POEM
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 and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
Jack Spicer, “Thing Language” from My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). Used by permission of Peter Gizzi for The Estate of Jack Spicer.
Source: My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2008)
Spicer was a Beat poet, an associate of Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg, who spent his life . . . MORE »
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