Gil McElroy : even strange ghosts can be shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, eds. Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin

even strange ghosts can be shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin
Wesleyan University Press, 2025

 

 

 

“My vocabulary did this to me” are words absolutely synonymous with the late poet Jack Spicer, first revealed by his long-time friend, the poet Robin Blaser, in his essay “The Practice of Outside” that accompanied the book, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, published back in 1975.

An awful lot has happened since then, what with a number of more recent publications documenting both Spicer’s work and life. And those words – the last he spoke to Blaser as he lay dying in a hospital in 1965 – have escaped the gravitational pull of literary circles and spun off into the infosphere, appearing even in a newspaper crossword puzzle. Jack Spicer, it appears, has shucked off the straightjacket of being regarded merely as a poet’s poet. His legacy is larger.

Perhaps more than any other texts, letters outline the fleshly shape of a life. I’m not talking about those written with posterity in mind – in the context of a presumed literary afterlife with an audience larger than the apparent addressee – but rather letters delineating the contours (messy or not) of a life lived written with an audience of one in mind. Jack Spicer knew the trueness of letters, knew the equation, having had an early and influential encounter with Emily Dickinson’s in which he was taken with the fine line (if it exists at all) between the epistolary and the poetic in her work.

even strange ghosts can be shared collects Spicer’s wide-ranging correspondence dating back to 1943, four years before his fateful meeting with Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, and extend thru to 1965, a month before he died – with an add-on of selected letters sent to him from (amongst others) Duncan, Blaser, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Some of this has been published previously, but this is the first time his extensive correspondence has been collected. It makes for a fascinating, albeit upsetting, map.

Now, the letter recipient may be a singular audience, but it’s clearly evident that Spicer is performing. Clever Jack is everywhere. He makes evident attempts to be outrageous, pushing the envelope with humour and wit. But it’s a private performance. Not designed for the ages or the masses, but for the singularity of that privileged person on the other end. Alas, in the last few years of his life those letters often took an ugly turn and manifested harshness and vitriol and meanness.

And worse.

Like any letters written without an eye towards posterity, Spicer’s run the gamut from the mundane to the miraculous. Of the former, maybe the strangest might be the resume he sent in 1958 to San Quentin State prison applying for a teaching position there. And in case we thought (as did I) that his use of the term “Martians” was one he employed only to help describe his poetics in his later lectures, in fact he uses it often in writing to friends. In a 1954 letter to longtime friend Graham Mackintosh who’d been drafted into the military, for instance, Clever Jack writes that “MARTIANS DEMAND RELEASE MACKINTOSH,” and then a week later “EISENHOWER DENIES MARTIAN CHARGES IN MACKINTOSH CASE”. And even deep and intense relationships sometimes show pique, as in Spicer’s annoyance with Blaser in a 1951 letter written during the former’s short and unhappy tenure in Minneapolis, in which he addresses Blaser as “Dear Stinker,” and signs off with “unlove”. Pushing.

And then into the ugly. Spicer’s move back to San Francisco in 1956 where he lived until his death in 1965 marks a massive change in tone and texture. Anger, intolerance, jealousy and bigotry rise up suddenly and unexpectedly in his letters of this period, like flares shooting up, brightly burning in some night sky. Afterimages linger, altering how we experience the large landscape of his correspondence. Spicer’s story falters by the wayside, weighed heavily with the burden of malevolence. And this just as his work was starting to be registered in a larger than local way.

Daniel Benjamin addresses this directly in his introductory essay, suggesting in the end that “we might contextualize Spicer’s violent remarks in his attempt to understand his own status as an outsider following his political involvement with the Mattachine Society, an early gay activist organization….” But how does that affect our reading of his work?  We judge Wallace Stevens and Pound (amongst so many others) on their racism and anti-semitism as inseperable from their work. Spicer most certainly cannot be absolved; his violence goes beyond mere crankiness. A 1959 letter to Robert Duncan regarding City Lights Bookstore is sickeningly racist. So much for the mythology of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance. Of course, Spicer was but just one part of it, but were poetry judged by the same strictures as baseball, the game that he loved above all, maybe there should be an asterisk next to his name.

