Charles SimicReseñas

Some of these short poems delight me with the poet's everyday metaphors and his sardonic wit like "Looking for a Soul Mate," a sort of dating app description "Recovering puff pastry and almond cookie addict,,,Now seeks a comfortable brownstone free of cats/..And where he'll be free to mingle with bankers and lawyers/And sit in their wives' laps like a much-pampered pet." Or "Meet Eddie" "Whose life is as merry as a beer can/Hurling down a mountain stream...Are you ready to meet your Maker?"
Others didn't work as well for me, like his soulful verse about God and Satan, each playing Solitaire ("Dark Night") or "Passing Through," but I like his dogs, his cats, his fish, his fleas and birds and poems of winter. My favorite was this one (perhaps the emblematic-of-the book?) line "About life being both cruel and beautiful" and "the sight of a dog free from his chain."

"So Early in the Morning"
It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store -
How swiftly I forget her as my own grief
Finds me again - a friend at death's door
And the memory of the night we spent together.

I had so much love in my heart afterward,
I could have run into the street naked
Confident anyone I met would understand
My madness and my need to tell them
About life being both cruel and beautiful,

But I did not - despite the overwhelming evidence:
A crow bent over a dead squirrel in the road,
The lilac bushes flowering in some yard,
And the sight of a dog free from his chain
Searching through a neighbor's trash can.

If you want to read the best review of this book, see s.penkevich https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22752746-the-lunatic?from_search=true&fr...

Curiosando tra i nuovi arrivi in biblioteca, la mia attenzione è stata catalizzata da questo libretto di 150 pagine scarse. Sono rimasta colpita dal titolo: Il mostro ama il suo labirinto. Mi è subito venuto in mente il Minotauro, che, rinchiuso nel Labirinto perché Minosse si vergognava di lui, si suppone odiasse la sua prigione. Invece, Simic ci dice che lo ama: una sorta di Sindrome di Stoccolma dei luoghi. Forse il Minotauro è grato a Minosse per averlo nascosto dalle pubbliche manifestazioni di orrore nei suoi confronti. O forse è solo felice di poter svolgere il suo ruolo di mostro con l'approvazione del re.

Comunque sia, Il mostro ama il suo labirinto è un taccuino, un insieme di pensieri sparsi del poeta. Si va dai suoi ricordi personali a pensieri fulminei (e poco lusinghieri) su politici e intellettuali. A Simic piace stravolgere il modo comune di vedere le cose (e qui ricorda un po' Il dizionario del diavolo di Ambrose Bierce) e spesso ci ricorda la bellezza della corporeità e della carnalità che la religione e il cosiddetto amore puro amano demonizzare e svilire in virtù della presunta superiorità dell'anima e degli alti sentimenti.

”Ti fanno male” mi dicono i miei amici. Come se fra me e l'immortalità si frapponessero soltanto un paio di salcicce.

Non dimentichiamoci che anche Romeo e Giulietta ogni tanto scoreggiavano e si grattavano il culo.

La bellezza di un attimo fuggente è eterna.

Un libro con in copertina una fotografia di Saul Leiter parte molto bene, dunque io lo compro a scatola chiusa, ignaro dell'autore e immaginando un saggio su temi di estetica o storia dell'arte. Scopro - prima ammissione di ignoranza - che Simic è un poeta. Leggendo i primi scritti, mi ritrovo in un mondo di filosofia letta di notte, salsicce, blues strazianti, casualità con cui fare i conti, fotografie misteriose. E le prime 100 pagine circa volano con gran piacere, fra un riferimento a Emily Dickinson e uno a William Carlos Williams (che conosco solo grazie a Paterson di Jarmusch - seconda ammissione di ignoranza). Le pagine successive - che non sono poche - diventano un po' più frammentarie in quanto maggiormente legate a recensioni (di esposizioni o testi). Emergono riflessioni nuovamente vitali - per esempio quelle autobiografiche o lo scritto su Cornell - ma su un tono minore rispetto a quello della per me folgorante apertura di libro. A ogni modo, lettura piena di libertà, ironia e meraviglia, che lascia almeno un paio di compiti a casa (leggere le poesia di Simic - e anche quelle di Williams e Vicente Huidobro, magari).

The poems in No Land in Sight include those whose vivid imagery imprinted on my brain.

Tango

Slinky black dress
On a wire hanger
In an empty closet
its door slid open

To catch the draft
From an open window
And make it dance
As in a deep trance

The empty hangers
Clicking in unison
Like knitting needles
Or disapproving tongues.

from No Land in Sight by Charles Simic

And poems of insight into the common experience.

