Jack Spicer Quotes & Sayings

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope. — Jack Spicer

No love is Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries ... — Jack Spicer

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
— Jack Spicer

See how weak prose is ... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. — Jack Spicer

At least we both know how shitty the world is. You wearing a
beard as a mask to disguise it. I wearing my tired smile. I
don't see how you do it. One hundred thousand university
students marching with you. Toward
A necessity which is not love but is a name. — Jack Spicer

In hell it is difficult to tell people from other people. — Jack Spicer

One Night Stand"

Listen, you silk-hearted bastard,
I said in the bar last night,
You wear those dream clothes
Like a swan out of water.
Listen, you wool-feathered bastard,
My name, just for the record, is Leda.
I can remember pretending
That your red silk tie is a real heart
That your raw wool suit is real flesh
That you could float beside me with a swan's touch
Of casual satisfaction.
But not the swan's blood.
Waking tomorrow, I remember only
Somebody's feathers and his wrinkled heart
Draped loosely in my bed. — Jack Spicer

Well Dennis you don't have to hear any
of the mountain music they play here.
Telling the young lies so that they can learn to get old.
Favouring them
with biscuits. "It's a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to
Danville, declension on a three mile grade." In either case
collision course. You either pick up the music or you don't. — Jack Spicer

Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap? — Jack Spicer

ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN
BUT IT TAKES A GODDESS
TO GET OUT OF ONE. — Jack Spicer

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. — Jack Spicer

Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
- from Thing Language — Jack Spicer

And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think it has some definite basis to it. I'm not sure what. It's like telekinesis, which I know very well on a pinball machine is perfectly possible. — Jack Spicer

The poet is stepping out of the airplane. — Jack Spicer

Beauty is so rare a th
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card
- from 15 False Propositions Against God [1958] — Jack Spicer

The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy, — Jack Spicer

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person. — Jack Spicer