You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and my guest today is Kevin Killian, a co-author of a recent

literary biography of Jack Spicer.

The biography is called Poet Be Like God.

The subtitle is Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance.

And I want to begin by asking you to give me a mini bio of Jack Spicer.

Who is he?

Jack Spicer was born in Hollywood in 1925.

He, at age 20, he went to University of California at Berkeley

and met two other would-be poets, Robert Duncan and Robin Blazer.

And the three of them, at that point, all very young men tried to invent a new kind of poetry

that would be just as good as the poetry of the then aging modernists,

Elliot Pound, Marianne Moore, and so on, who were all 30, 40 years there senior.

And Spicer went on to found his own poetry school in San Francisco,

where he wrote 12 extraordinary books of poetry

and died very young of drink in 1965.

He was only 40 years old.

Now, so many things come out of the so-called Berkeley Renaissance,

...