<div class="line">The way the light and shadow</div>
<div class="line">Go on with their tug-of-war</div>
<div class="line">While the night busies itself</div>
<div class="line">Behind our backs</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">To catch us by surprise</div>
<div class="line">With a single burnt matchstick</div>
<div class="line">Left in someone’s hand,</div>
<div class="line">Who forgot why he lit it,</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Unless it was for children</div>
<div class="line">To find their way</div>
<div class="line">Through weedy gardens</div>
<div class="line">And narrow back alleys</div>


The Sleep of Prophets

Tralee, Ireland, Days Ago

The Vices of the Evening

<div class="line">The truth is, we are nearer to heaven</div>
<div class="line">Each time we lie down.</div>
<div class="line">Take a look at the cat</div>
<div class="line">Rolled over with its feet in the air.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">A sunny morning after last night’s storm</div>
<div class="line">Is one more invitation to paradise.</div>
<div class="line">So we leapt out of bed</div>
<div class="line">To dress quickly, only to tarry</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Kissing, and fall into bed again,</div>
<div class="line">Astonished to find</div>
<div class="line">The ceiling over our heads,</div>
<div class="line">And not the blue sky.</div>


When I Think About Cats

To Choose Each Other Perpetually

Midsummer

<div class="line">The evening sky is red</div>
<div class="line">And so is the wine I’m drinking.</div>
<div class="line">I’ll stay on right here</div>
<div class="line">At the end of this long pier.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">O world with your traveling horrors,</div>
<div class="line">Cities burning in the distance,</div>
<div class="line">Coffins piled up to the sky,</div>
<div class="line">Martyrs hung like butcher’s carcasses.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Whatever your secret is, sea wind,</div>
<div class="line">Whisper it in my ear and only in my ear</div>
<div class="line">And then let the gulls</div>
<div class="line">Spread over me their ghostly wings.</div>


