Tag: Jack Spicer

Vocabulary Lesson: ‘Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer’

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“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,’’ Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.’’ The brilliant, troubled figure identified with the Berkeley Renaissance—a coterie of fellow littérateurs including Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser—cut his own cartographic path, calling on magic to bring his muse to life even as he was frustrated by the difficulties of finding the broader recognition he courted, and despised. The recent publication of Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (512 pages; Wesleyan University Press) returns us to this complex world in voluminous depth. It was edited by […]

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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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Bohemian Rhapsody: ‘Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan’ by William Hjortsberg

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To simplify, Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan (Counterpoint; 880 pages), William Hjortsberg’s massive new biography of the late, once-iconic poet and novelist, can be roughly divided into three parts: BUMMER. Brautigan’s childhood years, growing up poor and alienated in a dysfunctional family in the eternally drizzly Pacific Northwest. Highlights included the poet’s hospitalization—and treatment with electric shock—after throwing a rock into the local police station after a girl he had a crush on rejected him. TRIPPY. Brautigan’s arrival in San Francisco, well ahead of the Summer of Love, whose spirit he briefly seemed to embody, and […]

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