“What I need most, of course, is for someone to astonish me,” he writes in a letter to Robin Blaser in 1956. “Poetry only happens, I think, when people astonish each other.”

True, I do find myself astonished now, though not as Spicer might have hoped I would be. It pushes aside my earlier and better astonishment over his work. Now, though, I find myself mourning the Spicer that gave me that. Benjamin’s essay notes the ‘different’ Jacks that have accreted around him: “Real Jack,” “Radiant Jack,” ‘Dirty Jack,” and so I clearly realize which one I miss and admire. I want my real astonishment back.

Warts and all, the multiplicity that was Jack Spicer has been laid bare for the rest of us to know. I’ve not read Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and what little I’ve known about the man (as opposed to the work) began 40 years ago with Ekbert Faas’s Young Robert Duncan.  A way of saying much of this is new information (for me), new contexts (for me). Let these letters, valuable and useful as they are, not be the last word on Spicer. One thing is very apparent, though: his vocabulary did this to him.

 

 

 

 

Gil McElroy is a poet, visual arts curator, and critic. His most recent book is Long Division (University of Calgary Press, 2020). He's currently working on a book about the Windsor-based 'five-and-dime' architect G.A. McElroy, his grandfather. He currently lives in North Bay, Ontario.

Jay Miller : Porto, Portugal and Dad is Dying

 

 

 

I realize now that I must have downloaded The Vinyl Café at the most opportune time because it appears to have been scraped off the web, so the CBC can do a podcast about the behind-the-scenes of it, which really should be its own separate thing but isn't. This rendition starts with an ad for Mint Mobile with fucking Ryan Reynolds in it. 

But because I am in Martinique and my computer is off and my old new phone is dead, I am working off my old hand-me-down phone that doesn't have the unedited radio broadcasts on it. No matter, really.

But, I will say this for any data hoarders out there: if you're looking for a feasible challenge, try to cobble together the extant list of Vinyl Café story titles from their original air date and associated MP3 files. I'm certain it's still doable, but requires some effort. As it is, I think I have roughly 100 of them more or less appropriately titled on several devices, but technically every episode has 2 titles I believe, and neither variant is truly descriptive unless you're already familiar with the context of the particular story, so both almost equally... I don't want to come off harsh by saying useless, but a synopsis of each episode is also hard to come by if I recall correctly. With some effort, a solid archive could be DIY'd. I digress.

We were planning a trip to Portugal. We'd never been, don't speak the language, don't crave the food, and don't know the history of it. But, we had heard Lisbon was overrated and therefore flights to Porto cheap.

Earlier today we were languishing in the Martinique after work commute congestion, heading back to our hotel, listening to the special "ask us anything" episode of The Europeans podcast. The penultimate question, if memory serves me well, was "what European country have you not yet visited but is at the top of your list to go to next?" and I not only remarked at what a good question that was, I immediately spoke over the broadcast to ask Patrycja, since we were looking for a third country to visit this summer while in Poland (we had already been invited by her italophilic mother to go to Italy—for our second time—and enthusiastically agreed)—and her immediate response: Portugal.

What did I know about Portugal besides the trip we planned and never did?

I remember John Wall Barger talking about it at length in *Hummingbird*, a poetry collection of his from 2012, my second year of being a reviewer.

All the typical tropes of Portuguese lit were mentioned therein. All the most frequented sights, as to be expected, too. But it was predominantly Lisbon, not Porto, he explored and versified.

The only other thing I recall about Portugal from literature is Eça de Queirós's story about the Greek poet living out of a hotel and trying and failing to woo a woman—he was a big deal, in Greece, but she didn't know Greek, and was unfazed by his supposed literary grandeur.

We have a friend that we adore, Michael, who went to Portugal once. He hopes to buy a house and retire there some day. I hope he does, too, but it doesn't mean anything to me because we've never been.