In the Lockdown

I might have gone stir-crazy,
If not for my memories,
Those lifelong companions
Cooped up with me for months
And eager to console me

With stories of men and women
Who withdraw from the world,
And endured years of solitude
And dark nights of the soul
Thriving in some hole-in-the-wall

Where they found lasting peace
Obeying a voice in their heads
Telling them to just sit quietly,
So that the quiet can teach them
Everything they ought to know.

from No Land in Sight by Charles Simi

There are personal memories of a life unlike my own.

Where Do My Gallows Stand?

Outside the window
I looked out as a child
In an occupied city
Quiet as a graveyard.

from No Land in Sight by Charles Simic

Many of the poems are reductions that pack a punch bigger than their size would indicate. Charles Simic writes of quietly falling snow, dogs barking in the night, the hopefulness of an old woman going to the mailbox. Commonplace visions reveal depths of emotion, a few overheard words paint a portrait.

The opening poem is Fate, consisting of one line: “everyone’s blind date.” We ruefully chuckle.

At first I was puzzled by these poems, seemingly so direct and transparent. As I read on, I realized their beauty and truth. I will seek out his earlier work.

I received a free book from A A Knopf. My review is fair and unbiased.

I gave the book four stars, but I think I'm being kind. The only reason I recommend the book is for its imagry. Other than that, if you the sort who doesn't want to read the abstract, then I suggest you don't buy the book.

This book by one of my favorite poets is an eclectic assemblage of all kinds of essays, an odd basket-full containing biographies of obscure writers and lesser-known artists, memoirs of a childhood and youth spent living in the kinds of historical times that are now denied, and whimsical ruminations on things, habits, and music. I think you would have to be several different people to enjoy every piece in the volume.

Yet I repeatedly considered purchasing it to re-read and annotate (I had taken it out of the library). Simic knows more than most the viciousness, cold-hearted evil, and deliberate violence that lives under the mask of civilization, but he also knows that sausage and popular music can make up for a lot of the carnage, and that surrealism is best served up with humor, earthiness, erudition, and sometimes, childishness. There are many, many sentences and paragraphs here that deserve to be nailed up on telephone poles to be ignored by those who believe in nationalism, Utopia, or human perfectibility.

In other words, he still has a great deal of Yugoslavia in his soul even if he has lived in the US since he was a teenager.

One year, when I was an English teacher and he was the Poet Laureate of the United States, I went to an English teacher's convention and heard him read his poems in a small room. Gentle-voiced, with a slight accent and a deadpan face, he wore tinted glasses and read his wonderful, absurd poems to a small, bewildered audience who perhaps were there because other talks were full and because they needed to rest their feet.

I recommend the book highly but only if you want to have a funny, cynical view of the human race beaten into your head by accident with a saucepan by someone who is quoting obscure Polish or Argentinian writers in the process.

I first read this book about 30 years ago, and have kept coming back to it.

In my opinion, this is one of the best books by a great American surrealist poet. Such poems as "Fear," "Butcher Shop," "The Inner Man," "Fork," "My Shoes," "Ax," "Invention of Nothing," and "errata" are powerful examples of Simic's ability to dig deeper than language, far down into pre-literate culture, to discover primal, one could even say elemental, relationships.

Here is "Fear":

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling
And there is no sign of the wind.

أ
بعض الاقتباسات

"أود أن أقول:(لقد كان في البداية وسيكون عند النهاية) ولكن لا يقين في ذلك

ليلا بينما أجلس خالطا أوراق صمتنا , أقول له :(مع أنك تلفظ كل واحدة من كلماتي , أنت غريب . آن لك أن تتكلم )

وهنالك في البعيد أحدهم أكثر صمتا يمر علي العشب دون أن يطويه

أشياء تفلت من قبضتي
أشياء أخري تبلغ نهاية صامتة
هذه أغنيتي لا شيء منا يبقي
تقريبا لا شيء

لذا أوصدوا الأبواب والنوافذ ولا تنظروا
ستغزو النجوم سماء الخريف
مثل مراكب الناجين من البحر
لكن لن ينهض أي من أبنائكم من الأعماق

رأيت شررا ينبعث
عند حف حجر بحجر
إذن ربما لا تكون عتمة في الداخل في نهاية المطاف
ربما هناك قمر يشع
من مكان ما , كأنما من وراء هضبة ....
فقط ما يكفي من الضوء
لفهم الرموز الغامضة , الخريطة الليلة علي الجدران الداخلية

A disappointing collection full of pretentious verse which on the whole expresses nothing, or at least nothing much of interest. Here and there, thankfully, there were real moment of genius, but sadly they weren't developed. Not a collection I can recommend.

