A Conversation with Daniel Benjamin (co-editor of Spicer’s Collected Letters)

hosted by: Timmy Straw and Julieta Vittore Dutto

co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Daniel Benjamin received his PhD in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. With Kevin Killian and Kelly Holt, he edited Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). He is the author of an afterword to Jack Spicer’s The Wasps (speCt! Books, 2016). With Eric Sneathen, he co-edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017), and with Claire Marie Stancek, he co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba Press/Giramondo, 2016). His academic articles have appeared in Jacket2, small axe, Contemporary Literature, and European Romantic Review. He teaches English at Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.

About Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared:

The more than 300 letters collected in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared are a crucial component of Jack Spicer’s unique oeuvre, and they radiate with the brilliance, ferocity, and vulnerability that characterizes his poetry. Spicer writes tenderly to lovers and friends in self-reflective series that recall the poetic sequences in My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Letters to elders like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound and to poetic collaborators like Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan provide insight into the inner workings of an avant-garde, and are indispensable documents for students of 20th century American poetry. Writing to younger poets, Spicer offers inspiring words of mentorship — sometimes with a sting — about how to live in total devotion to art. Spicer’s letters paint a unique portrait of the political and personal challenges faced by a gay man at mid-century, including documents from his involvement in the early gay rights movement.