Women Only Write About Themselves

Malignant

Fried Fish Cafe

<p><em>Review by Howard Rosenberg</em><img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/simicselected.jpg" alt="New and Selected Poems by Charles Simic" align="right" /></p>
<p><small>Houghton Mifflin Harcourt<br />
215 Park Avenue South<br />
New York, NY 10003<br />
ISBN 978-0-547-92828-9 2013<br />
384 pp., $30.00<br />
<a href="http://www.hmhco.com/">www.hmhco.com</a></small></p>
<p>In an interview published in <i>The Paris Review</i>, Charles Simic said, “I love odd words, strange images, startling metaphors, and rich diction, so I’m like a monk in a whorehouse, gnawing on a chunk of dry bread while watching the ladies drink champagne and parade in their lacy undergarments.” That love displays itself in the poems in his new book, <i>New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012, </i>most of it culled from thirteen of his earlier works.</p>
<p>Almost hidden near his latest book’s end are the new poems. Many didn’t captivate me as much as ones in his previous works, such as <i>Master of Disguises’ </i>“Summer Storm”: Its style reminds me of Linda Pastan’s, one of my favorite poets. For me, poems need to tell a story that I can invent from, expand upon. In “Summer Storm,” its final quintain both ended the poem and initiated my imagination’s journey. The “deepening quiet” that enters the poem surrounded me as my eyes lingered on its lines. Of the sixteen new ones, six are discussed below, beginning with “I’m Charles” and ending with “In the Egyptian Wing of the Museum.”</p>
<p>“I’m Charles” is the first-person, one-stanza account of its narrator</p>
<blockquote><p>Swaying handcuffed<br />
On an invisible scaffold,<br />
Hung by the unsayable<br />
Little something<br />
Night and day take turns<br />
Paring down further.</p></blockquote>
<p>Battling writer’s block, the narrator struggles to express the “unsayable,” warring with a deadline that’s effecting his “last-minute contortions,” the poem animating the difficulty of expressing what’s just beyond the mind’s reach. Rather than relating to the experience literally, Simic mutates it, transfiguring it into a scene whose similes, metaphors, and personifications could have captured Poe’s attention. However, what I enjoyed most was the poem’s abstraction, first a distraction and then an attraction.</p>
<p>“Things Need Me” further displays Simic’s skill at animating the inanimate. Its opening lines, “City of poorly loved chairs, bedroom slippers, frying pans,/ I’m rushing back to you” introduce another narrator—totally different persona, one cognizant of the outer, literal world but not trapped within an internal conflict. The narrator verbally glares at the “heartless people who can’t wait/ To go to the beach tomorrow morning,” people eager to desert the city with its “Dead alarm clock, empty birdcage, piano I’ll never play,” objects the narrator prefers as his companions, “Each one with a story to tell.”</p>
<p>The interaction with the outer world continues in “Lingering Ghosts.” Its narrator asserts, “Give me a long dark night and no sleep,/ And I’ll visit every place I have ever lived,” those lines reflecting Simic’s statement in <i>Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell </i>that “Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.” When told in an interview published on <i>Terrain.org</i> that “many of your poems seem to take place late at night,” he replied, “As for late-night settings in my poems, it’s my lifelong insomnia speaking. I’m usually up when everyone else is snoring away.” The night seems to guide his vision in ways the day cannot.</p>
<p>In “Ventriloquist Convention,” the narrator addresses anonymous others identified in its opening quatrain:</p>
<blockquote><p>For those troubled in mind<br />
Afraid to remain alone<br />
With their own thoughts,<br />
Who quiz every sound<br />
The night makes around them …</p></blockquote>
<p>Then those being addressed are offered an invitation to enter “a room down the hall” where the voices and forms of those not actually there—some deceased— are “All pressing close to you,/ … Leaning into your face,” one person’s “Eyes popping out of his head.” This poem reminds me of those of James Tate, the style change adding spice to Simic’s new poems, its title a lure, its bait worthy of a bite. It’s the second new poem I dwelled upon, treated as a puzzle whose pieces contained a secret I wanted to share.</p>
