The letters of poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) are a vital component of his unique oeuvre; they radiate with the brilliance, ferocity, and vulnerability that characterizes his poetry. In fall 2025—the year of Spicer’s centenary—Wesleyan University Press will publish Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin. The over 300 fully annotated letters in this volume contribute vital details to Spicer’s biography, and stand alongside Spicer’s previously published works as key components of his inventive and influential writings.
Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared will be the fourth volume of Spicer’s writing published by Wesleyan, following Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer (edited by Daniel Katz, 2021), My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, 2009), and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (edited by Peter Gizzi, 1998).
The selection of letters offered here for the Poetry Project Newsletter concern Spicer’s brief period in New York. Spicer identified the city with a literary establishment which he at once abjured and aspired to join. Spicer came to New York in the summer of 1955, after being fired from his teaching position at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. He stayed fewer than six months, struggling to find paid work and struggling even more deeply to connect with the local literati. Through painter John Button, Spicer’s Berkeley friend and erstwhile Mattachine Society comrade, Spicer was introduced to Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Joseph LeSueur. Spicer spent evenings at the San Remo Bar hoping to fall in with these writers, but he did not take. O’Hara memorialized their interaction in his poem “At the Old Place,” written within two weeks of Spicer’s arrival, according to LeSueur’s account. In this poem, “Jack, Earl, and Someone don’t come” with Frank and his friends to go dancing at a gay bar, but later “drift guiltily in.” The poem reflects Spicer’s uneasy presence among O’Hara and his scene. These letters similarly reflect Spicer’s complex mix of discomfort and desire about New York.
—Daniel Benjamin
To Robin Blaser #4
{March 6, 1951}
{1611 River Rd. E, Minneapolis, Minn.}
Dear Robin,
I hate your postcards. Why not save money and not send them airmail? It can hardly matter when I get them.
If the first paragraph has made your paranoia glitter, relax. I’m in the same boat as you, only I don’t send anything. At the moment I owe 7 people in Berkeley one letter, 3 people two, and Arthur Kloth 29.
I remember the first month here (I must have been ten years younger). I thought that I could keep in touch with my own life. It’s rather embarrassing to recall the project I suggested to you and Duncan of recherching the temps perdux (sik). Now I know why the friends I had in the Army wrote so much for the first month and then gradually stopped writing. It is not a comfort to know that your past exists and is independent of you. Letters from Berkeley make me feel disembodied.
One adjusts. It is no longer unpleasant, I certainly do not mean to imply that it is pleasant. I never knew before what a gulf there was between two states.
I’m seldom bored here. Boredom comes only when one feels that there is entertainment somewhere that one is missing. It is infinitely easier to be bored in New York or Berkeley. Here the emotion is exhausted after about a month’s experience. If I were prevented from seeing the fights on TV some Wednesday night, I might be bored all evening. That’s the extent of it.
So you see that Minnesota is good for me. It is the equivalent of a nice snowcovered insane asylum or, if you like, a Magic Mountain without a Settembrina or a Naptha. It is a good place to face oneself and get to like one’s face.
Only the weather has emotion here. It reminds me of you sometimes with its violence and sudden apologies. Inhuman cold is followed quickly with temporary thaw. Suspect a blizzard then! One can actually talk about the weather without being absurd here. In fact one is absurd if one talks of anything else.
But of course I can’t stay permanently an invalid. This June I intend to leave my sanitarium and go back into the world. New York, I think now, although I’d like to come back to Berkeley. New York is just like a room full of slot machines. It’s quite exhilarating and quite vulgar and made me feel that Berkeley was, after all, quite like Boston. It makes me write badly just to think of it.
This is enough undeserved communication for now, I think.
Love, with strong reservations,
Jack
P.S. Landis is more mature and is now fun to talk to. He hates New York and is unlikely to stick it out past June. George is still George, a melancholy fact, I think.
P.P.S. Let Duncan read this letter so he’ll know just why I can’t write him.
“Jack Spicer Papers,” BANC MSS 2004/209, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, notebook draft. Spicer met the poet Robin Blaser (1925-2009) shortly after arriving in Berkeley in 1945. Along with Robert Duncan (1919-1988), Spicer and Blaser were the key figures of the “Berkeley Renaissance” during the late 1940s. Blaser would remain Spicer’s longest and most devoted friend, serving as his literary executor after his death 20 years later. Arthur Kloth (1926–2000) was born in Chicago, and came to Berkeley after serving in World War II. During Spicer’s ill-fated sojourn in New York, Kloth remarked in a letter to Blaser that Spicer’s poor dress and antisocial attitude limited his social success. Spicer refers to The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), the 1924 novel by Thomas Mann (1875–1955). The characters include Ludovico Settembrini and Leo Naphtha, patients along with the protagonist, Hans Castorp, at a sanatorium in the Swiss mountains. “Landis” is Landis Everson (1926–2007), a poet from Coronado, California, who had walked in Spicer’s footsteps, first at Redlands, then at Berkeley, a young man with “boy next door” charm and genuine poetic talent, who attracted the other poets like flies to honey. Everson left the Bay Area to complete a master’s degree at Columbia, but would return and join Spicer’s Sunday afternoon group in 1960. After Spicer’s death, Everson stopped writing for forty-three years, only starting again when the scholar Ben Mazer began researching his work for a special issue of the magazine Fulcrum focused on the Berkeley Renaissance. Mazer subsequently edited Everson’s Everything Preserved: Poems 1955–2005 (Graywolf, 2006). George Haimsohn (1925–2003) was Spicer’s first male lover. He had one of the most curious careers of any of the Berkeley poets, eventually writing the libretto for the 1966 Broadway musical hit Dames at Sea. As “Plato,” Haimsohn was a prominent “physique photographer.”
