Jack Spicer Quotes

#1. The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy,

Jack Spicer

#2. In hell it is difficult to tell people from other people.

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#3. 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

#4. No love is Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries ...

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#5. ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN
BUT IT TAKES A GODDESS
TO GET OUT OF ONE.

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#6. The poet is stepping out of the airplane.

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#7. 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]

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#8. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.

Jack Spicer

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
- from Thing Language

Jack Spicer