More often than not, if you wandered into a bar in North Beach or the Mission District in San Francisco in the late 1980s, early 1990s, you’d run into Jack Micheline, and he’d trade a broadsheet poem or sing his “It’s the Dead” song for a drink. Sometimes when I saw him in the last years of his life he seemed just an old, boozy blowhard, all disappointed ego and nothing to say… but when he was taken with the poetry, chanting, singing, tapping, knee slapping, Jack was an angel of the word. I’m glad I got to bask in his glow a few times back when so many poets were crowding every week into the tiny back room at the Cafe Babar, warming each other with our words.