To Robin Blaser #9
{May 1952}
{1315 8th St., S.E., Minneapolis, Minn.}
Dear Robin,
Between hot thunderstorms I write asking for your aid. (The weather suddenly changed at the end of April. It was snowing (as it had been) and suddenly the snow turned to hot water and millions of damned birds started flying in. Now there are flows.)
The aid (which I ask of you with confidence) is this. Please contact everyone who calls me friend in Berkeley and ask them to send me a penny postcard telling me whether, in their opinion, I should return.
Now that I have been wakened from my winter sleep it has become clearer and clearer to me that:
(1) my wanting to go to New York was based on the feeling that I never could write again.
(2) I can write again (Undemonstrated, as yet.)
(3) I wouldn’t be likely to write in N.Y.
(4) People shouldn’t come to N.Y. until they have something to sell. I have nothing to sell but some old poems I no longer quite believe in.
(5) I should go back to Berkeley, finish that play (I have it figured out now), and leave for N/Y. when I have reestablished myself as a writer.
(6) I assume (a) the Berkeley scene has not changed much since I left, so I can find a job as a show clerk for several years.
Poll my friends (and yourself) on whether they agree with the logic & assumptions. Please ask everybody.
Love,
Jack
P.S. Get me Henry Hunt’s address. He wrote me a wonderful letter with no return.
“Jack Spicer Papers,” BANC MSS 2004/209, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, notebook draft. The play is Pentheus and the Dancers (Be Brave To Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer, 199–237). Henry Hunt was another student at Berkeley; not a poet, and not gay, but “a tease . . . mainly to Jack, but he tried to be a tease for Duncan” too, according to an interview with Gerald Ackerman (Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).
To Jonathan Williams #4
{1955}
{243 West 4th Street, apartment 16, NY, NY}
Dear Br. Jonathan,
While I’m not at the end of my rope yet, I’m already past the middle of it and still swinging. I haven’t found a job yet. I haven’t enough money to get Troilus typed (a wonderful play—all finished and all beautiful) and I haven’t found anybody at all in N.Y. that I want to show Troilus to. As a matter of fact I haven’t found anybody in all N.Y.
I can see why you have these strange urges toward heterosexuality when I look at the eastern faggot. God, what types! No feeling for nonsense, no feeling for the impossible. People camp here like a jew telling anti-semitic stories. And, on the other hand, the women—they obviously run this town. The weakest of them has more character than the strongest faggot. Just the opposite of the west where the women one knows seem to apologize for not having a cock and balls. Here they need a wheelbarrow to carry all the penises they have clipped off the males around them. A disgusting city!
But I’m stuck here. No other place to go and no money to go with if I did. I know at least a thousand ex-Californians (who are rather like German refugees) and this keeps me occupied if not amused. Please, please, Jonathan, dear brother, please come to New York for a day or so this month. I want to see somebody I like. Also maybe you could introduce to some people I’d like in this town. I’m so desperate for friends that they don’t have to be pretty or even male.
Did Mother McClure manage to avoid the army? How and with what doctor? New York poetry stinks. New York bars stink. The New York Giants stink. I stink.
If you do get a chance please see if BMC has a job for me. I need a job. I need a friend. I need a drink.
Love,
Jack
P.S.: Enclosed is my only New York poem. Treat it with care as it may be valuable on account of my suicide.
J.
The Jargon Society Collection, 1950–2008, The Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Jonathan Williams (1929–2008) was an East Coast poet and printer who founded the press the Jargon Society with the artist David Ruff in 1951, and was familiar to Spicer through extended stays in San Francisco. Williams was a student at Black Mountain College and published the Black Mountain Review. Spicer met San Francisco poet Michael McClure (1932–2020) in Robert Duncan’s workshop at San Francisco State College in 1954. Early in 1955, McClure acted alongside Duncan and Spicer in Duncan’s play Faust Foutu. Later that year, at the famous 6 Gallery reading at which Allen Ginsberg introduced “Howl,” McClure invoked the spirit of the absent Spicer by reading from a letter to Spicer pleading that someone get him a job or send him enough money to return to San Francisco.
To Edward Dorn
{1962}
Dear Mr. Dorn,
Why in the fucking hell of New York do you want an anthology? Why don’t you motherfuckers write poetry?
I’ll read yours but I won’t send you mine.
Sincerely yours
Jack
Jack Spicer Papers, notebook draft, Bancroft MSS 99/94 c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. This letter is dated based on its appearance on the verso of a draft of a poem from The Holy Grail. It’s not clear what set off Spicer’s sharp words to poet Edward Dorn (1929–1999). Dorn, a one-time student at Black Mountain College, later met Spicer at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965. No trace of this letter has been found among Dorn’s main correspondence which is held at the University of Connecticut.
