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.
