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Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (excerpt)

by Lewis Ellingham? and Kevin Killian

Early after his arrival in North Beach in the spring of 1962, Tony Aste befriended Richard Brautigan, opened an affair with Virginia — Ginny — Richard's girlfriend, then married her. By Brautigan Ginny had had one child, Ianthe; with Tony Aste there were more. The Tony/Virginia/Dick triangle was very much on Spicer's mind when he wrote The Holy Grail, but sitting behind it was very much, still, the Creeley/Marthe Larsen/Kenneth Rexroth triangle which had so fermented Spicer's imagination since he first heard of it in Boston, and which had already inspired his detective novel and "Homage to Creeley."

Not surprisingly, one consequence of Tony's elopement with Virginia was a new closeness between Spicer and Richard Brautigan. Spicer admired Brautigan's poetry and had published it in J. At this time, Brautigan was wrestling through the writing of his first "novel," which became Trout Fishing in America. He brought it to Spicer page by page, and the two men revised it as though it were a long serial poem. (Later, Blaser? would perform a similar service for Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar.) Brautigan dedicated Trout Fishing in America to Ron Loewinsohn? and Jack Spicer. Loewinsohn speculated on the reasons for the double dedication. "Me, I think, just friendship; and Jack, editing, help, whatever he did. Jack was absolutely fascinated with Trout Fishing, and spent a lot of time with Richard talking about it." Spicer may have recommended cuts; this was rumored in the community at the time. "Anytime you [could] get Richard Brautigan to accept criticism [was] an unbelievable accomplishment. He [was] so defensive, and so guarded; and Jack was able to get him to make changes. Whatever he did he deserved some sort of Henry Kissinger award."

Jack told Gail Chugg, "Brautigan's written a great poem! ... I just got through reading the whole thing. It's called Trout Fishing in America." Not only did Spicer champion Trout Fishing in America; he arranged for Brautigan to read the novel in public, over two consecutive nights in a San Francisco church (at the corner of Market, 16th and Noe Streets). In a caustic letter written in December 1956, Robert Duncan sharply criticized Brautigan's early poetry and urged him to attend the upcoming "Magic Workshop" that Spicer would administer in the spring of 1957. "I suggest that before you think of reading you go into the open Forum of your contemporaries." It is uncertain whether Brautigan took Duncan's advice — certainly he was never a regular member - and thus the date of his meeting Spicer has probably been lost, but their friendship was firm by 1958, when Jack wrote "For Dick" in Admonitions:

Look
Innocence is important
It has meaning
Look
It can give us
Hope against the very winds that we batter against it

From Poet Be Like God by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian