Overview

Collected correspondence showcases the dazzling intelligence of an iconic American writer 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. The fully annotated letters in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared contribute vital details to Spicer's biography, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian). They stand alongside the recently published Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer (edited by Daniel Katz) as key components of Spicer's inventive and influential writings. Readers of Spicer's poetry will delight to find his extraordinary letters--previously uncollected and mostly never-before-published--in one volume. Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

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9780819501905

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Reviews

""With the release of Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared Jack Spicer's day to day life is finally allowed to speak for itself. Some of these letters assume an extremely withering 'on stage' voice while others sound warm, incidental, and full of longing. I can almost hear the hiss of his furnace or the morning kettle rolling to a boil. This collection reads more like a lost autobiography, a book that has come to light through imparting the magic of chronology.""--Cedar Sigo, author of Siren of Atlantis ""How I've missed the arcade Atlantis of this voice, its midnight cowbell ringing the hive. The raucous salt of Spicer's loneliness will feed the heathen oracles hand over fist, such seething mercy, a good long time.""--Michael D. Snediker, author of Jones Very

""With the release of Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared Jack Spicer's day to day life is finally allowed to speak for itself. Some of these letters assume an extremely withering 'on stage' voice while others sound warm, incidental, and full of longing. I can almost hear the hiss of his furnace or the morning kettle rolling to a boil. This collection reads more like a lost autobiography, a book that has come to light through imparting the magic of chronology.""--Cedar Sigo, author of Siren of Atlantis ""How I've missed the arcade Atlantis of this voice, its midnight cowbell ringing the hive. The raucous salt of Spicer's loneliness will feed the heathen oracles hand over fist, such seething mercy, a good long time.""--Michael D. Snediker, author of Jones Very ""The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer gives us a new window onto Spicer's way of moving in the world, highlighting his passion for the art of poetry as well as his impish upending of pieties about it. The editors also present, with honesty and integrity, the problem of what to make of Spicer's relationship to his literary milieu: the letters teem with both genuine declarations of love and loyalty to other writers and with a kind of petty viciousness that we would now identify as a white gay version of toxic masculinity. Spicer invigorated the poetry scene in the mid-20th century Bay Area with a playful devotion to something like capital-M Mystery, and his letters leave us with one, too.""--Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University ""Correspondence collecting the messiness and hopes of a life: this important edition of Jack Spicer's letters, expertly edited and introduced, is essential reading for anyone seeking insight into the poet and the world at large in the mid-twentieth century.""--Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Author Information

JACK SPICER (1925-1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. During his short but prolific life, he published numerous books with small presses, including Billy the Kid (1959), The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1962), and Language (1965). Spicer's first book, After Lorca (1957), was recently reprinted by NYRB Poets with an introduction by Peter Gizzi (2021).Wesleyan University Press has published The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi (1998), My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (2008), and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer, edited by Daniel Katz (2021). DANIEL BENJAMIN received his PhD in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of an afterword to Jack Spicer's The Wasps (speCt! Books, 2016). With Eric Sneathen, he co-edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017), and with Claire Marie Stancek, he co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba Press/Giramondo, 2016). His academic articles have appeared in small axe, Contemporary Literature, and European Romantic Review. He teaches English at Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. KELLY HOLT is a writer and teacher living in San Francisco. Her poems and essays have appeared in After Spicer: Critical Essays, edited by John Emil Vincent (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), and journals including Fulcrum, New American Writing, Jacket, and Mirage 4/Period(ical). KEVIN KILLIAN (1952-2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. He won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009 for My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi.

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