Erik Davis
In 1959, Norman Holmes Pearson, a friend of the poet H.D.’s as well as her literary executor, asked Robert Duncan whether he would write up something for the older author on the occasion of her birthday. Duncan, who considered H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) to be a spiritual and poetic initiatrix of sorts, agreed. Over the next five years, his tribute blossomed, or metastasized, into The H.D. Book, a hefty and digressive meditation on modernism, literature, and esoterica whose twenty-odd chapters appeared individually in a menagerie of mostly obscure literary journals. Given Duncan’s love of the serial form, it is In the summer of 1965, the poet Robin Blaser discovered his friend Jack Spicer lying comatose in the poverty ward at San Francisco General. The forty-year-old Spicer had passed out drunk in the elevator of his North Beach flat a few days before and was wheeled in, without ID, in a torn and befouled suit. When an attending doctor suggested to Blaser that Spicer was just your typical middle-aged alcoholic, Blaser grabbed the fellow’s shirt: “You’re talking about a major poet.” This was certainly true at the time, and it is now. But then, Spicer was a dying poet. After