A Conversation with Spencer Reece

In May of 2025, Spencer Reece won the prestigious John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his significant contribution to American literature, given to an artist for their entire body of work, alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, Don DeLillo, Angela Davis, and Marie Howe. Reece is the rector of the historic St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island. Love IV: Collected Poems will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the fall of 2030. His poetry appeared this past April in The New Yorker.

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In the fall of 2016, I sat with Spencer Reece for many slow, lingering meals under a pergola stitched with ivy at Civitella Ranieri, an artist colony nestled in the hills of Umbria, Italy. The air was warm with late light, the table always set with bread, fruit, and the kind of quiet utterances that invites conversation to stretch itself out. I had come to Civitella as an emerging writer. Reece, in my eyes, was fully emerged—a poet of astonishing range and presence, capacious with life and poetic wisdom. Every conversation with him, whether about poetry, faith, hardship, or joy, felt like an education in how to live as much as how to write.

Reece has been one of my great teachers, though I found him not in a classroom but in the living world. His wisdom is hard-won and deeply lived: shaped by years working as a store clerk at Brooks Brothers in Florida, teaching at an orphanage in Honduras, and later serving as secretary to a bishop in Madrid. His experiences remind us that it is not the cloistered act of writing alone, but the continual action of life and service, that begets poetry—and that poetry itself requires constant acts of faith. It was an honor to sit with him and talk about his tremendous collection Acts, published last year by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Kimberly Grey: Let’s begin where we met: beautiful Civitella. What do you remember most about your experience there? Did you have a writing schedule or ritual you adhered to? I know you were working on The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir, because I remember sitting on the couch in your studio as you read excerpts to me. Were you also writing the poems that would find their way into Acts? Did the writing of that memoir inform the writing of Acts in any way?

Spencer Reece: I was invited to Civitella in 2016, almost ten years ago. I lived in Madrid, Spain, then, working for the Episcopal bishop of Spain. The bishop allowed me to take a six-week leave to attend Civitella. I went in the fall where I met you in that fifteenth-century castle given to the world by Ursula Corning. God bless Ursula. I was in the room where Mark Strand had once been. The first three days there, with the Umbrian umber and gold landscape, I slept. I slept for ten hour stretches. My work with the bishop had exhausted me more than I knew. Then I began my work. An editor at Granta magazine, Luke Niema, from London, encouraged me to work on The Secret Gospel of Mark. The kernel of that book began as a memory of James Merrill that Luke Niema had solicited. The poet’s memoir, a prose book on how poetry saved my life, was a seventeen-year project. With my peripatetic life as a priest, prose sets a different challenge than poetry. Poems seem to roll around in my head and I pick them up and put them down as the decades pass. But with the prose I needed sustained attention, especially that book: I needed to remember and retain what happened on page 9 when I was on page 299. Civitella allowed me to think through the whole project without interruptions. I woke early with the sun, ate breakfast, worked until the late afternoon, then reread what I’d done, every day for six weeks. I’ve never had such a sustained period of work with writing before or since. More drafts followed after Civitella, but that room on the second floor and the meals prepared for us got me closer. I don’t think I worked on poems then. No time.

Writing the memoir did affect my life. The memoir increased my gratitude for all the people and poems and poets that helped me. Acts, the poems that followed the memoir, written over ten years or so, winnow my sound with more clarity. I craved the lyric after having wrestled so many sentences to the mat. The Road to Emmaus was prosy. It had prose poems! The Book of Acts in the Bible follows the Gospels. Taking my cue from that ordering, I was concerned with what happens in real time after the Gospels when I wrote Acts. How does the spirit spread in front of my face as a priest? The Gospel had to come before I could bring that into the world, I suppose. I was working the line between the past and the present with these two projects. In the writing of the memoir, finally, I did not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. Topics of how alcoholism had affected those I loved most and coming into a greater peace with being me, all this I think, I can now see, were clarified for me as I wrote the memoir, which was a self-portrait in the nude: that affected the poems. And once done, it doesn’t need to be done again.

Louise Glück, whom I miss, was passionate and greedy in telling us to use whatever materials were possible to make our poems. I felt that way with the memoir; it was affecting the new sound I was making in the poems. Curious isn’t it that when I finally set out to write a book of prose, a memoir, in my late fifties, that the thing became entirely about poetry? “I’m mad for poetry,” I thought when the seventeen years were finished. Why, Kimmy, who’s to say? It is the art I love most. The Secret Gospel of Mark was my autobiography told through the poets and their poems that saved my life, and Acts was concerned with the autobiography of the Holy Spirit. The Secret Gospel of Mark came out in the pandemic, and I have given only one public reading from it in person, at Bennington, years after the publication date. The book came out quietly: apparently, that was the way that book was meant to enter the world. That quiet entrance informs me and pleases me, strangely.

KG: Can you tell us more about the process of writing Acts? Where and how does a book begin for you?

SR: I have written a book of poetry every decade since forty. That has not been on purpose, but more organic. The first book took twenty years, and I often wondered, while writing it, if my work would ever be seen by a public. I suppose that made me cautious. Or perhaps it made me patient: I had often been impatient. Poetry, and publishing it, taught me a great patience. I write quickly. I write slowly. An idea comes to me, and if the idea or the tune persists, I start writing it down. I frequently go through hundreds of drafts. I’ve only written one poem in my work that came quickly and required only a few drafts. That poem from my first book is called “Autumn Song.” I mainly wrote Acts on the office computer when the bishop was traveling, and I was in the office alone for the day. Although I never told him this, I am certain he had suspicions. Curiously, I always meditate on a visual artist and their work like some kind of icon throughout the decade that I write a book: the image is usually somewhere in the notebook where I collect the poems. The Clerk’s Tale was John Singer Sargent. The Road to Emmaus was Diane Arbus. Acts was Diego Velasquez. I am always trying to make a new sound with each book, a sound that I haven’t heard, that surprises me. 

KG: To turn more deeply toward Acts, one of the early poems in the book, “Letters from Spain,” unfolds as a long poem in multiple sections, documenting one’s time living and working for a bishop in Madrid. In “Navidad,” the speakers tell us, “This city [is] where poetry died.” Tell us about Madrid and Madrid’s history and its influence on this book and your poetics.

SR: I wound up in Madrid as a kind of wild accident: I was invited for a year after I was ordained on the Amy Lowell traveling grant and ended up staying for a decade! The city, the country, changed my aesthetic entirely. A new language—grammar, vocabulary, expressions—entered my brain in my forties and scrambled the way I thought about everything. It is humbling to acquire language at forty-five. Humbler still to be speaking it in public every weekend under the guise of providing spiritual support to many. I managed. Gradually through classes, films, books, the whole place began to cure in my brain. The Civil War seemed to largely remain just under the service of most conversations. I began to read the Civil War poets and that changed my poetics. Lorca and Machado are gorgeous. Sarah Arvio has brilliantly translated Lorca. I can’t ever repay how much that country gave to me from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.

KG: Those two figures, Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado, occur repeatedly in these poems, the former of whom was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War for being both socialist and queer. Talk to us about their influence on you as a poet. How would you describe yourself as connected to and/or in conversation with them aesthetically, politically, spiritually?  

SR: Well, while I lived there, working long hours as the secretary to the bishop, an author series erupted in my off hours and among the many writers and personalities I met and celebrated there, including you. I met, one day, Laura García Lorca, the niece of Lorca, and meeting her was like meeting all of Spain, the sorrow and the injustice and the passion and the elegance seemed contained in this beautiful woman. I liked her very much and that affected me. Lorca was a genius; the poems contain all different registers. His queerness I probably gravitate to without even knowing why, much the way I read Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop in college and I felt like they were talking to me. Machado for me writes exquisitely of longing and there is a measured patience about his words which I associate with Spain. When I visited his house in Segovia, the rooms spoke to me. Spain taught me to live and to love in ways that were different to me as an American. And these poets, all run over by a dictatorship, were waiting for me in the cracks, in the books, in the air, when I arrived as a brand new priest in a foreign country. I felt them with me all the time. Still do.  

