I’m tempted to think of Barry Spacks as the elephant in the Santa Barbara poetry room. As Chryss Yost has said, he was a creative force we couldn’t just talk around but had to acknowledge as central, not only to poetry but with excursions to the other arts. In doing so, we were like the blind men describing that other elephant in the old fable. One of us — it could be myself — touches and hears the trunk and exclaims: “A Poet!” Correct! This revelation has come to every Santa Barbaran who cares about poetry, even before Barry became our first poet laureate.
Slogging through the May 1966 issue of Poetry magazine, my spirits were suddenly lifted by two bright and sparkling pieces by someone at MIT, whose name I had just read on a letter of recommendation to UCSB: Barry Spacks. One of those spirited poems parodied what he had written seriously, and it was mischievous (this MIT Spacks was the Poet), being titled “Recommendations”:
This is a good fellow
