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 Poetry Conference in Wheeler as well, weeks before his untimely death at age 40.
The letters that were read at the launch event in September 2025 reflect the range of social entanglements that run through Spicer’s poetics, gesturing to past networks of connection and creating new ones as well…