A Quote by Jack Spicer

The poet is stepping out of the airplane. — © Jack Spicer
The poet is stepping out of the airplane.
If you take one rivet out of an airplane, it will be all right, it'll keep flying. You take another rivet out of the airplane and it still flies. So what the heck, let's take more rivets out of the airplane, and sooner or later, the airplane drops from the sky.
One of the appeals of William Carlos Williams to me is that he was many different kinds of poet. He tried out many different forms in his own way of, more or less, formlessness. He was also a poet who could be - he was a love poet, he was a poet of the natural order and he was also a political poet.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
The airplane I usually fly has 450 horse power, and it's all made out of carbon fibre - you can't break it; your body will break before the airplane does.
We had an airplane, a Beechcraft Baron, that we - I had since 1981. And Annie [Glenn] and I both of had to have knee replacements unfortunately over the past year, and it made it more difficult to climb up on the airplane. We weren't using it that much so we did - it hurt a lot but I finally sold the airplane.
It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.
I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror... As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight.
I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.
I got out of Iowa all set to be a poet and a novelist, but you know what? It's really tough to make a living as a poet.
I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
Part of the pleasure of giving a reading comes from the rapport between the audience and the poet. I don't want to get mystical here, but there's an energy flow that begins with the poet, and the energy goes out to the audience, and they're energized, and then they return that energy to the poet. As someone standing up there alone, facing these people, I can feel that rapport (or its absence).
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