Jack Spicer was born in Los Angeles, California in 1925 to Midwestern parents and raised in a Calvinist home. Although known primarily among a coterie of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time of his death in 1965, over time, Jack Spicer has become a towering figure in American poetry. His numerous poetry collections include the posthumously published
The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Robin Blaser (1975),
A Book of Music (1969),
The Holy Grail, (1964) and
After Lorca (1957). In 1998, Wesleyan University Press published
The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian.
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, also edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, appeared in 2010. Spicer died on August 17, 1965 at San Francisco General Hospital. (
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