{Photograph} by Robert Berg, 1954.

To JoAnn Low

Postmark: April 20, 1955
975 Sutter Road, Residence C
San Francisco

Expensive JoAnn,

I do know simply what you imply. I really feel it myself, in fact, within the bars and the college and different locations I dwell—extra now even than I did a couple of years in the past. The reply (and a poor one) is that this, I feel—you’ll be able to solely talk with one other human being by a miracle and you need to wait patiently for miracles and imagine in them a little bit too. Nonsense helps (however it must be the correct of nonsense), energy of perception helps (however it must be the type that doesn’t curdle up inside you and turn into desires), and magic helps essentially the most (however it must be the sort of magic that’s not ventriloquism—the voices can’t be your personal). Every little thing that isn’t a miracle isn’t necessary—and that features the ego, the libido, and the atomic bomb.

However, you’ll say, 3 o’clock within the morning comes so fairly often—it lasts so lengthy within the evening and tugs on the fringe of you a lot of the day. That’s 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—however the best of those is miracle.

Jack

To Graham Waterproof coat
Saturday, November 27, 1954

975 Sutter Road, Residence C
San Francisco

Expensive Mac,

Though it’s quite unbelievable that you’ve got mail name on Sunday, I’ve determined to maintain to the emergency schedule of letters. That is simply concerning the final of the soccer Saturdays (it’s the 1st quarter of the Military-Navy recreation as I write this) so naturally this letter could have footballs flying throughout it.

I’ve talked about earlier than that the hope of accomplishment of what would appear unattainable is finest demonstrated by what occurs in soccer video games. The previous 4th quarter story. What I would point out at present is the psychology of the participant who has to reply to a 4th quarter 0-21 scenario. I can think about that earlier than the burst of vitality and confidence the star participant has one by means of the sport feeling that issues will not be actual, doing what in chess is named pushing wooden. Then all of the sudden, I suppose, the sector stands out in sharp readability; he feels as if he had woke up from a sudden sleep. That guard that was so arduous to get by is all of the sudden no impediment; he’s just like the stone you have been attempting to push away in your dream that seems to be a heavy blanket bunched about your head if you get up. It doesn’t appear to him that he’s utilizing the final sources of vitality however quite that he’s the one dwell man amongst useless males, the one waker amongst sleepwalkers.

However how does this waking come, how does the soul awaken from the sluggish nightmare, the 0-21 impediment? If I knew, I’d offer you instructions. How does one go about waking up from a dream—the sort of afternoon fever dream the place you understand you’re asleep however can’t appear to make your self get up. (Each time you stand up from the place you’re sleeping you discover that you just’ve merely dreamed that you just’ve gotten up.) I don’t know the way it’s achieved however one does lastly get up. Homer all the time attributes the waking up course of in his warriors to the gods. Maybe that’s the best way with you. Bacchus is attempting to forestall you from attending to India and Venus or Jupiter will wake you up. From soccer to the Portuguese Navy in two paragraphs.

And that’s the tip of this Saturday’s teaching. I can’t assist getting a malicious pleasure out of the very fact the Collected Letters of Jack Spicer are so stuffed with soccer. The students who edit them will hate this. Which jogs my memory—I’ve been rereading all I’ve of the collected works of Graham Macintosh they usually appear higher than ever. You’ll be an excellent athlete.

Navy simply made a final second landing. The half ends 21-20.

Yours
Jack

To the editors of The Pound Publication
Ca. 1955

It appears to me that the spirited however peripheral change of insults between Mr. Kenner and Mr. Parkinson in your final situation tends to obfuscate the crucial query that Mr. Parkinson had beforehand raised. Anti-semitism, like each different concept or crotchet of the poet’s thoughts, will be an unimportant biographical element or a necessary vital situation. All of it relies on the way it impacts the best way his poetry, not he, sees the world.

Nobody offers a rattling whether or not Wallace Stevens is a Republican or a Democrat, however a person can be an fool to attempt to perceive the Divine Comedy with out figuring out what kind of Ghibelline or Guelph Dante was. It’s merely rude to wonder if Cowper was an lively gay, however it’s of central significance to Whitman’s poetry to find whether or not or not he was. Was W. C. Fields a crypto-Stalinist? Who cares? Is Chaplin? Can one perceive his later motion pictures with out contemplating the query?

There have been three hints of anti-semitism in Pound’s Europe: the social form (starting from the how odd of God perspective of our aunts and uncles to the extra pretentious snobberies of, to call two, Mr. Waugh and Mr. Eliot), the economic-political form (which stems from the truth that the Jews did management many of the cash and governments of Europe within the late nineteenth century), and the paranormal form (which noticed within the Jew an emblem and a scapegoat for the evils of the fashionable world). An evaluation of Pound’s anti-semitism (a posh of all three) would appear to be one of the vital necessary issues {that a} Pound scholar (ugly phrase!) might attempt to clear up, and I can solely attribute the absence of such a dissertation to the truth that there are too many Jews and too many anti-semites on most English schools for the topic to be secure for the employed scholar.

To Donald Allen
September 30, 1957

Expensive Don,

I’ve some new poems, a rash, and a lover. I’ll ship them (the poems that’s) to you in a few days. They embody a quite great Buster Keaton Rides Once more, a few translations, and a few poems that don’t appear to belong in After Lorca.

The Artwork Competition was ghastly. It stored raining (even a thunderstorm) and I refused to go to any of the poetry readings which aggravated all people. I did see a really humorous puppet play that Jack Gilbert and Gerd Stern wrote about The Place. There was a wonderful puppet of Rexroth. If all this sounds a bit inbred—it was.

That is the primary day of my official looking for a job. I’ve determined to not write any poems whereas I’m trying as a result of if I do write poems then I don’t really feel responsible for not trying and this, whereas it would enrich the literature of the American individuals, will go away me in Aquatic Park stealing meals from the seagulls who, in spite of everything, don’t learn poetry.

Have you learnt the paperback individuals (those you bought Harvey a inventory job with) properly sufficient to write down them a letter telling them that they should discover a place for me of their group? Wouldn’t they want individuals to make spot checks on how the books are displayed on the stands and so forth.? You understand all this significantly better than I and I ought to have talked to you about it severely once I was nonetheless on the town—however I used to be afraid that even planning would interrupt the poetry. Anyway, please inform me the easiest way to method them. This begins to sound like a Hart Crane letter.

I miss you an excellent deal each as a poet and a good friend. Write.

Love
Jack

To Robin Blaser
1958

2208 Parker Road
Berkeley, CA

Expensive Robin,

Apart from the impropriety of the title, the poem you despatched me appears actually one of the best factor you might have achieved since The Starvation of Sound and, uncertainly, one of the best factor you might have achieved. What is critical now could be to suit it someplace, make it (with all its rattling components) part of one thing—as Ginsberg by no means did and Whitman-Olson-Duncan all the time do, to write down poetry that can help it (even by subversion) make it what it’s however can by no means be (no poem can ever be) by itself.

It’s not a “shit-sheet” however you may make it right into a “shit sheet” by not educating the eagles tips on how to converse, by surrendering into silence or reediting your personal silence, by letting the poem stand by itself or, worse, judging it not within the gentle of the poems that you just haven’t written.

I do know you. You’ll have suspicions of it (CLEVER READER) and you’ll accuse it of lies that are solely (can be solely) lies as a result of the opposite poems don’t exist that you’d refuse to write down. Thus Ginsberg and Wieners pop like firecrackers whereas an excellent poet (Blake, Rimbaud, Yeats) why his complete lifetime of writing is one immense soundless explosion.

I exhort you—settle for it (UNCHANGED) and hatch it as an eagle would a basilisk’s egg. Don’t change, shift, cross out sections however allow them to change, shift, cross out themselves as you elevate (the egg raises) an entire household of human-tongued basilisks. The court docket of the gods lies within the poem correctly prolonged into poetry.

And the starfish raping the entire aquarium. How great!

Love,
Jack

To Russell Fitzgerald
1958

Expensive Russ,

Is it love (but or not but) love you need or one thing for the scrapbook? I imply scrapbook within the final sense.

After I first learn the letter I imagined an entire new sentence—“I don’t imply a brand new paediea.”

Consuming cotton fills your mouth with cotton.

I feel we have been like planets that handed nearer to one another than any astronomer might think about as soon as in an intergalactic yr and now often contact (comparatively) in outer orbits. I’m afraid of you.

Fill your mouth with cotton and I’ll fill mine with phrases.

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

Jack

To Stan Persky
March 8, 1959

Expensive Stan,

Letters are a entice for me as an individual and, I believe, for me as a poet. They’re impure. I’d give an excellent deal (have given an excellent deal) to not have written the Alexander ones. Warnings to myself, principally.

Oddly sufficient (for the variety of occasions I’m there) your ghost fills up Mike’s usually despite the truth that it was solely two (or three?) occasions that we talked and also you all the time had a nasty impact on my pinball.

I don’t suppose it might have made any distinction when you’d hugged me or gone to mattress with me. We have a tendency (I have a tendency) to confuse what isn’t understood with love though we by no means do (I by no means do) when now we have love instantly to have a look at as a comparability. There needs to be about 5 phrases for these emotions as a substitute of only one. Baseball gamers don’t make love to one another when passing third base. However on the identical workforce?!

Okay and others can’t afford artistically to be trustworthy about boy for boy, man for man love. No murals can afford to be trustworthy about every part. There are all the time issues within the imaginative and prescient of your personal eye that you would be able to’t see. Like that desk over the sting of this letter you’re studying. Can’t afford to see.

One of many 5 different phrases about these emotions,
Jack

From Even Unusual Ghosts Might be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin, to be printed by Wesleyan College Press this September.