January 30, 2025 marks the 100th birthday of American poet Jack Spicer. Later this year, Wesleyan University Press is releasing Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin. Wesleyan is also releasing a new edition of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi.
Spicer was an American poet often identified with the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance. Although he spent some time living in New York City and Boston—he held a strong sense of regionalism and did not want his work published outside of California. During his short but prolific life, he published a numbr of chapbooks with small presses, including Billy the Kid (1959), The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1962), and Language (1965).
He was one of the founders of the Six Gallery—known for the famous Six Gallery Reading with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in attendance. However, Spicer was not a fan of the Beats. Ron Loewinsohn, who was then a student at San Francisco State University, noted that “Jack [Spicer] would have nothing to do with Ferlinghetti; would not allow his books to be sold in the store [City Lights]; did not take Kerouac or Ginsberg seriously; dealt with all of the Beat Generation people with a kind of contempt…” (Poet Be Like God, Ellingham and Killian; Wesleyan, 1998)
An early activist for gay rights, Spicer was an active member of the Mattachine Society. During the Lavender Scare—when thousands of gay employees were dismissed or forced to leave their federal jobs due to their sexual orientation—his work examined queerness and sexuality. He lost his teaching assistantship at the University of California after refusing to sign a “loyalty oath” to the United States, which was required of all UC employees under the Sloan-Levering Act.
About Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
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. Readers of Spicer’s poetry will delight to find his extraordinary letters—previously uncollected and mostly never-before-published—in one volume.