Jack Spicer’s reputation rests on a clutch of perfect books he left behind after dying of alcoholism in 1965. These include the luminous ‘untranslations’ of After Lorca (1957), the unclassifiable satire The Heads of the Town up to the Aether (1962), and the crystalline, bruising political commentary of Language (1965). Mostly he’s a love poet, but it’s more mysterious than that. In each book he makes a precise formal intervention, shifts his comic timing, tends to his reader with belligerence and poise. Spicer’s stature, first established among his acolytes in the gay bars of San Francisco where he held court, has grown steadily. His position as a major poet of the 20th century – a West Coast counterpart to Frank O’Hara, a kind of evil twin – now seems irrefutable. As he said himself: ‘Death is not final. Only parking lots.’
The appearance of Spicer’s Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: Collected Letters (2025) – edited by Daniel Benjamin in collaboration with Kelly Holt and the late Kevin Killian – is the capstone of a decades-long scholarly project. More séance than dry academic research, it began in 1998 with the simultaneous publication of Killian and Lew Ellingham’s biography Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance and Peter Gizzi’s edition of Spicer’s collected lectures, The House That Jack Built. The former is one of the great literary biographies, thick with gossip, lore and devotion. It’s been years since I read it, but I still think of Spicer eating nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and offering another poet $11 not to read at a festival. Likewise, Spicer’s lectures – given in Vancouver and at Berkeley in 1965 – are an essential document.
The poems are now collected in two volumes. My Vocabulary Did This To Me (2009), edited by Gizzi and Killian and titled after Spicer’s last words, gathers all of Spicer’s major sequences. Be Brave To Things (2024), prepared by Dan Katz, includes unpublished poems, drafts and plays. This is, as you’d expect, more uneven territory. But it includes some breathtaking poems, not least ‘“Goodnight. I want to kill myself. . .’”, which declares: ‘Hart Crane died so that faggots could write poetry. / And faggots have written poetry’. Altogether, this leaves us with close to 2,000 pages of work to reckon with, a massive expansion of the corpus originally established by Robin Blaser’s The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (1975).
The letters begin with Spicer being declared ‘4F’, unfit for military service, working a graveyard shift at the Lockheed factory in Los Angeles. Soon we find him at Berkeley in the 1940s, where he met Blaser and Robert Duncan – fellow poets, also gay – and studied with the charismatic medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz. It was a milieu of mystics and anarchists, and the young poets treated each other with the absurd seriousness proper to making art. ‘I hope you realize the physical danger of your poetical plans’, Spicer wrote to Duncan in 1947. The stakes forever remained high: ‘This is the most important letter you have ever received’, he wrote to Blaser ten years later in a note included in the poem sequence Admonitions (1958).
A native Californian, Spicer was temporarily exiled in 1949 after refusing to sign the McCarthyite loyalty oath at Berkeley, a condition of his employment as a teaching assistant in the English department. He ended up taking a post in Minneapolis, which he described to Blaser as ‘good for me . . . the equivalent of a nice snowcovered insane asylum’. The distance from Blaser and Duncan – the latter, especially – seems to have been necessary. It was an opportunity to disentangle and re-establish the dimensions of their three-way friendship. ‘Duncan . . . had never had a friend before’, he writes to Blaser in November 1950. ‘I had never had a lover. This was the struggle between us – to see which one of us would have the new experience.’
On his return to San Francisco in 1952, and in another example of his political bravery, Spicer joined the proto gay rights organization the Mattachine Society. It’s striking, reading the letters, how much leftist political thought was in his orbit. He studies Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1943 (doesn’t like it); argues with Christopher Isherwood about the British Labour Party at someone’s house in 1946; starts quoting Rosa Luxemburg in the 1950s, Mao in the 1960s; makes jokes about Trotsky in his final poems. Perhaps this is just what California was like: you rub shoulders with interesting people, absorb a little radicalism by osmosis. But Spicer’s work can’t be understood outside of the context of post-war reaction, and the persecution of political dissidents and sexual minorities.