<p>“Grandpa’s Spells” is another new poem in which the narrator prefers his own company.</p>
<blockquote><p>Bleak skies, short days,<br />
And long nights please me best.<br />
I like to cloister myself<br />
Watching my thoughts roam</p>
<p>Like a homeless family<br />
Holding on to their children<br />
And their few possessions<br />
Seeking shelter for the night.</p></blockquote>
<p>But the narrator’s favorite thought is of “The dark sneaking up on me,/ To blow out the match in my hand.” The dark’s actions are both a personification and a metaphor for death—a frequent guest in Simic’s poems—as the narrator awaits without fear his dispossession from everything tangible.</p>
<p>Life and death also coexist “In the Egyptian Wing of the Museum.” A man and woman engage in coitus against a coffin painted with death’s rituals</p>
<blockquote><p>While the dog-headed god<br />
Weighed a dead man’s heart<br />
Against a single feather,<br />
And the ibis-headed one<br />
Made ready to record the outcome.</p></blockquote>
<p>Preceding the above, final stanza is a middle quintain laden with prepositional phrases—“like an unicyclist,” “up a pyramid,” “in the hands of a magician,” “at a mortician’s convention”—that slow its pace, control its rhythm, and detail the live couple’s unification. Simic’s minimalistic style both sharpens and condenses the reader’s focus and reflects the bond between life and death, creating a verbal representation of the Yin-Yang symbol.</p>
<p>When the new poems’ pull on my attention waned, I returned to earlier times, to poems such as “St. Thomas Aquinas” (in <i>The Book of Gods and Devils)</i>, to its six-line stanza that begins with “I stayed in the movies all day long./ A woman on the screen walked through a bombed city/ Again and again” and ends with “I expected to find wartime Europe at the exit.” For a moment, I was more than a reader. I was an observer, the woman walking away from me, the war outside my door.</p>
<p>Also in <i>The Book of Gods and Devils </i>is “The Little Pins of Memory,” a first-person tale recounting a remembered event, one involving a “child’s birthday suit,” “a tailor’s dummy,” and a store that “looked closed for years.” Though the tale’s revealed to be real, to stimulate my imagination I blurred its border between the real and the surreal, an action that many of Simic’s poems easily allow if not already doing that for the reader.</p>
<p>Another of my favorites is “Listen” (in <i>That Little Something</i>). An apostrophe poem, it begins with</p>
<blockquote><p>Everything about you,<br />
My life, is both<br />
Make-believe and real.</p>
<p>We are a couple<br />
Working the night shift<br />
In a bomb factory.</p></blockquote>
<p>The narrator gives his life a joint existence, treating it as if it’s separate, yet inseparable, one partner a “he,” the other, a “she.” This poem displays Simic’s strength, his ability to mesh seamlessly the real and unreal, using simple language to express complex ideas.</p>
<p>Another earlier poem, “The Common Insects of North America” (in <i>Jackstraws</i>), contains an allure that I wish more of the new poems had. Insects, its narrator proclaims, are all about, “Behind Joe’s Garage, in tall weeds,/ By the snake handler’s church,&#8221; among them, “Painted Beauty,” “Clouded Wood Nymph,” and “Chinese Mantid,” all animated by personification. One insect’s “barefoot and wears shades”; another’s “climbed a leaf to pray.” Further, in Simic’s “scene” the insects are not intruders but more like acquaintances who are asking us, through him, to “Please let us be neighbors” a la Mister Rogers.</p>
<p><i>New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012</i> offers an excellent selection of Charles Simic’s poetry; however, I wish it included one omission: information about the “nearly three dozen revisions” to previously published poems that its front flap states the book contains.</p>
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Virginity

