Her dry, acerbic approach to the subjects in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and other writings were invigorating at the time, especially when they reflected the hippie counterculture. I didn’t especially consider it New Journalism, much less its use of novelistic techniques. Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were already there, ahead of her, in my reading.

I didn’t keep up with her output, though, and returning to the early work I now see much that strikes me as dated and shallow. Maybe that’s a consequence of seeing national reporters come briefly into a locality and then write of it as if they have some authority, in contrast to what I know after longer residency.

More recently, reading Where I Was From, the account of her upbringing in central California, I felt her telling was more novelistic than actual nonfiction.

As the 21^st century got underway, I was baffled that all of the published contemporary novelists and many of its poets I admired were in place by the time I graduated from college at the beginning of the ‘70s. Where were those my own age or younger?

Yes, the publishing world was in turmoil, but that couldn’t have been the entire problem.

I was also recognizing that my native Midwest, especially as I experienced it in industrial Ohio, went unrepresented – something missing largely from Hollywood presentations as well.

And then, as I discovered Greek-American culture, I was amazed to find how little of that culture, too, existed in public awareness.

The one exception who came to light was Detroit-born Eugenides. And how!

His three novels, each one a unique take on the novel itself, address the previous blanks. For large stretches of the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I thought he was talking about Dayton, including the race riots of ’68. The Marriage Plot, meanwhile, looked at Quaker practice in ways that gave me confidence in the Greek-American dimension of my own novel What’s Left.

The man is a master, for sure.

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.