In one of many incendiary letters – accusing other poets of scabbing on the art by accepting invitations to an event he disapproves of – Spicer writes: ‘Poetry in a funny and metaphysical sense of the word is a Union’. This is key to his poetics. His poems speak over and over of an intense, grief-stricken loneliness, a landscape of ghosts and failures. But he eventually conceives of this loneliness as an ecstatic form of solidarity, ‘a fight against the capitalist bosses who do not want / us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous. / Our dissatisfaction could ruin America.’ By Spicer’s logic – his ‘almost annihilating contrariness’, to quote Gizzi – alienation can’t just be discarded or wished away. Inside the mild, even deadpan ‘dissatisfaction’ there’s the kernel of a ferocious negativity.
Between October 1954 and June 1955, Spicer sent more than fifty letters to Graham Mackintosh, his ex-student, who had been called up for military service. These are among the most moving letters in the collection, a desperate attempt to conjure an alternate reality. He mocks up a newspaper called Aware America (sample from the jokes page: ‘Why does a rabbit have more babies than a swan? How would you like to fuck in a tree!’), recounts his dreams, tells stories across multiple letters. He ends one with the signoff: ‘They have made maps of every square inch of this world and imprisoned us inside those maps. Let’s escape.’ Poetry becomes a medium of opposition to the world as it is, a means of critique.
After being fired from his teaching job – apparently in a routine restructure – Spicer made an ill-advised move to New York, where he spent six unhappy months. He ended up in Boston in December 1955, where Blaser was now living, and soon met the poets John Wieners and Stephen Jonas, tarot obsessives who defrauded book clubs (Jonas), and only understood ‘Black Mountain poetry and Cole Porter’ (Wieners, in Spicer’s bitchy assessment). As David Grundy has argued, in his recent history of post-war queer poetry Never By Itself Alone (2024), the links between the San Francisco Renaissance and the ‘Occult School of Boston Poetry’ have had an enduring legacy. Like Spicer, Wieners has received increasing scholarly attention, including a recent volume of letters. Jonas – whose work is marred by a vicious antisemitism, sometimes shared by Spicer – remains neglected.
During his sojourn in Boston, Spicer worked for the rare books department of the Public Library, where he had a crucial re-encounter with the work of Emily Dickinson. Reviewing T. H. Johnson’s landmark three-volume variorum edition of her poems, Spicer highlighted the importance of her prose, and the porous boundary between the two. He describes her correspondence ‘not as mere letters . . . but as experiments in a heightened prose combined with poetry’. Nobody today would disagree. But Spicer was ahead of the curve. In the library he’d been able to study Dickinson’s manuscripts, writing to the maverick poet and publisher Jonathan Williams about her ‘abominable’ handwriting and wondering if, in the following century, anyone would be able to decipher his own.
This is one of the things that makes poets’ letters such a strange genre: they’re often addressed just over the head of the recipient, either to posterity or the muses. Spicer jokes about this in After Lorca, where he describes ‘the letter one poet writes to another not in any effort to communicate with him, but rather as a young man whispers his secrets to a scarecrow, knowing that his young lady is in the distance listening’. Yet often a dutifully edited Selected Letters will send the reader to sleep or leave a sour taste. Even the most austere and mercurial poets wrote shopping lists, had days of petty-minded stupidity, made tedious arrangements. Lucky for us, Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared puts Spicer alongside Dickinson – and her contemporary Rimbaud – in the ranks of those for whom letter writing was an inextricable component of a visionary poetics.
By 1957, Spicer had returned to California. With After Lorca he makes a key formal breakthrough in thinking about the book – rather than the individual poem – as a unit of composition, what he later called serial poetry. He begins to develop his theory of dictation, which insists that poems do not emerge from the lyric interiority of the poet, but are received from outside, like radio signals. In the Vancouver lectures he illustrates these ideas with a variety of motifs, including getting lost in the woods, going from room to room turning the lights on and off (Blaser’s image), receiving messages from outer space. It’s a poetics of dislocation, estrangement, playing along. We have to put all our trust in the poem, both reader and writer alike.
It’s hard, given such co-ordinates, to imagine anyone reading Spicer casually. He is an all-or-nothing proposition. He made fierce demands on the people around him, and – reminiscent of André Breton and Guy Debord – was fond of excommunication. His letters can be hilariously spiteful. A sample: ‘I actually hope you stay sucking on shit and never write any more poetry’ (to Ebbe Borregaard); ‘Please do not disgust me again with your invitations, lozenges or miserable social climbings’ (to Wesley Day); ‘Why don’t you motherfuckers write poetry? I’ll read yours but I won’t send you mine.’ (to Edward Dorn). He could be cruel, offensive, petty. But Spicer never sold out, he held frauds and milquetoasts in contempt, and he made a nuisance of himself trying to raise standards.
