BestofSpicer

Best Poetry By the Bay:

They dream about themselves.
They dream of dreams about themselves.
They dream they dream of dreams about themselves.
Splash them with twilight like a wet bat.
Unbind the dreamers.
Poet,
Be like God. —Jack Spicer, Imaginary Elegies III

Only a fragment of these lines from Jack Spicer made the transfer from page to panels inset in the sidewalk - but it’s enough to provide welcome reminder that poetry is something we can experience from head to feet, and in this City it may at any minute ambush the unsuspecting as one walks down the street.
Spicer was one of the foremost San Francisco poets after WWII. Along with Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, he embodied the so-called San Francisco Renaissance in poetry, a group initially clustered around Josephine Miles at U.C. Berkeley in the 1940s, and in the ’50s helped make North Beach a literary mecca.

Although lacking the marketing skills of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and the Beats, Spicer’s influence since his untimely death at age 40 in 1966 has been profound, but still subcultural if this evidence underfeet is any guide.

On Herb Caen Way, aka the Embarcadero promenade at Howard St. Admission is free and accessible 24/7, just watch out for some low-lying stone benches that have brought at least one dreamer I know back to painful consciousness while on this pleasant walkway on the Bay. —D.S. Black

Note: This is is more or less how my “Best of” article on Spicer was supposed to appear. The submission included photos similar to the ones above. Unfortunately, the Bay Guardian prefers to use its own staff photographers, and the one dispatched to shoot an accompanying image to my text either did not have my copy in hand, or was not properly instructed on finding words attached to Jack Spicer's name.