When I Heard About the Gunman

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: 1962-2012

<p><em>Review by Jason Tandon</em></p>
<p><small>Ausable Press (Copper Canyon Press)<br />
Copper Canyon Press<br />
PO Box 271<br />
Port Townsend WA 98368<br />
ISBN-10 1931337403<br />
2008, 128 pp., $14.00<br />
<a href="https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/book.asp?bg={EFACB2C8-C2AD-4E87-9A3E-09181AD80644}">www.coppercanyonpress.org</a></small></p>
<p>Charles Simic&#8217;s <em>The Monster Loves His Labyrinth</em>, a seemingly random collection of notebook entries and sketches, achieves a singular theme: an artist meditating upon his craft. Though neither a polished treatise nor didactic in tone, this book belongs in the 20th century American canon of poetics, somewhere between Eliot&#8217;s &#8220;Tradition and the Individual Talent&#8221; and Frank O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s &#8220;Personism.&#8221;</p>
<p>Part I consists of biographical sketches that shed light on Simic&#8217;s predilection for juxtaposing tragic events with the absurd. He recalls Belgrade during World War Two and his early days in Chicago, establishing the significance of these experiences in his artistic development. He recounts one particular episode that will resonate with any poet: after showing his work to an older, painter friend, the friend responds, &#8220;Simic, I thought you were a smart kid. This is pure shit you&#8217;re writing!&#8221; Simic, recoiling from the unadulterated critique, recalls:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8230;mulling over what he had said, I got pissed off. There were some good things in my poems&#8230;I sat on a bench&#8230;crossing out most of the lines, attempting to rewrite them then and there, still angry, still miserable, and at the same time grimly determined.</p></blockquote>
<p>This stubbornness, bluntness, and unflinching assessment recur in parts II-V, which include clipped proclamations on art, religion, politics, and history:</p>
<blockquote><p>God died and we were left with Emerson. Some are still milking Emerson&#8217;s cow, but there are problems with that milk.</p>
<p>Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping.</p>
<p>Centuries ago, when the king&#8217;s advisers and seers gave wrong predictions as to the outcome of military campaigns, they were tortured and publicly executed. In our days, they continue being called &#8220;experts&#8221; and appear on TV.</p></blockquote>
<p>What will draw most readers to this book are Simic&#8217;s poetic aphorisms. His tenets for writing poetry rest upon linguistic frugality (&#8220;Be brief and tell us everything&#8221;) and unyielding faith in the imagination. He suggests that sight, &#8220;seeing with eyes open and seeing with eyes closed,&#8221; is the poet&#8217;s most important and reliable sense. The fragmentary nature of these entries reflects the central qualities of Simic&#8217;s preferred genre, the lyric poem; yet, the idea of language accurately capturing a heightened state of emotion or recreating a visceral experience leads Simic to his central, paradoxical dilemma:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">How to communicate consciousness&#8230;the present moment lived intensely<br />
that language locked in the temporal order of the sentence cannot reproduce?</p>
<p>Much of this dilemma focuses on the conflict between time and space. Words mark time, Simic observes, and a sentence is a unit of time. Therefore, what occurs in the process of writing a lyric poem is the diminishment of temporal suspension and of experience (real or imagined) that initiated the poem. Poets often comment that when they are <em>really writing</em> time falls away, and they try to induce this state by unplugging the phone, locking the door, eliminating interruptions or markers of time.</p>
<p>The element that <em>can</em> combat the constraints of time is space, which Simic defines as the &#8220;attention we pay to each word.&#8221; Language, despite its apparent unity and universally accepted usage, contains multitudes of meanings and associations. It is this ambiguity, a word&#8217;s range of connotations (Simic refers to this as &#8220;non-Euclidian geometries&#8221;) that creates the space in which a reader experiences timelessness. &#8220;A battle against time&#8221; is perhaps the best way to describe the feeling one gets when reading a Simic poem:</p>
<blockquote><p>BUTCHER SHOP<br />
Sometimes walking late at night<br />
I stop before a closed butcher shop.<br />
There is a single light in the store<br />
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.</p>
<p>An apron hangs on the hook:<br />
The blood on it smeared into a map<br />
Of the great continents of blood,<br />
The great rivers and oceans of blood.</p>
<p>There are knives that glitter like altars<br />
In a dark church<br />
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile<br />
To be healed.</p>
<p>There is a wooden slab where bones are broken,<br />
Scraped clean:—a river dried to its bed<br />
Where I am fed,<br />
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.</p>
<p>(from <em>Dismantling the Silence</em> by Charles Simic)</p></blockquote>
<p>Simic continuously returns to the dilemma of writing poetry, lamenting that &#8220;Language is the Fall from the awe and consciousness of being,&#8221; but he is thrilled by the possibility of &#8220;making[ing] something that doesn&#8217;t exist, but which after its creation would look as if it had always existed.&#8221; He concludes that &#8220;Lyricism, in its truest sense, is the awe before the untranslatable&#8230;A great lyric poem must approach untranslatability,&#8221; a line of thinking that precipitates his thoughts about literary theory: &#8220;A high school student reading an ancient Chinese poem and being moved—a theory of literature that cannot account for that commonplace miracle is worthless.&#8221;</p>
<p><em>The Monster Loves His Labyrinth</em> is a perfect companion to any handbook that deals explicitly with forms and figures of speech. It reminds us that writing poetry in and of itself is a supreme pleasure, and that poetry is an art and language its medium. Simic occasionally offers glimpses into his writing process—&#8221;Chance [is] a tool with which to break up one&#8217;s habitual associations. Once they&#8217;re broken, use one of the pieces to launch yourself into the unknown,&#8221; intimating that truth can always be sacrificed for the sake of the poem—offerings that encourage poets to reflect upon their poetics, a constantly evolving hodge-podge of touchstones, departures, and obsessions of language, image, and memory. Simic returns an air of mystery to poetic composition, when chance, happy accidents, and the hard work of revision produce a poem that prompts even its creator to marvel, &#8220;I wrote that?&#8221;</p>
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January 10, 2023The Vices of the EveningCharles Simic

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January 10, 2023The Vices of the EveningCharles Simic

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