Background
Lawrence "Larry" Kearney was born in 1948, in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
Lawrence "Larry" Kearney was born in 1948, in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
Lawrence Kearney attended the State University of New York in Binghamton.
Lawrence Kearney moved to San Francisco in 1964 and became involved with the group of poets centered around North Beach and generally and inaccurately described as the San Francisco Renaissance - Spicer, MacInnis, Duerden, Duncan, Brautigan, Stanley, Blaser, Kyger, Meltzer, Hirschman. His closest friends in poetry were Jack Spicer and Richard Duerden, and Spicer's insistence on being willing to, and capable of, saying what the poem wants to say when it wants to say it, endures for him as a working definition - poetry as the whole of the real - the seen and unseen, heard and unheard - the voices of the haunted living and the unsuccessfully dead.
Though he wrote throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Kearney did not have a major nationwide release until Kingdom Come, in 1980. Kingdom Come features poems written from the perspective of different characters that Kearney describes as "people whose chief dread - that nothing will work out - has come true." He wrote two books with Jack Erdmann. They offer an unflinching look at the misery of addiction as well as the potential for hope. Jack Erdmann was an alcoholic salesman who lost everything, gradually regained his life during twenty years of sobriety, and then chose to tell his story to give hope to others. Erdmann and Kearney's first collaboration was Whiskey's Children, which begins with Erdmann's childhood in a violent, alcoholic family and then details Erdmann's helpless repetition of his father's mistakes with his own wife and children. Readers were struck by the truth of the story. Kearney also worked with Erdmann on his next book, A Bar on Every Comer: Sobering Up in a Tempting World. This work focuses on Erdmann's first year of recovery, outlined according to the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Erdmann and Kearney show Erdmann's struggles returning to a society where most everyone drinks, including his mother and his coworkers.
Lawrence Kearney has published twelve books of poetry and three works of non-fiction, as well as a children's book. In his role as ghostwriter he has produced five books, four of which have been published, and his own press, Worm in the Rain Publications, lists hundred-and-forty-five titles in its catalog. He has read, lectured, and taught in many places.
(The story of a fourth-generation alcoholic begins in 1934...)
1995(Fish Gotta Swim is an extraordinary story of a child comi...)
2016(Through a series of deeply personal interviews with indiv...)
2003(Edward Hogg, a thirteen-year-old boy in 1950 Brooklyn, di...)
2012
Although known primarily among a coterie of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time of his death in 1965, over time, Jack Spicer has become a towering figure in American poetry.
Spicer believed in poetry as a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. His work tapped a variety of idioms including the "deep image" as found in the writing of Federico Garcia Lorca. In 1957, he organized a "Poetry as Magic" workshop that included his friend Robert Duncan. Spicer was also an enthusiastic participant and sometimes host, of Blabbermouth Night at The Place, a San Francisco literary bar.
Lawrence Kearney met Jack Spicer in 1964 at Gino and Carlo's on Green Street, North Beach, San Francisco where Spicer held court among the other poets - Fagin, Kyger, Allen, Duncan, Creeley, McClure, Duerden, Welch, Hirschman, Brautigan, Blaser, and others. In Testamentality, Transcryption: An Emotional Memoir of Jack Spicer, Kearney writes, "So Jack was thirty-nine and I was twenty-one and we were both alcoholic and both deeply gnostic in the sense that we'd been in touch with, felt, the purely random ecstasies that were realer than anything else, ever, but also that the real was out there and couldn't care less though sometimes it would come close enough for jazz - as used to get said - as if it meant something." They became close friends - but Spicer died the next year at the age of 40, his liver ruined.
A member of the San Francisco Renaissance poetry movement, Richard Duerden founded the literary journals Foot and the Rivoli Review. His books of poetry include The Fork (1965), The Left Hand & The Glory of Her (1967), and The Air’s Nearly Perfect Elasticity (1979).