So anyways, it is the middle of the night in Martinique, I am sat at the alloyed metal table on the patio of our entranceway overlooking the bay of Fort-de-France from L'anse à l'âne, and I catch a title of a Stuart McLean story called "Dad is Dying".

I remember the day I found out my dad was dying, nearly six years ago. It was summer. I was walking out of Métro Snowdon in Montreal, northbound, on my way to the dollar store, when my brother called me. Dad was in a coma. He had had a seizure. He would go on to live another 5 years following this event, and I remember then and there being so not okay with that. I didn't know then that it was the beginning of the end but a part of me always felt like I should have. Probably why I remember it so vividly. I had just seen him that spring.

McLean's story starts with “Most people will tell you that spring is the most reassuring of seasons. They will tell you that it's something about the renewal of the natural world, the return of the sun, the songbirds of God's green garden that puts a spring into their step. This spring came to Dave differently than most.”

That spring was admittedly a blur. I had just gotten promoted at work, for the first time ever, and I had just fallen in love with the most beautiful girl I was certain was never going to have the time to find out together what we were. My dad was finally living out his dream of becoming a modern-day Henry David Thoreau, bought a cabin in a secluded wood on the water in North Frontenac, and we were working on our grief together following the passing of my mother 5 years prior. Life was as good as it had been in as long as I could possibly remember. It brings a tear to my eye now just reflecting on it.

"Like all storms, no one noticed its first stirrings."

The McLean story is funny.

I remember my maternal grandfather dying. I must have been about 12 years old. Papa, we called him. I remember feeling too old to cry, I was so young. At his celebration of life, I cried. Tears of joy, because of all the new stories old friends of his I'd never met had to share with us. Taking a cat in a burlap sack down to the river to drown it and it literally getting out of the bag to defend itself, never to return. Very different times then. Another, taking a fistful of firecrackers down to the same river and seeing if they could make a bucket into a rocket and a piece of shrapnel from said bucket propulsion gone wrong carried in his leg like a reminder for the rest of his days. Big smoker, died less than half a decade short of eighty.

Not my parents. It baffled me then the way it baffles me now: people outlive the people you love all the damn time. There were eighty-year-olds twenty years ago when Papa died as much as there were eighty-year-olds a year-and-a-half ago when my father died. We had a trip planned to go canoeing on Lake Banff the next day, we were in Calgary, and the town was swarming with retirees. I just remember thinking, of all the old folks bumming around, why him? Over time, the sensation dulled, but never faded away. He was only a month shy of 64.

Stuart McLean... it's like what happens if you reverse engineered a Tragically Hip lyric into prose and took all the protagonist out of it.

Porto was the first trip I planned. We must have been in Poddąbie, summer 2022, my father warning me every day about what was going on next door in Ukraine and asking for my reassurance that Poland was safe (of course it was, we were many miles away).

Similar to the trip we never made to Latvia, Porto enticed me enough because of the cheap airfare. We could also fly home to Montreal from there, so if we planned it right, could be a last hurrah on our way back for fall.

We never ended up going but here's the eleven things I had in mind:

The Sandeman Cellars, a-k-a The House of Sandeman. As a fan of tawny port since 2020 (a versatile bottle for the hopeless wreck I was during the first year of the pandemic, chilled port with a slice of orange was as refined as any cocktail exceeding more than one ingredient to concoct) and sherry (absolutely crucial for my favourite drink at some point in time, a memory lost to time I'm afraid to admit, but available in many lovely variants), it was the first stop on my list. We would only be going if I planned it, so I put my strengths (and spirits) at the forefront of my mind.

Next was the Passeio das Virtudes. This seems reminiscent of another landscape I had planned to visit with Patrycja but never went and that is Perugia, Italy. I am certain it is lovely but that was a trip I had planned for November, so less than spectacular weather for travelling. Perhaps I'll expound another time. The thing about Passeio das Virtudes that strikes me this very moment, however, is how similar the houses on the hill seem to the ones here in Martinique.

Claus Porto was next. They do soaps and perfumes, although apparently the duty-free at the airport sells the same. If you're looking for a boutique experience, however, they have their own history of Porto to share, and, if you're lucky, an old-fashioned hot towel shave.

