But for our purposes, Spicer’s description of letters
that are “experiments in a heightened prose combined with poetry” does much to
explain his own work, and the importance of this volume in Spicer’s larger oeuvre.
The more than 300 letters in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared constitute
a significant addition to Jack Spicer’s published works, not merely for the
light they shine on his life and contexts, but also because many of them have
as much reason to be classed with his poetic works as the texts in My
Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer or Be
Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer. Indeed, Spicer’s
letters to James Alexander appear both in My Vocabulary and in this
present volume. In Be Brave To Things, editor Daniel Katz printed a
draft letter to Russel FitzGerald from one of Spicer’s notebooks at the
Bancroft Library that we are also including here.
Beyond these liminal texts that produce problems for
editors, Spicer frequently included letters that were unmistakably part of his
book manuscripts. That practice is inaugurated with Spicer’s first book, After
Lorca (White Rabbit Press, 1957), which he began composing at the time he
was studying Dickinson’s letter-poems. Intermittently throughout the book, we
read letters from “Jack” to “Lorca” on the differences between poetry and
prose, the translation of reality into language, and the necessary loneliness
of poetry. Certainly, these letters are works of poetics, and Spicer selected
one of them to be printed in his “Statement on Poetics” in Donald M. Allen’s
anthology The New American Poetry. But why put forward these statements
in letters—and what’s more, in letters that would require a mystical connection
to reach their addressee, given that Federico García Lorca had been dead since
1936? (“Introduction: The Real Jack, The Half-Real Jack, and the Miracle of
Communication,” Daniel Benjamin)
Recently, I’ve been going through the remarkable volume even strange ghosts can be shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, eds. Kevin Killian (1952-2019), Kelly Holt and Daniel Benjamin (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025). This is collection seemingly in the works for some time, given Killian’s untimely death more than half a decade earlier [see my review of his recently-published volume of collected poems here], so kudos to those editors able to continue and complete the work that Killian had been part of starting. Killian, of course, had been a prominent scholar on the work of the late San Francisco renaissance poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), having co-authored, with Lewis Ellingham, Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). As one of the footnotes in the collection also offers (a fact I hadn’t been previously known, referring to, as Benjamin writes, “In 1958, he [Jack Spicer] began drafting what he hoped would be a popular novel satirizing the Beat poets. Many letters detail Spicer’s attempts to place his chapters before a sympathetic agent, but the novel was never finished.”), “Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian edited the extant material and published it as The Tower of Babel: Jack Spicer’s Detective Novel (Talisman House, 1994).” Obviously, volumes of letters allow for a continued research into a broader context for an author and their work, especially for Spicer, who saw an overlap between personal correspondence and literary output, seeing the two as intricately connected. “By the way,” Spicer writes to Allen Joyce on July 16, 1955, “I hope you show other people these letters I write you. They are personal letters for you and they are also public letters. I measure their success by how well I can succeed in being deeply personal and deeply public at the same time. Like my poems.”
These letters by the famously difficult Spicer also articulate a sense of personal distance he maintained, even with those he wished to be close to; how the letters articulate a kind of connection that wasn’t always possible in person, but could be romanticized or perfected, through that particular distance. As Benjamin furthers, through the introduction:
[…] The Jack of the letters, too, might be something more than the “half-real Jack,” and he can pursue a romance of correspondence in the way that the “half-real Jack” in person could not. On the one hand, the imagination is nourished by the visit of the real Graham: “On the day after I’ve seen you it always seems I could write a letter to you that could go on forever,” Spicer begins. But the endless letter is also an endless deferral. The imagined togetherness continues, delaying any return to actual togetherness. The reality of imagination triumphs over the reality of what can be seen and touched.
Spicer’s letters in this volume are organized extremely well, numbering letters to particular individuals, with letters grouped into particular periods—“Los Angeles, Redlands, Berkeley, 1943-1950,” “Minneapolis, 1950-1952,” “Berkeley and San Francisco, 1952-1955,” “New York and Boston, 1955-1956” and “The San Francisco Renaissance, 1956-1965”—each of which hold their own introduction for larger context. There are elements of these letters that frustrate, slightly, given the one-sidedness of certain conversations, although fully aware how that would have been a far larger editorial project (presuming, also, that responses to Spicer’s missives even still existed in searchable archives), especially given the levels of personal chaos and mood-swings and grudges depicted. As the final section’s introduction by Benjamin acknowledges:
Perhaps these feuding letters paint a one-sided picture as most of Spicer’s interactions, during these years, were in person, and Spicer picked up his poison pen only to make his anger public and permanent. Spicer’s last years, nonetheless, included increasing estrangement from the world and even from those he loved the most. His drinking—always significant from his first Berkeley days—escalated seriously in the 1960s, and his health was in shambles.
One might already be aware of the huge impact Spicer’s work has had on subsequent literature, a ripple effect on Canadian poetry and poetics as well, in large part due to the three infamous lectures he gave in Vancouver in Warren and Ellen Tallman’s living room in June, 1965—collected by Peter Gizzi in the house that jack built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), a volume recently re-released in paperback—a series of informal talks attended by multiple writers from Vancouver and beyond, including, as Gizzi lists from his introduction to the volume, Dorothy Livesay, George Bowering, Judith Copithorne, Jamie Reid, Angela Bowering and Gladys Hindmarch, among others. What do, one might ask, these letters specifically offer? Much as do the published journals of the late Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986), these letters provide insight into the concerns and the language of one of North America’s essential poets, providing the good and bad both, and the threads through which he and his writing engaged.
To James Alexander #15
{1959}
Dear James,
Measuring the volcanic quality of rock if one sparrow
beats against it it is as if nothing has ever happened.
What I mean is that volcanos like Greeks knew their own
limits and sparrows didn’t.
Christ’s dying was no excuse.
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