Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer

by Jack Spicer, Kevin Killian (editor), Kelly Holt (editor)

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 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 Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian). They stand alongside the recently published Be Brave to 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

620 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 2, 2025

About the author

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.[1] Spicer's poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement.