{"id":171091,"date":"2025-06-25T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171091"},"modified":"2025-06-25T06:40:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T10:40:47","slug":"letters-from-jack-spicer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/06\/25\/letters-from-jack-spicer\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters from Jack Spicer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Robert Berg, 1954.<\/p><\/div>\n

To JoAnn Low<\/strong><\/p>\n

Postmark: April 20, 1955
\n975 Sutter Street, Apartment C<\/em>
\nSan Francisco<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear JoAnn,<\/p>\n

I know just what you mean. I feel it myself, of course, in the bars and the school and other places I live\u2014more now even than I did a few years ago. The answer (and a poor one) is this, I think\u2014you can only communicate with another human being by a miracle and you have to wait patiently for miracles and believe in them a little too. Nonsense helps (but it has to be the right kind of nonsense), strength of belief helps (but it has to be the kind that doesn\u2019t curdle up inside you and become dreams), and magic helps the most (but it has to be the kind of magic that is not ventriloquism\u2014the voices can\u2019t be your own). Everything that isn\u2019t a miracle isn\u2019t important\u2014and that includes the ego, the libido, and the atomic bomb.<\/p>\n

But, you will say, 3 o\u2019clock in the morning comes so very often\u2014it lasts so long in the night and tugs at the edge of you so much of the day. That is true and there\u2019s nothing one can do about it. A miracle doesn\u2019t destroy the clock, it merely stops it. So, brethren, there abideth these three\u2014despair, diversion, and miracle\u2014but the greatest of these is miracle.<\/p>\n

Jack<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To Graham Mackintosh<\/strong>
\nSaturday, November 27, 1954<\/strong><\/p>\n

975 Sutter Street, Apartment C
\nSan Francisco<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Mac,<\/p>\n

Although it\u2019s rather improbable that you have mail call on Sunday, I\u2019ve decided to keep to the emergency schedule of letters. This is just about the last of the football Saturdays (it is the 1st quarter of the Army-Navy game as I write this) so naturally this letter will have footballs flying all over it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve mentioned before that the hope of achievement of what would seem impossible is best demonstrated by what happens in football games. The old 4th quarter story. What I might mention today is the psychology of the player who has to respond to a 4th quarter 0-21 situation. I can imagine that before the burst of energy and confidence the star player has one through the game feeling that things are not real, doing what in chess is called pushing wood. Then suddenly, I suppose, the field stands out in sharp clarity; he feels as if he had awakened from a sudden sleep. That guard that was so hard to get by is suddenly no obstacle; he is like the stone you were trying to push away in your dream that turns out to be a heavy blanket bunched about your head when you wake up. It does not seem to him that he is using the last resources of energy but rather that he is the only live man among dead men, the only waker among sleepwalkers.<\/p>\n

But how does this waking come, how does the soul awaken from the sluggish nightmare, the 0-21 obstacle? If I knew, I would give you directions. How does one go about waking up from a dream\u2014the kind of afternoon fever dream where you know you\u2019re asleep but can\u2019t seem to make yourself wake up. (Every time you get up from where you\u2019re sleeping you find that you\u2019ve merely dreamed that you\u2019ve gotten up.) I don\u2019t know how it\u2019s done but one does finally wake up. Homer always attributes the waking up process in his warriors to the gods. Perhaps that\u2019s the way with you. Bacchus is trying to prevent you from getting to India and Venus or Jupiter will wake you up. From football to the Portuguese Navy in two paragraphs.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the end of this Saturday\u2019s coaching. I can\u2019t help getting a malicious pleasure out of the fact the Collected Letters of Jack Spicer are so full of football. The scholars who edit them will hate this. Which reminds me\u2014I\u2019ve been rereading all I have of the collected works of Graham Macintosh and they seem better than ever. You are going to be a great athlete.<\/p>\n

Navy just made a last second touchdown. The half ends 21-20.<\/p>\n

Yours
\nJack<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To the editors of The Pound Newsletter<\/em><\/strong>
\nCa. 1955<\/strong><\/p>\n

It seems to me that the spirited but peripheral exchange of insults between Mr. Kenner and Mr. Parkinson in your last issue tends to obfuscate the very important question that Mr. Parkinson had previously raised. Anti-semitism, like every other idea or crotchet of the poet\u2019s mind, can be an unimportant biographical detail or an essential critical issue. It all depends on how it affects the way his poetry, not he, sees the world.<\/p>\n

No one gives a damn whether Wallace Stevens is a Republican or a Democrat, but a man would be an idiot to try to understand the Divine Comedy without knowing what sort of Ghibelline or Guelph Dante was. It is merely impolite to wonder whether Cowper was an active homosexual, but it is of central importance to Whitman\u2019s poetry to discover whether or not he was. Was W. C. Fields a crypto-Stalinist? Who cares? Is Chaplin? Can one understand his later movies without considering the question?<\/p>\n

There were three hints of anti-semitism in Pound\u2019s Europe: the social kind (ranging from the how odd of God attitude of our aunts and uncles to the more pretentious snobberies of, to name two, Mr. Waugh and Mr. Eliot), the economic-political kind (which stems from the fact that the Jews did control most of the money and governments of Europe in the late nineteenth century), and the mystical kind (which saw in the Jew a symbol and a scapegoat for the evils of the modern world). An analysis of Pound\u2019s anti-semitism (a complex of all three) would seem to be one of the most important problems that a Pound scholar (ugly phrase!) could try to solve, and I can only attribute the absence of such a dissertation to the fact that there are too many Jews and too many anti-semites on most English faculties for the subject to be safe for the employed scholar.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To Donald Allen<\/strong>
\nSeptember 30, 1957<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Don,<\/p>\n

I have some new poems, a rash, and a lover. I\u2019ll send them (the poems that is) to you in a couple of days. They include a rather wonderful Buster Keaton Rides Again, a couple of translations, and some poems that don\u2019t seem to belong in After Lorca.<\/p>\n

The Art Festival was ghastly. It kept raining (even a thunderstorm) and I refused to go to any of the poetry readings which annoyed everybody. I did see a very funny puppet play that Jack Gilbert and Gerd Stern wrote about The Place. There was a marvelous puppet of Rexroth. If all this sounds a bit inbred\u2014it was.<\/p>\n

This is the first day of my official searching for a job. I\u2019ve decided not to write any poems while I\u2019m looking because if I do write poems then I don\u2019t feel guilty for not looking and this, while it will enrich the literature of the American people, will leave me in Aquatic Park stealing food from the seagulls who, after all, do not read poetry.<\/p>\n

Do you know the paperback people (the ones you got Harvey a stock job with) well enough to write them a letter telling them that they ought to find a place for me in their organization? Wouldn\u2019t they need people to make spot checks on how the books are displayed on the stands etc.? You know all this much better than I and I should have talked to you about it seriously when I was still in town\u2014but I was afraid that even planning would interrupt the poetry. Anyway, please tell me the best way to approach them. This begins to sound like a Hart Crane letter.<\/p>\n

I miss you a great deal both as a poet and a friend. Write.<\/p>\n

Love
\nJack<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To Robin Blaser<\/strong>
\n1958<\/strong><\/p>\n

2208 Parker Street<\/em>
\nBerkeley, CA<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Robin,<\/p>\n

Except for the impropriety of the title, the poem you sent me seems certainly the best thing you have done since The Hunger of Sound and, uncertainly, the best thing you have done. What is necessary now is to fit it somewhere, make it (with all its rattling parts) a part of something\u2014as Ginsberg never did and Whitman-Olson-Duncan always do, to write poetry that will support it (even by subversion) make it what it is but can never be (no poem can ever be) by itself.<\/p>\n

It is not a \u201cshit-sheet\u201d but you could make it into a \u201cshit sheet\u201d by not teaching the eagles how to speak, by surrendering into silence or reediting your own silence, by letting the poem stand by itself or, worse, judging it not in the light of the poems that you haven\u2019t written.<\/p>\n

I know you. You will have suspicions of it (CLEVER READER) and you will accuse it of lies which are only (would be only) lies because the other poems do not exist that you would refuse to write. Thus Ginsberg and Wieners pop like firecrackers while a great poet (Blake, Rimbaud, Yeats) why his whole life of writing is one immense soundless explosion.<\/p>\n

I exhort you\u2014accept it (UNCHANGED) and hatch it as an eagle would a basilisk\u2019s egg. Do not change, shift, cross out sections but let them change, shift, cross out themselves as you raise (the egg raises) a whole family of human-tongued basilisks. The court of the gods lies in the poem properly extended into poetry.<\/p>\n

And the starfish raping the whole aquarium. How wonderful!<\/p>\n

Love,
\nJack<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To Russell Fitzgerald<\/strong>
\n1958<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Russ,<\/p>\n

Is it love (yet or not yet) love you want or something for the scrapbook? I mean scrapbook in the ultimate sense.<\/p>\n

When I first read the letter I imagined a whole new sentence\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t mean a new paediea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eating cotton fills your mouth with cotton.<\/p>\n

I think we were like planets that passed closer to each other than any astronomer could imagine once in an intergalactic year and now occasionally touch (relatively) in outer orbits. I am afraid of you.<\/p>\n

Fill your mouth with cotton and I will fill mine with words.<\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t you paint and shut your mouth and I\u2019ll kiss it.<\/p>\n

Jack<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To Stan Persky<\/strong>
\nMarch 8, 1959<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Stan,<\/p>\n

Letters are a trap for me as a person and, I suspect, for me as a poet. They\u2019re impure. I\u2019d give a great deal (have given a great deal) not to have written the Alexander ones. Warnings to myself, mostly.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough (for the number of times I am there) your ghost fills up Mike\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it would have made any difference if you\u2019d hugged me or gone to bed with me. We tend (I tend) to confuse what isn\u2019t understood with love although we never do (I never do) when we have love directly to look at as a comparison. There should be about five words for those feelings instead of just one. Baseball players do not make love to each other when passing third base. But on the same team?!<\/p>\n

K and others can\u2019t afford artistically to be honest about boy for boy, man for man love. No work of art can afford to be honest about everything. There are always things in the vision of your own eye that you can\u2019t see. Like that table over the edge of this letter you\u2019re reading. Can\u2019t afford to see.<\/p>\n

One of the five other words about those feelings,
\nJack<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From\u00a0<\/em>Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer<\/a>,\u00a0edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin,<\/em>\u00a0to be published by Wesleyan University Press this September.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\n
Jack Spicer (1925\u20131965) 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 <\/em>After Lorca, <\/em>Billy the Kid,\u00a0<\/em>The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, and <\/em>Language. His works have been collected in <\/em>The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, <\/em>My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, and <\/em>Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEverything that isn\u2019t a miracle isn\u2019t important\u2014and that includes the ego, the libido, and the atomic bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2602,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68530],"tags":[13038,182,68834,68833],"class_list":["post-171091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters","tag-jack-spicer","tag-letters","tag-on-poetry","tag-san-francisco-poets"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLetters from Jack Spicer by Jack Spicer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 25, 2025 \u2013 \u201cEverything that isn\u2019t a miracle isn\u2019t important\u2014and that includes the ego, the libido, and the atomic bomb.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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