After decades of work, AFS English teacher and scholar Daniel Benjamin has just released a collection of 20th century poet Jack Spicer's letters with Wesleyan University Press, bringing the poet back into the public imagination and discourse. Known for his fierce integrity, experimental style, and commitment to creative community, Spicer helped shape the landscape of 20th-century American poetry. We sat down with Daniel to hear a bit more about his work, why he connects with Spicer as a poet, and what Spicer has to tell us today.

Q: To begin, can you share a little about your own journey: how you came to poetry, and to Jack Spicer’s work?

When I was in 11th grade, my English teacher, Kip Zegers, introduced me to the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane Di Prima. I was hooked! My high school librarian, Eugene Lim, led me further down the path of experimental mid-20th century poetry, leading me to Robert Creeley and Susan Howe. Both Mr. Zegers and Mr. Lim were writers themselves, in addition to being teachers.

In college, I majored in philosophy but I continued to be excited by poetry, working on my college’s literary magazine and attending poetry readings on campus and at bookstores around Chicago. A friend suggested I read Spicer’s first book After Lorca (1957), which is a translation of and invocation to the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was killed for his homosexuality and left-wing politics in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. In the book, Spicer writes letters to Lorca and even invokes Lorca to write an “introduction” describing Spicer’s translation. Spicer mixes in some original poems that are like Lorca’s among the translations, creating what “Lorca” describes in the introduction as “rather the effect of an unwilling centaur.”

I wrote much of my PhD on Spicer and the way that he used poetry to create community. Spicer was gay and he was involved with the Mattachine Society, an early gay activist group in the 1950s. He also was committed to building writing groups, workshops, and literary magazines inside and outside of formal literary institutions.

My mentor in studying Spicer was Kevin Killian, a wonderful poet, novelist, playwright, art writer, and scholar, who wrote Spicer’s biography and co-edited the definitive collection of Spicer’s poetry. In 2019, when I had finished my dissertation, Kevin asked me if I wanted to collaborate on finishing editing Spicer’s letters, a project that he had begun with another scholar, Kelly Holt, in the early 2000s. Kevin was dying of cancer. After his passing, I worked to finish editing the book, which was just recently released this year.

Q: For those who may not be familiar, who was Jack Spicer, and why is he such a significant figure in 20th-century American poetry?

Spicer was born in Los Angeles in 1925, but he sometimes gave his year of birth as 1946—that’s the year that he met his two closest friends, Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, at UC Berkeley. The three gay poets imagined themselves as a second coming of the Renaissance troubadours remaking poetry, and they ostentatiously called themselves “The Berkeley Renaissance.” 

In 1950, Spicer was fired from his grad student instructor job at Berkeley for refusing to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath. Right-wing state legislators had insisted that Berkeley solve its “Communist problem” and Berkeley’s president instituted a requirement that all professors and instructors sign an oath avowing that they were not Communists. Spicer was not a Communist, but he refused on principle. Hundreds of instructors were fired. I find Spicer’s integrity and bravery inspiring at this moment when academic freedom is similarly under attack. As part of my research for this book, I uncovered new details about Spicer’s activism, and I wrote about my findings and the connections with the present moment.

Spicer moved to the University of Minnesota. He returned in 1952 when Berkeley modified its oath, but he never completed his PhD. In the mid-50s, Spicer created an influential art gallery known as the “6” with some of his students. In an influential series of lectures, Spicer considers the power of occult forces to shape literary creativity. Spicer developed a strong following, published several books, created a press, and edited a literary magazine. He gathered with younger poets to discuss writing at bars and parks in San Francisco. In 1965, he died of alcoholism-related causes.

In the decades since his passing, Spicer has gone from a cult figure to a canonical writer. His poetry, sometimes painfully, explores the contours of community and personal connection.

Q: What was the editorial process like? How do you approach shaping such a large and diverse set of correspondence?

When I started working on this project in 2019, Kevin and Kelly had a nearly-complete manuscript of the letters with most of them dated and in order and some of the endnotes complete. My main work involved completing the endnotes, tracking down details about Spicer’s correspondents and the people who he mentions. I found a number of new letters along the way which I edited as well.

