This week on From the Vault we present American poet Jack Spicer, one of the main drivers behind the San Francisco Renaissance, an art and literature boom that happened in around San Francisco in the 1950′s. Thanks to the efforts of poets like Jack Spicer, Kenneth Rexroth, Madelaine Glaser, Robert Duncan, Robert Creely, philosopher Alan Watts, and Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac, San Francisco became the epicenter of a creative and intellectual explosion that would influence generations of artists and scholars.

In 1954, Jack Spicer co-founded the famous Six Gallery. The birth of the Beat Poetry movement can be traced to a October 1955 poetry reading at the Six Gallery organized by Kenneth Rexroth and featuring poetry readings by Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Michael McClure – as well as the debut of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. This reading would signal the emergence of San Francisco Renaissance into the public consciousness and helped establish the city as a center for counterculture activity.

Jack Spicer died young in 1965 at the age of 40, but his legacy as an important creative force in the Beat Poetry Movement and Gay poetry movement lives on. Today on From the Vault, we present this rare classroom recording of Jack Spicer reading and teaching from his 1962 poetry book, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. This program was recorded on June 13th 1965, just a few months from Jack’s death.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”
~Jim Morrison (1943-1971)

This week we’ll get a little better acquainted with the short life of rock star, poet, and icon Jim Morrison with the help of a beautiful radio documentary called Artist in Hell, produced by Clare Spark in 1971. Of course, it would be easy to focus on Morrison’s wild antics and excess, as that kind of behavior always leaves a high water mark on someone’s life for the ages to see, but instead, we’ll hear his closest friends describe the life of a tortured genius, a man with not nearly enough names for all of the colors he wished to paint. The Doors band members Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek speak candidly about their close friend, as do producer Paul Rothchild; while David Birnie, Digby Deal, Harvey Purr and others read from Morrison’s poetry and his Lord’s Notes On Vision.

In the second half of From the Vault, we’ll hear The Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek speaking at The Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica on September 12, 1998. Manzarek speaks on The Doors and Morrison, reading selections of Morrison’s poetry, and sharing his insights and recollections on the transformation of four normal guys who met in Venice, hung out on the beach, and became one of the most legendary rock-n-roll bands the genre has yet seen.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about the historic recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.

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This week on From the Vault we feature poet Robert Duncan. As a contemporary of Charles Olson, Robert Creely, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer, Duncan wrote poetry that became the artistic bridge spanning between the generation of artists like Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Dylan Thomas to the generation of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, DiPrima, Keroac, and the Beat Poets. We present this October 28, 1960 recording of Robert Duncan reading dozens of his classic poems at the University of California, Berkeley with the excitement and reverence commanded by this rare and important document of 20th Century writing.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.

PURCHASE a copy of this program or learn more about and purchase copies of the historic archival recordings used within this episode. To purchase a CD copy of this program by phone, please call Pacifica Radio Archives at 800.735.0230 x 262.

Click here to send an email to From the Vault.