Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance.

[1] During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliances with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance.

Blaser was also in Boston at this time, and the pair made contact with a number of local poets, including John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, and Joe Dunn.

His interest in the work of Federico García Lorca, especially as it involved the cante jondo ideal, also brought him near the poetics of the deep image group.

In 1957, Spicer ran a workshop called Poetry as Magic at San Francisco State College,[1] which was attended by Duncan, Helen Adam, James Broughton, Joe Dunn, Jack Gilbert, and George Stanley.

[8] After many years of alcohol abuse, Spicer fell into a hepatic coma, a brain disorder precipitated by liver failure, in the elevator of his apartment building, and later died aged 40 in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital on August 17, 1965.

[9] Spicer's view of the role of language in the process of writing poetry was probably the result of his knowledge of modern pre-Chomskyan linguistics and his experience as a research-linguist at Berkeley.

[10][11] Although seemingly far-fetched, his view of language as "furniture", through which the transmissions negotiate their way, is grounded in the structuralist linguistics of Zellig Harris and Charles Hockett.

[8] My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008) edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, won the American Book Award in 2009.