Spicer was born John Lester Spicer on January 30, 1925, in Hollywood, California, where his parents managed a small hotel. Migrating north in 1945, he arrived on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a gay if virginal male, a poet for life.

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He formed enduring connections with two other students, the poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, and studied Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and German to prepare for a career in linguistics. This putative career was blighted by Spicer's refusal to sign the "Loyalty Oath," a provision of the Sloan-Levering Act that required all California state employees (including graduate teaching assistants at Berkeley) to swear loyalty to the United States.

He left the university and embarked on a number of low-paying, short-lived jobs in Minnesota, New York, and Boston. In 1957, he returned to San Francisco and began his mature career as a poet with the "dictated" poems of After Lorca (1957) and the eleven books that followed.

Spicer's controversial theories of dictation metaphorically reduce the poet to a "radio," picking up signals from the "invisible world," and indeed he sometimes joked that his poetry was really written by "Martians." The personality of the poet, he argued, should be kept out of the poem as much as possible.

Such an argument ran directly counter to prevailing American poetic practice, then (as now) largely a poetry of voice. "If you want to write opinions, write a letter to the editor, don't write a poem," he insisted.

The lyric beauty, intellectual power, and formal invention of Spicer's poetry attracted a core of disciples who met in the North Beach bars and the San Francisco parks he favored. The open homosexuality of his core group, the "Spicer Circle," resulted in the marginalization of some of the most moving love poetry produced in this century.

Spicer's "Several Years' Love," for example, commemorates his tumultuous love affairs of the period with a nod toward Shakespeare's Sonnet 144:

Two loves I had. One rang a bell
Connected on both sides with hell
The other'd written me a letter
In which he said I've written better
They pushed their cocks in many places
And I'm not certain of their faces
Or which I kissed or which I didn't
Or which of both of them I hadn't.
     (The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, 1960-1961)

Although writing and living in the middle of the Beat movement, Spicer and Duncan stood oddly set apart from it, maintaining an approach to poetry and art that wedded aesthetics to intellect. Spicer's relations with his gay contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara remained antagonistic: Ginsberg was too "populist"; O'Hara a superficial versifier.

Indeed, Spicer quarreled with almost everyone he knew, and as he reached his thirties, his incipient alcoholism became widely known and feared. Sober he could be the most gracious and loving of men, but he was an unpleasant drunk. Still, his "derangement of the senses" provided a fertile field for the outside forces that, he claimed, wrote his poetry for him.

After forty years of allegiance to California, Spicer decided to leave San Francisco and emigrate to Vancouver, British Columbia, in the summer of 1965. But before he could leave, he collapsed into a prehepatic coma in his building elevator and died several weeks later in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital on August 17.

During his lifetime, his books were reissued in small editions by a variety of local presses; a natural anarchist, Spicer viewed copyright askance. All of his work has since been reissued or newly published to meet the rising interest in this brilliantly original gay poet.

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