Now that I think of it, I think my dad had been to Lisbon. He got me a few books in Portuguese from one of his trips to Europe after Mom died. He had always wanted to travel; her, not so much. It comes to mind because the next place I had in mind was Livraria Lello, an absolutely breathtaking bookshop with massive ornate staircase in what, at a glance, appears to be red velvet and mahogany, a stainglass skylight, and architectured ceiling. I'm sure it's even more stunning in person. Never a fan of Harry Potter myself, its mixture of neogothic and art nouveau design was allegedly the inspiration for Hogwarts. The transphobe who lived.

Everything in Porto is so damn historical. Speaking of stories, I completely lost sight of Stuart McLean. The dog is dying. Sam thought he was too old to be crying about his dog dying so he told his class his dad was dying instead to save face. Hilarity ensues.

My mother used to spend all weekend making long-distance phone calls. She'd talk and talk and talk for hours with all her old friends, all the women who had been part of our lives growing up in Kitchener-Waterloo. One of them, our godmother, Jojo, passed shortly after our father went. I got word from our old neighbourhood friend Peter, who messaged me from Germany. Wish we had been invited to her funeral. Too much to deal with in the wake of our father's death, but still would've been nice. Her husband JP died years ago. I remember talking with her after our mother died. She suggested I get my license to become a PI. Saleema Nawaz Webster, a Montreal writer whose *Mother Superior* collection I absolutely adored when I reviewed it years after its release, recently did that. Makes sense. Maybe I see in her what Joanne saw in me.

Stuart McLean... I wonder what will ever happen to all those secondhand copies of Vinyl Café hardbacks. Synonymous with retirees, church benefit book fairs, Adirondack chairs and sunsets. There were too many when he was still alive. Does anyone under 30 even listen to radio anymore? Let alone the CBC? It's always been a bit tough to see being Canadian as being cool. You tell anyone but an American about CBC Radio, god forbid Stuart McLean, and they wouldn't have an NPR to compare it to, and BBC doesn't really match up. Yet only attractive people seem to wear those vintage CBC tees, so maybe I'm the problem. As it is, still love tuning in. Quirks and Quarks, The Debaters, Under the Influence? Perfection.

The rest of my Porto-to-do list consists entirely of restaurants: O Diplomata, Musa das Virtudes, Época Café, Casa Guedes Tradicional, Adega de São Nicolau, Gazela Cachorrinhos Da Batalha.

Back in 2022, these likely held more currency. I am dubious there was a more obvious theme now, but perhaps I got really deep with it. By name, they all appear to be different kinds of restaurants, different experiences, not just different menus. Perhaps I picked them based on our potential accommodation. I don't have it listed anywhere. I probably had Queirós's hotel in mind. Looking at all these dishes is making me hungry. Like us, you may seldom think of Portuguese chicken, or bread, or beer, but seeing this flurry of images now, I can't think of anything in the world I'd like more than that, if not another splash of Martinique rum.

Sam, Dave and Morley's kid on The Vinyl Café, finally spills the beans: it's not my dad that's dying, my dog is dying.

"My dog's going to be all right! It was just worms!"

Word spread through the neighbourhood like wildfire.

I wish my father had been diagnosed. In five years of non-epileptic seizures and a rollercoaster of unrelated maladies, he never had the privilege of finding out the cause.

I don't know what sort of nonsense the medical profession has succumbed to in Ontario since I left, but they barely treated my mom 10 years earlier much better either.

Quebec has its own crisis, too. So I get it. But it's one of the few things I think of even though I should: why the hell have we let things get this bad in Canada? What have we done to deserve this? Why is nobody helping? Why is nobody fixing what's broken?

What's going to happen when I end up in hospital in my forties, fifties, and sixties? Will I even live long enough to find out?

What if I just need a pill and I end up getting referred to a never-ending parade of specialists in different cities across the province who have too many patients to diagnose me? Who do I call then?

