His wild poetics drawn on linguistics theory broke ground for a number of us. Quite simply, the narrative within a poem – or a series, as Spicer soon turned away from the single-page model – no longer had to conform with factual reality. I can only imagine what he would have done with Donald Trump as a figure. An image, however, took on a life of its own.

I didn’t realize how central the Los Angeles born character was to the West Coast poetry world. He was co-founder of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where the Beat movement burst forth, and later in the Berkeley side of the Bay Area literary scene.

His collected poems, published posthumously by Black Sparrow and Grey Fox presses, remain core works on my bookshelf.

I also loved the way Ed Dorn picked up and continued Spicer’s stream.

My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac’s watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.

I’ve never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early ‘70s was Kerouac’s narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the ‘50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac’s native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.

Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city’s West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.

For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller’s earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.

As for Kerouac’s celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that’s a matter of being human, too.

Assigned as part of a contemporary novels course in the spring of 1970, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was unlike anything I had previously encountered. The lively tone and style were a kind of pre-rap, I suppose, as were the content. He was amusing in a way Leroi Jones wasn’t and also an example that we can be free of having to “write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it.

He certainly introduced a new world to my essentially suburban Midwestern nature.

Reed was, as critic Anita Felicelli wrote of a later novel, a firebrand, crackling, overflowing, pugnacious, “someone who doesn’t care about genre boundaries any more than he cares about historical boundaries, but who does care deeply about innovating.” In other words, right up my alley.

The novel Mumbo Jumbo confirmed my impression, but, somehow, I haven’t encountered him since, even though he’s written and published prolifically. Note to self: Rectify ASAP.