IF THERE’S ANYTHING poet Jack Spicer (1925–1965) and his archivist-biographer, the late Kevin Killian, can teach a reader, it’s that anything can be a poem, even a letter. The letter, as a literary thing, is one of several “occasional” forms, like “Dedication to Your Swimming Pool” by the Roman poet Statius, written to crash a rich man’s pool party, drink his wine, and feel up his spouse. It’s occasional like lectures, introductions, obituaries, sermons, thank-you notes, dedications, dirges, odes. It’s occasional like Killian’s marvelous collection of Selected Amazon Reviews (2024), which includes “Men’s Khaki Shorts,” by Michael Kors: “[T]he prevalent yellow stitching made it look like a flock of yellow butterflies had settled on my crotch.” What you are reading now could be considered an occasional form.
There are some wonderful literary letter writers, and the more you know about art and culture, the more dishy and gossipy their letters become. LGBT people are famously good at the dishy letter—think of Audre Lorde, Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes. And so was Jack Spicer. In Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, we receive news from Spicer in San Francisco, then on assignment in Boston, and then when ruinously exiled in Minnesota. A casual influx of events: readings, a perfunctory record of no-go boyfriends, university edicts (firings), and headline crises, with a sort of marvel.
In most cases, the letters of great writers and artists are perhaps the final things to read, the deep cut, the reward for knowing all their creative works, plans, life, and colleagues. Letters are the private joke you get to laugh at, even if the joke was cast privately for somebody else. But even if you don’t know Spicer’s works and colleagues and jokes, this volume of letters is a great introduction to the poet-priest.
The range of expressions in the Spicer letters run from profound—the report of the event where Ginsberg first read Howl off a handwritten script—to hilariously glib, like his letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti that goes: “Dear Ferlinghetti, Under no circumstances may you publish my poem. Jack Spicer.” Between this moon and that star is a lot of gossip, opinions, asides, marginalia, artistic bitchery, and other opinions. The editors (and not just Killian) have offered the reader a complete set of literary letters, many to fellow gay writers like Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, with generous and fascinating notes, and a select handful of delicious letters to Spicer.
Daniel Benjamin, who, with Kelly Holt, completed this book as co-editors with Killian, offers a narrative of this amazing project. Benjamin described it to me in an email that’s so good it counts as a letter: “My work and everyone else’s, as far as I know it: Kevin began collecting letters during his research for Poet Be Like God in the 1990s. In the 2000s–2010s he returned to editing the letters with Kelly Holt, who wrote a PhD thesis at UC Santa Cruz on the Spicer circle. Kelly was part of the group who worked on processing the large archive of Spicer materials that the Bancroft acquired in 2005, and that became the basis for much of the new material in My Vocabulary Did This to Me.” No doubt, trying to wrangle the “collected” letters of any writer is something of a daunting, never-ending task. Benjamin continues: “When Kevin was sick in 2019, he asked me to help with some remaining work on the letters. Since then, I’ve been working on finishing the book for the last six years. I’ve missed Kevin a lot while working on this book, wanting to share discoveries with him and ask him questions. It’s been a great privilege, though, to be continuing in ghostly conversation and collaboration.”
What did Spicer himself think of letters as art? He seems aware that his own correspondence would be read by more people than the addressee. “Letters are a trap,” he writes in 1959 to Stan Persky, Robin Blaser’s then-scandalous new boyfriend, an artist who died in October 2024, “for me as a person and, I suspect, for me as a poet. They’re impure … you[r]ghost fills up Mike’s [Bar] often in spite of the fact that it was only two or three times that we talked and you always had a bad effect on my pinball.” The glory of letters, too, is in the indiscriminate friction and accidental revelations generated by high and low culture meeting as a bit of a joke, one you must take seriously. To Robin Blaser he writes with excitement about his fascinating 1957 collection of poems After Lorca and provides “A List of Persons to Whom I’m Sending Copies” which includes “Ez Pound’s Secretary, Tom Eliot, Hilda Doolittle, Chuckles Olson, Bubbles Cocteau, and Clytemnestra Jeffers.”
At one point, Spicer describes himself as having “The heart of a second baseman.” It’s a private joke, but long after I finished reading these letters, that term stayed with me. What is actually in the heart of a second baseman? The position of second base is an unflashy one, but one for a dependable player, gritty and hardworking—quick-thinking and agile, turning double plays and reacting to unpredictable bounces, team-oriented, a linchpin in the infield. If you have a friend who has “the heart of a second baseman,” they probably have the spirit of a steady, humble, and team-first competitor, someone who does the little things right and plays with heart even if they don’t get the glory. “Second baseman” describes Jack Spicer, but also the late, great Kevin Killian, as well as Holt, Benjamin, and Wesleyan University Press, who believe, as I do, that anything can be a poem.
And so, dear reader, consider this occasional piece as something of an appreciation, a dedication, a five-star Amazon review. And above all, a letter to you, personally, from me, who misses Kevin Killian very much, and loves being, if marginally, a part of the great tradition of occasional belles lettres and the better tradition exemplified by both Spicer and Killian, who believed simply and correctly that anything can be a poem, if you do it right.
Brian Bouldrey, who teaches writing and literature at Northwestern, is the author of Good in Bed: A Life in Queer Sex, Politics, and Religion.