 

Jay Miller is a tech writer and poet. He occasionally posts book reviews on Bibelotages.com and pics of the cat he shares with his beautiful partner Patrycja, @itsthemilashow on Instagram.

Alex Deng : What’s Left Behind: On Verissimo’s Circumtrauma

 

 

 

Circumtrauma is a book that explores the Nigeria-Biafra War, specifically the leftover trauma and (un)spoken history of that war. Verissimo tracks this using found poems. The book is composed of four sections: OGBE: 2°, OYEKU: IIII, 1001: IWORI, and 0110: ODI. In the method note of the book, Verissimo says that the poems mined language from “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Flora Nwapa’s Never Again, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and Kole Omotosho’s The Combat.” On top of using these four novels as language for these poems, Verissimo “turned to the Ifá divination system to deepen the meaning of these stories, written and oral, that [she] collected.” The reason Verissimo turned toward found poems and the Ifá divination system is because “[her] initial poems felt too much like [her] own echo.”

          I read Circumtrauma as an exploration of gaps. The “circum” in Circumtrauma suggests a circle—something with a gap in the middle. Indeed, one of the many ways trauma reveals itself is through dissociation and repression. These methods perhaps create a gap in memory. “i said nothing,” says (or, rather, doesn’t say) the speaker of Circumtrauma. But “circum” also suggests recurrence, circularity—how trauma attaches itself to the body. “Circum”—a constantly repeating event or affect that is also hollow in the centre—is a prefix that attaches itself to “trauma.”

          Thus, two things occur with this idea of “circum:” one being space, gap, hollow centres; the other being recursion, circularity. Verissimo evokes these ideas simultaneously. She writes:      

the war may have ended
but every life is still riddled with bullet holes,
 some large, others small              some missing

Consider, here, how the “bullet holes” are hollow in the centre, leaving “every life” with this space that trauma lives in. The space between “small” and “some” reflects this hollow centre with the form that the lines take. But, as well as these hollow centres, there is also the idea of recursion; “the war may have ended / but every life is still riddled with bullet holes” reveals that, although the war might be over, it has left holes, real or “missing,” holes that remain in generations forward, beyond the war. This gap has moved beyond form and entered into the arena of history. The “circum” in Circumtrauma once again attaches itself to word and body, remaining circular through time.

          But on top of the gaps that trauma leaves, Verissimo questions how they are left in the first place, especially to those who did not fight or live through the war. This is why her use of found poetry is important: Through found poetry, she re/de/constructs the narratives found in novels “because the war is remembered in fractured and diverse ways,” she says. Verissimo is trying to track the gaps in both how war creates these “bullet holes” in the body in the first place and how the leftover trauma of war leaves these gaps in narratives and stories. She says, in the beginning of 0110: ODI,

#define words
do {
    words
         –({“squish”,
         “hope into fragile pulps”,
         “of misery”}); 

[...]

#define words
Stories before_we_utter_them, before_we_collect;
us(before_we_utter_them, before_we_collect)

This is a capacious book. For one, the use of code as form, here, reflects “[...] the first four main Odu [of the Ifá divination system [...] this binary structure, much like computer code, served as a way to ‘read’ the meeting of emotions as I cut up novels [...]” The tension between gaps (what’s between the 1s and 0s of code) and circularity (the repetition of 1s and 0s as information) is one of the major ideas that this book explores. When looking at (intergenerational) trauma through stories and narratives, Verissimo says that “words / –({‘squish’/  ‘hope into fragile pulps’, /  ‘of misery’});” “Hope” becomes tangled with “misery,” and both of these affects become the 1s and 0s of code. Verissimo is exploring how things fall between these gaps—hope and misery, stories and bodies, sound and silence.

          These poems-in-code, too, repeat: “Stories before_we_utter_them, before_we_collect; / us(before_we_utter_them, before_we_collect);” I want to look at these two lines closely. Not only do they use repetition and circularity, as “circum” suggests, but they also isolate two words, “Stories” and “us,” as the two words not repeated. These two words here might reflect the ones and zeros of binary code: it might have something to do with how these stories become, or hollow “us” out, when these narratives are told. But if I am to draw parallels between these two words and binary code, then one of these things must be hollow, as zero is. I might suggest that these stories are the zeros of binary, seeing as Verissimo writes: “fire razed down books / [...] opening a / history of silence.” The gaps in war narratives are formed through stories, leaving “a / history of silence.”

However, Verissimo writes, in the same poem, as the code’s output:

is this about/what words mean inside us
          before we utter them/before we collect
          them into stories/instructions in survival
          handed down
                           to the generation
                                                               next
                      to their fate/
                      [...]

I suggested earlier that it is worth examining the two words—“Stories” and “us”—as binary code, and “Stories” being what is hollow, what is left empty, as the 0 of binary. The found poems reflect this, as Verissimo is trying to fill in the gaps stories leave. But this quote might counter my reading, as “what words mean inside us” makes me think of bodies as hollow vessels for these narratives, as “instructions in survival.” What is critical might be the preposition: “in” rather than “for:” not instructions for survival but “in survival.” I might go as far as to say that this word “in” is the way that these “instructions,” these “Stories” get absorbed inside of a body, as nutrients or ideologies do.

          So there’s this contradiction in the reading of this book. Either the stories are hollow or the body is. But this contradiction is part of the game. The circles that Verissimo explores are contradictory. These circles are both recursive and empty. The hollow body: “our body is:            a lonely home” but also the body filled: “our body is a lake.” To read Circumtrauma is to read into the ways that the body gets filled with war, trauma, and history, but it is also to read into the ways that the body gets hollowed out by these same things, leaving a gap. I mentioned earlier that this book is capacious. This means that even my own reading might be contradictory and, more than that, hollow, as I have merely glanced over the history of the war and the divination system. But, in the end, to read Circumtrauma is to read “astretchofsilence astretchofsilence astretchofsilence” and the way these stretches of silence are filled.

 

 

 

Alex Deng is a writer based in Toronto. He has appeared or is forthcoming in The Temz Review, Ricepaper Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, La Piccioletta Barca and Reverie. Find him on instagram @allexdeng.

 

 

Lesle Lewis : Two poems

 

 

Lake


Doctors say you have only weeks yet.

You go early to bed and draw meadows.  

One day remembers a better one as she crawls out of self-consciousness.

Whatever happens happens now.

Red painted monuments bloom.

It’s a messy, wild-growing grief.

One child ventures out, the child, lovely and bespeckled, the child, a powerhouse, the child grown up, a person capable and remarkable.

Then the ocean comes for the land.

Drought is causing the reappearance of the canyon.

And of the split level house on a lake.

 

Dumped


I can’t begin to think how to begin again.  

Okayness is not good enough.

Good enough is not good enough.

Do you care about the details of my life?

Is it generous for me to share them?

Generous of you to listen?

Now draw your face.

Get out of bed.

Then, and only then, go ahead and despair.

You feel badly about feeling badly.

It’s a thing trying to understand itself.

If you sink into it, you find nothing.

When you get there, you won’t know anything, even who you are.  

Dreams are passing scenery.  

A tiny tick tock dozes in the field.

You wake for a break from the sleeping.

You hang onto the dawn.  

You have a bird for a face and a string for a mouth.

It will be a summer morning.

You will eat mushrooms and potatoes.  

The dead will come back as hungry animals.

You feel my hunger, so maybe you can help me.

I feel your hunger too.

Someone has figured it out so it’s a story.

How one thing is like another is also how it’s not.

Ahead is not a place to get to.

Important questions will maintain their identities.

I’m sadder, dumber, more tired now.

If you want uplifting, lift yourself.

This gets better or worse or this gets bogged down.

The truck needs more than a jump.

Much ink is dumped.

 

 

 

 

 

Lesle Lewis is the author of six full-length collections of poems, including her debut collection, Small Boat, which was the winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. She's released two books through Alice James Books, one book with Cleveland State University Poetry Center, and one with Fence Books. Her sixth collection, John's Table, is out with Piżama Press in May 2026. She lives in the rough New Hampshire woods with the rest of the trees.