Sporting Life

Painting by Victor Whitmill

SPORTING LIFE


The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios
don't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a
transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram
burns out replacable or not replacable, but not like that
punchdrunk fighter in a bar. The poet
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him
in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with
a champion.

Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the
scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the
invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of
them.

The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
counterpunching radio.

And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even
know they are champions.

Jack Spicer

Published over on Jack Spicer Homepage


1964
copyright © 1975 by the Estate of Jack Spicer
reprinted from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer with the permission of Black Sparrow Press
all materials reprinted with the kind permission of Robin Blaser