KG: The epistolary form is a large part of the speaker’s thinking. We are told that, “Letters started in the Book of Acts . . . a biography of the Holy Spirit.” Early in the book, the Palacio de Cibeles is described as a, “grand post office / [that] is now a museum. The letter slots sealed?” How has the epistle form influenced your poetry or vice-versa? Do you see letters as having different kinds of conversations than poems? A way of tracking biography? A dying art?

SR: Yes. Letters and the writing of letters are largely gone now from the culture. The way we used to write them. When I was in college with my manual typewriter, I would send out two or three a week. Letters made a certain intimate sound that texting or emails do not. They were slower, more circumspect, letters moved us through our lives in a slower and perhaps more meticulous manner. They had a smell to them. Marie Howe captures this in one of her poems. I wanted this book, one last time, for me, to recall that lovely way we had of communicating. I don’t write letters anymore, I thought, in Madrid, noticing how the post office was turned into a museum and moved to a smaller basement location. My book of poetry will be my letter, I thought. The New Testament, as you know, is largely made of letters, and it begins with Acts, so the title of the book is signaling the letter. Letters were spontaneous and they tracked time. The book is a love letter to Spain, and a love letter to my parents by the end, as I was finishing the book and turning towards the care of my aging parents: my father’s death and my mother’s abrupt diminishment with a massive stroke.

KG: In the section “El año siguiente” you write, “Biblical texts that discount sex are of no use / in a city that excels at the art of the guess.” In addition, there are other references of homophobia the speaker encounters during an AA meeting. Did you find yourself writing differently about queer identity in Acts as opposed to your earlier books The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus?

SR: There’s a question! Yes. I wrote in my poet’s memoir that I didn’t “come out” so much as “came in,” came into myself. I did not readily accept my queerness: I wanted to die rather than deal with my difference. But here I am. Some of the histrionics embarrass me now. It’s not so bad to be me, and this settling into me happened even more during the decade I wrote Acts, that was an act in itself, loving myself and loving my life, and Madrid is a great city to love yourself in and to be loved in, a city of love affairs and liberation: Madrid liberated me and my work. I was somewhat of an uptight American prior to that and by the time I left, the language and the country and the men and the women had changed me. All this led to a deep gratitude for the gifts I have been given, the precious life I’ve had. When you are removed from your country you see your homeland in a different light. My queer identity has evolved. I stress, it has taken a long time for me to settle into myself. No one’s fault. If The Clerk’s Tale was about damage and distance, if Emmaus was about forgiveness and closeness, then Acts is about joy and release, what I am starting to write about now turns more to love and openness, love and some grief, that seems to be the mix in my sixties. I want to celebrate the gift of life.

KG: In the first section of “Tres Crepuscúlos” we are given two axioms for poetry: “I qualify before the old-timers to say poetry / is close to outer space” and “poetry is what we do while we wait / to come into the kingdom where what we see / is not how it went . . . .” The poem ends by saying, “I swear there is not one thing in this universe / . . . that is not buried / with opportunity and desire.” Talk to us about these axioms and how you conceive of poetry’s relationship to opportunity and desire.

SR: I love poetry more than anything else, and I don’t know why. Everything I have done has been in celebration of poetry. My prose book was all about poetry! I can’t explain it exactly. As Dad lay dying he turned to me and said, “Why poetry?” I said, “I don’t know. I just love it. Can’t get enough of the stuff.” Poetry opens ways of thinking: I am not lying when I tell you that more than once the unconscious writing of certain poems has literally called things into the world: a lover once, and then a country in another moment. Be careful what you write! There is a charm and charge with poetry, they are like spells, you know?

KG: Speaking of spells, the poems in “Tres Crepuscúlos” are syntactically complicated by running, enjambed lines and lack of punctuation, quite different from other poems in the book. What is your relationship to the line—the unit of measure in poetry—and what informs your decisions when it comes to the line’s relationship to the sentence in your work?

