Red Hook Books Celebrates Poet Jack Spicer

A book about a community of poets is bringing another community of poets and readers together.

On Saturday, Nov. 7, Red Hook Books hosted a launch event for the new paperback edition of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, the 1998 biography by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian.

The new bookstore (123 Coffey St.) is run by husband-and-wife team Tanya Chernyak and Patrick Preziosi. They envisioned the space not only as a store but as a neighborhood gathering place. This event brought together poets, writers, and scholars—Daniel Benjamin, Kay Gabriel, Sampson Starkweather, and Rebecca Teich—who discussed the influential poet and read from his work and their own.

Spicer (1925-1965) was a gay experimental poet who believed poets were like radios, picking up on signals from “the invisible world.” He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a literary circle that included gay poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan. The three were friends who encouraged and challenged one another.

Spicer was prolific but wary of commercial publishers. For many years, he refused to let City Lights Books sell his work. The San Francisco bookstore, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, helped introduce Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg to a wider audience. According to Blaser, Spicer once warned Ginsberg that he risked becoming a cult leader rather than a poet.

Wesleyan University Press has published four volumes of Spicer’s work, including poetry, plays, lectures, and letters. According to Wesleyan’s marketing manager Stephanie Elliott Prieto, science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany first brought Poet Be Like God to the press’s attention after reading an early draft by Ellingham that ran more than 1,000 pages. With interest in Spicer continuing to grow, readers had been asking for the long-out-of-print biography.

Benjamin, one of the editors of Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, relied heavily on the biography. “When editing Spicer’s letters, I kept Poet Be Like God by my side always to look up references and make connections,” he said. According to Benjamin, the book combines Ellingham’s “rough, highly personal oral history of the Spicer circle” with Killian’s “novelistic and more traditionally scholarly narrative.” He hails it as “a testament to the importance of writers outside of the literary mainstream telling their own histories.”

For those unfamiliar with Spicer’s work, Benjamin recommends starting with the 1949 poem “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” Told from the perspective of a patient answering his psychoanalyst’s questions, the poem follows the speaker’s thoughts and growing impatience. Its final line seems especially fitting for an event devoted to keeping the sometimes-prickly poet’s work alive: “I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.”

Red Hook Books, 123 Coffey Street. Open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. (closed Monday and Tuesday).