Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer

Collected correspondence showcases the dazzling intelligence of an iconic American writer

The more than 300 letters collected in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared are a crucial component of Jack Spicer's unique oeuvre, and they radiate with the brilliance, ferocity, and vulnerability that characterizes his poetry. Spicer writes tenderly to lovers and friends in self-reflective series that recall the poetic sequences in My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Letters to elders like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound and to poetic collaborators like Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan provide insight into the inner workings of an avant-garde, and are indispensable documents for students of 20th century American poetry. Writing to younger poets, Spicer offers inspiring words of mentorship—sometimes with a sting—about how to live in total devotion to art. Spicer's letters paint a unique portrait of the political and personal challenges faced by a gay man at mid-century, including documents from his involvement in the early gay rights movement. The fully annotated letters in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared contribute vital details to Spicer's biography, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian). They stand alongside the recently published Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer (edited by Daniel Katz) as key components of Spicer's inventive and influential writings. Readers of Spicer's poetry will delight to find his extraordinary letters—previously uncollected and mostly never-before-published—in one volume.

Publication of this book is funded by the
Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund
at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

JACK SPICER (1925–1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. During his short but prolific life, he published numerous books with small presses, including Billy the Kid (1959), The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1962), and Language (1965). Spicer's first book, After Lorca (1957), was recently reprinted by NYRB Poets with an introduction by Peter Gizzi (2021).Wesleyan University Press has published The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi (1998), My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (2008), and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer, edited by Daniel Katz (2021). DANIEL BENJAMIN received his PhD in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of an afterword to Jack Spicer's The Wasps (speCt! Books, 2016). With Eric Sneathen, he co-edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017), and with Claire Marie Stancek, he co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba Press/Giramondo, 2016). His academic articles have appeared in small axe, Contemporary Literature, and European Romantic Review. He teaches English at Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. KELLY HOLT is a writer and teacher living in San Francisco. Her poems and essays have appeared in After Spicer: Critical Essays, edited by John Emil Vincent (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), and journals including Fulcrum, New American Writing, Jacket, and Mirage 4/Period(ical). KEVIN KILLIAN (1952–2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. He won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009 for My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi.