Letter from the Editor
Written by
Joseph Hamilton
Editor in Chief
Dear reader,
I recently came across the Uncollected Poetry and Plays of the late San Francisco poet and queer icon Jack Spicer in the fairly sad poetry section of Foyles Tottenham Court Road. The copy I slid out to check its price was the last one left—maybe the only one there ever was, given the complete absence of any other Spicer title. I saw that this huge edition, be brave to things, published by Wesleyan UP in 2021, was edited by Daniel Katz, an English professor of mine when I was at Warwick. This connection, seeming beyond incidental, collided with a memory of reading Spicer’s micro-series Three Marxist Essays about a year ago, and was enough for me to part ways with just shy of twenty pounds. For an Uncollection, the premise of which Katz explains in his wonderful introductory notes, firsts are complicated. However, coincidences compounding, it is the very first poem from the very first section of the book—Spicer’s early semi-epistolary works—that has provided recourse to some poetic dead-ends I have been lost in as of late. I’ll excise the poem in full, if just for my own enjoyment:
TO JOSEPHINE MILES
Within an ever-circular domain
Home of lost orbits and tangential stuff
She snakes her sentences obtsuse enough
To arc the angled circuit and escape.
Jack Spicer
I have had in mind an ongoing creative-critical project centred around political inheritances. The project’s scope has forced me on many occasions to ask When are we writing? It’s a flexible (sort of limp) notion which, in addressing head-on, and therefore putting to one side other pressing matters of how and where, often results in a blush of poetic insecurity. So I’ll borrow from Spicer, who himself had a theory rooted in the how of poetry, his idea of the poet as a radio receiving transmissions from Martians or “The Outside”, that their poems are products of intercepted messages. From Spicer’s how, an answer to the where of poetry is partly clear, though no less psychedelic: we down here are receptors to what is going on up there. (Admittedly, the “lost orbits” of the poem above confuse things slightly.) Nonetheless, Spicer offers a spatial plane to work with. As for when, there is work to be done. How do poems tell the time—as historical subjects, as objects of temporal conditions—within this strange network of extraterrestrial emitters and human radios?
I feel dragged toward some of the most repressive features of modernity, particularly of modern life’s reduction to the present (Jameson). How do we account for our inability to trace histories and project futures, given the prevailing feeling of late-stage capitalism that everything seems to be happening all the time, all at once, in a blur? Spicer’s theory implies a similarly dominant present moment, the crucial instant when contact with “The Outside” is made. And yet this first poem of Katz’s Uncollection immediately suggests an alternative, and realises a contradiction. Spicer here speaks of his own poet-professor Josephine Miles, her sentences depicted as capable of navigating the overwhelming interconnectedness of life. A continuity or metaphysical movement is described. The final line’s “escape” offers a trajectory born out of (and vectored away from) this “ever-circular” realm of the present.
Whether Spicer is completely disavowing modernity’s cycles, I am unsure. There is perhaps as much to gain from this disorienting muddle of “tangential stuff” as there is from its navigation. The tenuous linkages alone, like my own connection to this book, derive a relational poetics. But I can’t help but align with the emotion (the certainty!) of Spicer’s “escape” through Miles and away from this messy present, even if I am left with the problem of exactly what this means.
As of now, escape occurs as a series of returns, to the question of when?, to Spicer of whom I still know far too little, to Daniel Katz’s Thursday afternoon Literature and Psychoanalysis class. Escape appears as the breach, whereby elements, little by little, develop their relations, whereby teachers, places, poems, almost forgotten, recur in unpredictable concert with one another in the emptiest corner of Central London bookshops. Escape even escapes my desire for conclusion or schema, warps the fixity of language, and complicates our cohabitation with the Martians we write through. But in the fog of escape, we recognise, alongside Spicer, the faintest suggestion of a new temporality.
The poems that make up Edition 002 of boundby astutely account for quiet local cycles, transcribe the uncanny quirks of language, and look to redress the processual rhythms of flattened time. These multi-dimensional works offer an excuse to return, and a reason to chart potential escapes.
–– Joseph, September 2025
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 2012
Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lectures, 1965