I was in frequent email contact with librarians at UC Berkeley, the University of Buffalo, and UC San Diego. I took a research trip to the Beinecke Library at Yale University to follow some traces in Kevin’s papers. But most of my work was done during evenings, early mornings, and, when my kids were babies, sometimes in the middle of the night between feedings.

The book is almost like a second biography of Spicer, telling the story of his life in letters. I wrote an introductory note for each section contextualizing the letters in Spicer’s life. I also wrote a longer introduction to the whole book situating Spicer’s letters in his poetics and in his writing as a whole. 

Q: As you immersed yourself in Spicer’s letters, did you notice your relationship with him, as a poet or as a literary figure, evolving?

I had to grapple with some challenging elements in Spicer’s letters. Many of the letters are tender and kind, but some are quite stinging. Spicer was deeply curious about how the experience of gay people compared to the experiences of other oppressed groups, but sometimes that curiosity comes out in his letters through anti-semitic, racist, sexist, and homophobic language.

Kevin Killian said about his work on Spicer that he went back and forth between overidentifying with him, then hating him for all his flaws, before finally reaching a third stage where “you seek the balance between the good and the evil in your subject and find the actual person somewhere in there. I don't know, maybe that's how friendship works in regular life?”

Q: What collection or individual poem of Spicer’s would you recommend as an introduction to his work?

I would first recommend After Lorca, Spicer’s book which includes translations, faux translations, and letters to his dead queer poet ancestor. The letters are full of confounding and beautiful statements where Spicer says things like, “A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.” The book was recently republished in a small paperback edition from NYRB Books.

A few years ago, many AFS ninth grade students read a short poem by Spicer called “Any fool can get into an ocean.” Spicer compares oceans to poems, and poems to labyrinths, and labyrinths to love and memory: “But when you’ve tried the blessed water long/ Enough to want to start backward/That’s when the fun starts.”

And of course I’d recommend the letters. Here are a couple of favorite quotes from the book. From a letter to JoAnn Low, a painter and former student of Spicer’s:

“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).”

From a letter to Spicer’s best friend, Robin Blaser: “Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.”

From a letter to a young poet, James Alexander, who Spicer had befriended:

“There are people that talk about poetry like tired insurance clerks talk about baseball. They must be destroyed by our silence. Even the hatred of them interrupts the conversation that our poems wish to continue. Even the mention of them makes it me talking, crashes into paradox that was their truth. We do not write for each other. We are irritable radio sets (but the image of the talking head of a horse on the wall in Cocteau’s first Orpheus was a truer image) but our poems write for each other, being full of their own purposes, no doubt no more mysterious in their universe than ours in ours. And our lips are not our lips. But are the lips of heads of poets. And should shout revolution.”

Q: What about Spicer’s work still resonates today? Is there something that he brings to the moment?

I think that Spicer’s fierce integrity and loyalty to art and poetry will continue to resonate deeply with poets and artists. He speaks powerfully in his writing and in his letters about what it means to commit yourself to writing, to follow the paths of poetry even when they involve personal risks. I think that Spicer’s example will resonate for as long as poets and artists have to figure out how to live in a world that isn’t always conducive to creative and resistant ways of thinking.

More particular to this moment, Spicer’s bravery during the California loyalty oath struggle is inspiring to me in light of the ways that students and professors are taking action to defend freedom of thought today.

Q: Finally, what’s next for you—either in your own scholarship, teaching, or writing?

I think that more loose threads to do with Spicer are going to emerge, and hopefully be tied up, now that the letters have been published. For example, I recently heard from one of Spicer’s few surviving correspondents who actually lives in Bucks County. He’s one of the people whose story I struggled to track down in my research, so I’m hoping to meet him in person and learn more about his life. 

Separate from scholarship, I’m excited about how AFS’s student newspaper, The Blue and White, has been growing this year. Our students have a keen eye for truth and justice, and their integrity inspires me in the same way that Spicer’s does.

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Daniel Benjamin will be hosting a reading at the University of Pennsylvania's Creative Writing Program on Thursday, November 20 called Jack Spicer at 100: A Conversation with Daniel Benjamin (co-editor of Spicer's Collected Letters). Register.