“BOTH OF US WERE OBJECT”

One of the outrageous events of North Beach life during the 1950s was Blabbermouth Night, a weekly feature at one of Grant Avenue's best-known literary bars, The Place. Using a kind of spontaneous and unrehearsed glossolalia, poets would babble into the mike, the best babbler winning a free drink. One function of Blabbermouth Night was to “bug the squares” pouring into North Beach in search of Beatniks, but another, more important function was to reinforce the sense of community that had arisen within the North Beach bar scene. For this community, poetry was a public event, something performed on stage in front of an audience. Blabbermouth Night extended this public dimension, introducing an element of competition – complete with hecklers, claques, and door prizes. Jack Spicer was one of the event's strongest supporters, helping to organize the participants and sometimes presenting the victor's prize. To some extent Blabbermouth Night was the perfect embodiment of Spicer's poetics: a public gospel in which the Logos speaks through the spontaneous jabberwocky of poets.

Jack Spicer's position in the North Beach poetry scene was central, and at the same time, eccentric. His table at The Place was the focus of a circle of poets who remained fiercely loyal to him and to the spirit of play and competition that he encouraged through events like Blabbermouth Night.