets when she planted Fields
      in the Palm of her hand

In the Movies the fall guy sees goldie locks
      as Hermes or Carmen Miranda
      covered in orange Blossoms.

This is appeal
This is a plot
This is a pot
      that boils a lot

The variable capitalization, the hanging indents that waver between being linebreaks & new lines altogether, the use of pop culture references, the structural echo of the nursery rhyme (literally The House That Jack Built) all come heavily marked by Spicer’s DNA. Ditto the ironic twist of the last lines when the poem identifies itself as a potboiler.

One wonders what Spicer must have made of such derivation. I personally find such gestures infuriating, but I know others who maybe know better how to see the compliment implicit there. There have always been some poets who seem even to strive to find their echoes, particularly among students and/or lovers. And Spicer seems very much to have needed a posse, not just a community, but someplace where he could actively be in charge.

Ronnie Primack by himself isn’t justification enough for an anthology of the Spicer Circle, but surely he would be included. Along with all its other underpublished members – even Larry Fagin & Ebbe Borregaard fit that definition – a Spicer Circle collection would bring together one of the major absences we still have of the poetries of the 1950s that have played such a vital role in shaping our own. Then we can get on with others – the Projectivist or Black Mountain anthology, the Beat anthology, an Objectivist anthology that covers all that movement’s phases.

 

¹ Bell went on to become a newspaperman rather in the mold of Ambrose Bierce, but, tho Bell was a self-promoter, he never succeeded half as much at it as did Wyatt Earp. For one thing, it was not his band that finally caught & killed Murrieta, but that of Harry Love, who severed Murrieta’s head & preserved it in a jar.