Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) he loses his balance for a moment, slips into being who he is, uses his poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead man.

—Jack Spicer

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