What makes a great poem? It’s time to re-read a favorite Any fool can get into an ocean by Jack Spicer Any fool can get into an ocean But it takes a Goddess To get out of one. What’s true of oceans is true, of course, Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming Through riptide…
Tag: Jack Spicer
Fools Like Us
It’s time to re-read a favorite poem Any fool can get into an ocean by Jack Spicer Any fool can get into an ocean But it takes a Goddess To get out of one. What’s true of oceans is true, of course, Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming Through riptide of rhythms and the…
Summing things up – the best literary experience 2012:
Any fool can get into an ocean BY JACK SPICER Any fool can get into an ocean But it takes a Goddess To get out of one. What’s true of oceans is true, of course, Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed You need to be a…
A Thousand Mornings
There’s something about the ocean – Mary Oliver (b. 1935) I have just recently posted the two ocean-poems; “Any fool can get into an ocean” & “Thing Language” by Jack Spicer. Today I’ve viewed the ocean from a new perspective, through the eyes of Mary Oliver in her wonderful new book of poems called A Thousand Mornings….
A Drop of Spicer
I’d like to start my week with a short poem by Jack Spicer, I think you should too; Thing Language This ocean, humiliating in its disguises Tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean Does not mean to be listened to. A drop Or crash of water. It means Nothing. It Is bread…
My Vocabulary Did This to Me
The ground still squirming. The ground still not fixed as I thought it would be in an adult world. – Jack Spicer This is what I will do today; I will try to find a way, a path, an opening … into the work of Jack Spicer. It seems like the most important assignment, I’m not yet sure why,…
“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
Remember the Faulkner saying I quoted some days ago: “In writing, you must kill all your darlings”… Here is an interesting continuation: From his 1957 book After Lorca onward, the American poet Jack Spicer (1925-65) wrote what he described as “dictated” poetry. For Spicer, the poet acts as a receptive host for language, rather than as an agent of…
sub rosa 