SR: I’ve tried all kinds of things as I’ve moved along, from a metrical sonnet to a prose poem, and found some measure of success, I think, in each. Those poems you are referring to, the way I indented them, comes from looking at Machado and how his poems were laid out in Spanish bookshops. It’s all fairly organic. I hear a line and see a line and away I go. Some of the poems in this book were influenced by Henri Cole, who recently wrote very short-lined poems and I wanted some of that compression here, which I hadn’t done much of, the punctuation-less poems I felt freed me up some. A bit of W. S. Merwin there too and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Headwaters, a fabulous book if you haven’t read it. Then I wanted bigger and broader canvases which came with the sequences.

KG: You recently published a tremendously gorgeous book of watercolors called All The Beauty Still Left. Acts makes reference to art, beginning with its epigraph by Diane Arbus and then references to painting your mother in “In Solitaria Stanza”: “He will paint his mother / with shades of burgundy, / the color water down / and a mint green accent . . . He always paints what / isn’t there, but is there.” I’m really interested in the final line of this poem: “Painting is the kinder art.” Though elliptical in nature, it seems to be making an implicit statement that writing is the less-kind art. Talk to us about these dual practices of writing and painting as two different ways of rendering people. Do you see one as less-kind?

SR: That line just came to me from the ether. But words can be exacting. Painting is an art I love very much and painting helps me think more and more as I age. I love Hockney for example, all those colors! In the Yorkshire landscape. I love them. But their effect on the soul is so different from a poem, isn’t it? Poetry is close, very close, to painting. But you can be unkind in a poem in a way different from a painting. Words have a different kind of power than tubes of paint. Or so I think. That the mouth is crueler than the eye. You could do a mean portrait, I suppose, as you could do a mean poem: in aging, in loving the world more, that doesn’t interest me in the least. Meanness equates with smallness, and I’m after bigger game in art. I think, in the poem, about my mother aging in her wheelchair, I see the potential for the words to be crueler than anything I might paint. Painting seems kinder.  

KG: By the end of the book the poems turn elegiac in nature, describing the deterioration of the speaker’s parents to dementia and old age. In the last section of “Poeta En Nueva York,” you write: 

 

My dear mother, you drool and have become
someone else, you look back. Grow salty,
have lost language like luggage. My old love,
my love who gave me language that I love,
when there are no words, there are only acts.

 

Act, the noun, is “a thing done, a deed.” Action, the verb form, means “to do something.” Is the poem an act or an action? What about language? What about love?

SR: What a great question. I love the words “act” and “acts.” At some primal level I was thinking about language and Anglo-Saxon sharp syllables, of which we have so many in English, and the languid round sounds of Spanish. I love the way “acts” sounds exactly like “ax” and the only way you know which is which is context. Try explaining that to someone learning English. That said, your question: a poem is an act, a thing created, and it is enacted, embodied like no other thing I can think of. The lines in that poem sort of floated in from outer space. When I got to “there are only acts,” I knew it was right, but I wasn’t even sure what I was saying–only that it was right. I think Elizabeth Bishop felt something like that at the end of “At The Fishhouses.” Like an ax coming down. What does this say about poem-making when there are no words, when words are what make the poem? What use is a poem that cannot save your own mother? I was thinking mightily about language also in this book because my English was going underground half the time in Spain. And my own mother’s disappearance from the stage with her declining health made me think much about her and how she taught me language, the miracle of mothers teaching their children language. All this was on my mind as I sat in Madrid, Madrid being a second mother teaching me another language and to learn that language required many faithful acts.

KG: Can you tell us about what you are working on now?

SR: I am writing some new poems now with the advent of the news that FSG will publish my collected poems, entitled, Love IV: Collected Poems, the title coming from a combined reference to George Herbert’s “Love (III)” and Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III. Nearly all of the ten poems I am working on there have something to do with place–autobiography seems to be fading fast. The New Yorker published one this year. I’ve been absent from the magazine for fifteen years, the amount of time I have been working as a priest, probably no accident. Putting together this book of all my poems over the past forty years, excites me. The book comes out in 2030.