Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared

The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer, Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, Daniel Benjamin

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780819501905
• eBook ISBN: 9780819501912
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Real Jack, The Half-Real Jack, and the Miracle of Communication
• Los Angeles, Redlands, Berkeley, 1943–1950
• Minneapolis, 1950–1952
• Berkeley and San Francisco, 1952–1955
• New York and Boston, 1955–1956
• The San Francisco Renaissance, 1956–1965
• Appendix 1: Selected Letters to Jack Spicer
• Appendix 2: Letter to Robin Blaser #41, Alternate Version
• Appendix 3: A Canto for Ezra Pound
• Appendix 4: Dialogue of Eastern and Western Poetry
• Notes to the Letters
• Index