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Jack Spicer Biography

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

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Jack Spicer Quotes

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.

Know, Name, Names, Tired, University, University Students

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

Difficult, Hell, People, Tell

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.

Attract, Bars, Prose, Speak, Trying, Two

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.

Heart, Life, Loneliness, Loses, Poet, Writing

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.

Drag, Push, Real, Rope, Tied, Use

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

Boundaries, Love, Love Is, Ocean, Sea

The poet is stepping out of the airplane.

Airplane, Poet, Stepping

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.

Forth, Like, Mean, Thinking, Tree

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.

Embalmer, Mechanic, Poet, Time

The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy.

Dead, Hard, Notoriously, Satisfy

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry.

Loneliness, Necessary, Poetry, Pure

Jack Spicer Biography

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