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Jake Arrieta Is Full of the Ghosts of Poets Past

“Pitchers are obviously not human.”i Mid-century California poet Jack Spicer wrote this, referring more to poets themselves—who he conceived of as catchers, receiving dictation from an otherworldly muse—than to pitchers, in any kind of baseball sense. As a poet of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1950s and ’60s, Spicer developed some idiosyncratic theories about poetry […]