Contributor: Daniel Benjamin

Sharing Strange Ghosts: Reflections on Jack Spicer at Berkeley

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It felt very fitting to launch Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters at Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2025) at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. The campus was a key location for the California poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) at the bookends of his poetic career. Spicer would designate his arrival at Berkeley in 1946 as the year of his birth. In the late 1940s, he organized the Writers Conference poetry workshops in Wheeler Hall, the first of the many alternative poetry spaces he curated on the margins and outskirts of academia. In 1965, Spicer lectured and read at the Berkeley […]

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Jack Spicer’s California: From The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer

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A scan of the first page of Jack Spicer's and Robin Blaser's letter to Robert Duncan and Jess, 1955

Jack Spicer (1925–1965) was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Spicer’s radical theories of authorship and poetic dictation influenced a generation of poets, and they continue to resonate with contemporary writers and thinkers. Openly gay in an era of repression, he developed a poetics that merged mysticism, political resistance, and linguistic estrangement. Spicer’s letters are a vital component of his unique oeuvre; they radiate with the brilliance, ferocity, and vulnerability that characterize his poetry. In fall 2025—the year of Spicer’s centenary—Wesleyan University Press published Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, edited by […]

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