Spicer began another epistolary campaign in December 1958, writing fourteen letters to his new muse James Alexander. Spicer gave readings from the letters in public, and in private at the home Duncan shared with the artist Jess Collins. ‘POETRY ALONE CAN LOVE POETRY’, Spicer declares at one point. ‘POEMS CRY OUT TO EACH OTHER FROM A GREAT DISTANCE.’ They were published posthumously in Caterpillar magazine, and appeared in My Vocabulary Did This to Me. But reading them in the context of Spicer’s other correspondence lets us see them anew. Given, too, the fate of many of that era’s gay love letters – destroyed in fear of blackmail, or otherwise quietly suppressed – this aspect of Even Strange Ghosts is especially welcome. As Spicer wrote plaintively in a sixteenth letter, previously unpublished: ‘I miss you. There is a queer and present danger.’
During his lifetime, Spicer’s work was chiefly published by his friends. Mackintosh took over the direction of the White Rabbit Press for Lament for the Makers (1962) and The Holy Grail (1964); Jess Collins did the covers and illustrations for Billy the Kid (1959), Fran Herndon for The Heads of the Town. Spicer was the poetry equivalent of King Midas: a whole infrastructure sprung up around him, with magazines like Open Space, J and THE SAN FRANCISCO CAPITALIST BLOODSUCKER-N, each full of serial poems. His influence slowly spread. I remember being shown a notebook of J. H. Prynne’s where he’d logged which of his precious books was being borrowed, and in the late 1960s it was all Spicer, all the time. The work still functions like catnip to young poets.
Spicer lost his final job – working as a researcher on the Linguistic Atlas of the Pacific Rim, again at Berkeley – in 1964. The same year he wrote the seven sections of Language, combining devastating love poems with baseball predictions, state of the nation riffs on the death of JFK with sketches of Orpheus and Eurydice. The book is eerie, his most beautiful. As if he’s tapping out morse code, he writes: ‘I / Can- / not / accord / sympathy / to / those / who / do / not / recognize / The human crisis’. Even as I wonder if this is a quote from someone else, a folded-in fragment of the newspaper or radio broadcast, I believe him.
By 1965 Spicer was clearly running out of time. But in April he wrote to Warren Tallman, who would host him in Vancouver: ‘I feel that I can probably survive and write poetry for a couple of more years. Maybe through a natural life.’ At the Berkeley Poetry Conference that July, Spicer gave his last stand in a lecture called ‘Poetry and Politics’. It is a provocative and beguiling performance. He is wary and pessimistic, disavowing the political relevance of poetry – ‘poetry’s been futile to humanity all the time’ – while at the same time insisting that poets shouldn’t ‘sell out to the bosses’. He quotes Mao on guerilla warfare, claims his father was a Wobbly, sings Joe Hill songs, settles scores with Allen Ginsberg and others.
Towards the beginning of the lecture he talks about a programme he’d heard on KCBS about peach farmers, and the relationship between supply and demand. He says: ‘What I’m saying is that you’re going to sell out eventually. You have to, just for economic reasons. But when you sell out, know exactly what your peaches cost . . . Know exactly what is the price you can sell out for.’ He tells the young poets that they’ll make mistakes: ‘But what I’m trying to do is to say don’t make any more than two or three mistakes.’ It still makes salutary reading, a bittersweet riposte to whatever latest garbage is being thrust upon us. Of course Spicer is ridiculous, makes himself so, deliberately. But he is nowhere near as ridiculous as the poet who fails to take poetry seriously enough.
On 5 July, Spicer signed a joint letter to the editors of the Chronicle and Examiner condemning the war in Vietnam. His final poems are acerbic and heartbreaking: ‘Too late / Too late / For a nice exit.’ In the final letter printed here, written a few weeks before his hospitalization, Spicer replied to Sister Mary Norbert Körte, who had asked a question during the Poetry and Politics lecture about labour songs, leading to Spicer’s rendition of ‘You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.’ She was a Dominican nun, who later published several books of poetry. Spicer writes: ‘I think I feel the call of your religion almost as much as you feel the call of the outside world. This world is outside. For Christ’s sake don’t question that.’ He died the next month. He was 40 years old.
Read on: Anahid Nersessian, ‘Notes on Tone’, NLR 142.