Letters from Jack Spicer

Photograph by Robert Berg, 1954.

To JoAnn Low

Postmark: April 20, 1955
975 Sutter Street, Apartment C
San Francisco

Dear JoAnn,

I know just what you mean. I feel it myself, of course, in the bars and the school and other places I live—more now even than I did a few years ago. The answer (and a poor one) is this, I think—you 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’t 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—the voices can’t be your own). Everything that isn’t a miracle isn’t important—and that includes the ego, the libido, and the atomic bomb.

But, you will say, 3 o’clock in the morning comes so very often—it lasts so long in the night and tugs at the edge of you so much of the day. That is true and there’s nothing one can do about it. A miracle doesn’t destroy the clock, it merely stops it. So, brethren, there abideth these three—despair, diversion, and miracle—but the greatest of these is miracle.

Jack

To Graham Mackintosh
Saturday, November 27, 1954

975 Sutter Street, Apartment C
San Francisco

Dear Mac,

Although it’s rather improbable that you have mail call on Sunday, I’ve 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.

I’ve 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.

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—the kind of afternoon fever dream where you know you’re asleep but can’t seem to make yourself wake up. (Every time you get up from where you’re sleeping you find that you’ve merely dreamed that you’ve gotten up.) I don’t know how it’s done but one does finally wake up. Homer always attributes the waking up process in his warriors to the gods. Perhaps that’s 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.

And that’s the end of this Saturday’s coaching. I can’t 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—I’ve 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.

Navy just made a last second touchdown. The half ends 21-20.

Yours
Jack

 

To the editors of The Pound Newsletter
Ca. 1955

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’s 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.

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’s 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?

There were three hints of anti-semitism in Pound’s 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’s 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.

 

To Donald Allen
September 30, 1957

Dear Don,

I have some new poems, a rash, and a lover. I’ll 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’t seem to belong in After Lorca.

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—it was.

This is the first day of my official searching for a job. I’ve decided not to write any poems while I’m looking because if I do write poems then I don’t 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.

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’t 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—but 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.

I miss you a great deal both as a poet and a friend. Write.

Love
Jack

 

To Robin Blaser
1958

2208 Parker Street
Berkeley, CA

Dear Robin,

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—as 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.

It is not a “shit-sheet” but you could make it into a “shit sheet” 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’t written.

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.

I exhort you—accept it (UNCHANGED) and hatch it as an eagle would a basilisk’s 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.

And the starfish raping the whole aquarium. How wonderful!

Love,
Jack

 

To Russell Fitzgerald
1958

Dear Russ,

Is it love (yet or not yet) love you want or something for the scrapbook? I mean scrapbook in the ultimate sense.

When I first read the letter I imagined a whole new sentence—“I don’t mean a new paediea.”

Eating cotton fills your mouth with cotton.

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.

Fill your mouth with cotton and I will fill mine with words.

Why don’t you paint and shut your mouth and I’ll kiss it.

Jack

 

To Stan Persky
March 8, 1959

Dear Stan,

Letters are a trap for me as a person and, I suspect, for me as a poet. They’re impure. I’d give a great deal (have given a great deal) not to have written the Alexander ones. Warnings to myself, mostly.

Oddly enough (for the number of times I am there) your ghost fills up Mike’s 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.

I don’t think it would have made any difference if you’d hugged me or gone to bed with me. We tend (I tend) to confuse what isn’t 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?!

K and others can’t 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’t see. Like that table over the edge of this letter you’re reading. Can’t afford to see.

One of the five other words about those feelings,
Jack

 

From Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin, to be published by Wesleyan University Press this September.

Jack Spicer (1925–1965) 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 After Lorca, Billy the Kid, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, and Language. His works have been collected in The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer.