Uncourtly Love

Author: Jamie MacInnis

Publisher: Awry (2025)



Every now & then we just kinda need to do a book as a public service. Jamie MacInnis (b. 1941, still alive? We tried to find out one way or another, trust us), is (or was) a rather striking and mysterious figure who published two books before disappearing from the poetry scene altogether. Born to a well-to-do Irish Catholic family, she became involved with the San Francisco poets centered around Jack Spicer in North Beach at Gino & Carlo’s bar in the early-mid 1960s (details of which you can read about in Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, who recognize her as “extravagantly talented”). Later (1967?) she moved to New York City with Larry Fagin, appearing in magazines & readings associated with the second-generation New York School poets at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. We certainly feel that there’s a quality about her work that connects those two geographically and poetically disparate milieux.

Her first publication was Hand Shadows in 1974, a side-stapled mimeo production from Fagin’s Adventures In Poetry. In 1976, she read her poems for Susan Howe’s WBAI radio program, and in 1978 her work was featured in an issue of Un Poco Loco. In 1979, she was awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. In 1980 her sole substantive collection, Practicing, was produced by Michael Wolfe’s Tombouctou Press, and she was scheduled (but did not appear) as a visiting poet at the Naropa Institute’s Summer Writing Program. Subsequent biographical traces and mentions are few, and her publications have become scarce, elusive, and expensive objects in recent years.