Jack Spicer

“There’s a big difference between talking as a teacher, which is easy, and talking as a poet, which is heartbreakingly difficult if you want to talk honestly.”

Jack Spicer, in a letter to Robert Duncan, 1955:
“… the best way to get a method for a new description of poetics is to look at the failures and successes of such things in other arts. Color theory for painting gives, I think, the most exact analogy. What we need is a color wheel for sounds.”

I’m not certain of their faces
Or which I kissed or which I didn’t
Or which of them I hadn’t.
-from "Several Years' Love"

“The point is then, if you’re poets—not too many flashbulbs, huh?—you out to figure out what the power system is within your own community. Your enemy is simply something which is going to try to stop you from writing poetry.”
-from Lecture 4: “Poetry and Politics”

Click Here for more about Jack Spicer.