Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer
Born	John Lester Spicer; January 30, 1925 ; Los Angeles
Died	August 17, 1965 (aged 40)
Alma mater	University of Redlands,; University of California, Berkeley

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles in 1925. He went to college at the University of California at Berkeley. He became good friends with the poets Robin Blaser, and Robert Duncan. They called themselves “The Berkeley Renaissance”. When they moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, they and other poets became known as the San Francisco Renaissance.^[1]^[2]

In 1950 he would not sign a “loyalty oath” to the United States. He left Berkeley to teach at the University of Minnesota. He returned in 1952 and worked on a Ph.D. in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. He never finished his writing for that degree. In 1953 he worked at the California School of Fine Arts. He and five others started the "6" Gallery. That was where Allen Ginsburg and other poets had a famous reading in 1955 that started the Beat movement.^[2]

Then he had a job in the rare books room at the Boston Public Library. But he soon went back to California. Duncan got him a job at San Francisco State College to teach a workshop called “Poetry and Magic."^[2]

Spicer suffered from alcoholism and depression. He died in 1965 at San Francisco General Hospital.^[2]^[1]