Dime-Store Alchemy perfectly pairs the mundane and the magical to capture Joseph Cornell's distinctive and various constructions, in boxes and otherwise. After looking at his boxes for decades, I now know their maker had the same offbeat, startling quality. The poet Charles Simic has produced a short, idiosyncratic, meditative discourse, with illustrations, on Cornell, his life on Utopia Boulevard, and his compelling enigmatic boxes.

A poet writing about an artist produces a third work of art, and so this relaxed and lovely writing is highly recommended for the triple pleasure of Cornell's constructions, Simic poetic insights, and the coming together of the two in this work.

Beautiful. Moving.

I bought this book years ago for a TIOLI challenge and never read it. (The challenge was to read a book written by an alumnus of your university) I choose this book for the October RandomCAT because of the word Black in the title and because the book jacket promises that Simic delivers startling new visions of the haunted landscape. This is the first time I've read the poetry of Charles Simic. Simic is the 1990 winner of the Pultizer Prize for Poetry.
These poems are strange, dreamlike things with a lot of classical references throughout. They're short, written in accessible language and a little bit creepy. I liked them- well, most of them.
Here are some examples specifically for October:

'''OCTOBER LIGHT'''

That same light by which I saw her last
Made me close my eyes now in revery,
Remembering how she sat in the garden

With a red shawl over her shoulders
And a small book in her lap,
Once in a long while looking up

With the day's brightness on her face,
As if to appraise something of utmost seriousness
She has just read at least twice,

With the sky clear and open to view,
Because the leaves had already fallen
And lay still around her two feet.

'''LONE TREE'''

A tree spooked
By it's own evening whispers,
Afraid to rustle,
Just now
Bewitched by the distant sunset

Making a noise full of deep
Misgivings,
Like bloody razor blades
Being shuffled,

And then again the quiet.
The birds too terror-stricken
To make their own comment.
Every leaf to every other leaf
An apparition,
A separate woe.

Bare twig:
A finger of suspicion.½

Charles Simic was born on May 9th 1938 in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, (now part of Serbia). As a child growing up in war torn Europe, he experienced the trauma of being one of the millions of displaced whilst both the “Germans and the Allies took turns to bomb him”. This obviously shaped much of his world view, leading him to joke in interviews that “Stalin and Hitler were his travel agents” and that in addition to his own tale of bad luck, he was around to hear plenty of others and is still amazed by the vileness and stupidity witnessed in his life.

In 1954, at the age of sixteen he emigrated with his mother and brother, joining his father who was living in Chicago, in the United States where Simic attended high school and began to take a serious interest in poetry, although he admits that the reason he began exploring the art form was to meet girls. Charles Simic published his first poetry in 1959 at the age of twenty-one whilst attending the University of Chicago, but was drafted in 1961 into the U.S Army. By 1966 he had earned his B.A. from New York University, with his first full length collection of poetry What the Grass Says, published the following year.

By the early seventies he was beginning to make a name for himself, with both his own poetry and the translations of important Yugoslavian poets, attracting critical acclaim. Since then he has won numerous awards and was chosen to receive Academy Fellowship in 1998, also fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995. In 2000 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, more recently, in 2007, he received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and he was the recipient of the 2011 Frost Medal, presented annually for "lifetime achievement in poetry”. Also in 2007 Charles Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, of which the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington stated:

"The range of Charles Simic' s imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humour."

He also received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He is professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire , where he has taught since 1973.

Charles Simic is one of those writers I was more aware of than knew, for example I knew of him as editor of the Paris Review, and over the years I've read bits of his poetry, but I had no understanding of his prolific work as a translator, editor and essayist, or that he has translated the work of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian poets, including Tomaz Salamun and Vasko Popa. Although I was aware of him I couldn't have strung together anything more than a threads worth of information. So when this collection Charles Simic ~ New and Selected Poems{1962–2012} came up, here was my chance to learn more about a writer who seems to stride across the American literary world of the last fifty years, commenting on the state of poetry, still contributing poetry and prose to The New York Review of Books and in 2007, a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Someone who a writer for the Harvard Review said of:

"There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures ... Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse."

This anthology covers a span fifty years and close to four hundred poems, distilling Simic’s life’s work combining poetry from his earliest writing through to his later work, featuring seventeen new, never before published poems and around thirty revisions. Tracing the path of this writer from a newly arrived immigrant through to the heartlands of America, on the way tracing it’s history through the blues & jazz, it’s folktales and urban myths. Charles Simic’s tale is that of America, not the one defined by the Madison Avenue, but by those individuals hollering on street corners, or praying knelt at the back of an empty church for just one more night, it’s that moment one second away from madness, when the lens focuses, shifts and the light refracts onto a new strange tableaux, before restoring itself to the same sidewalk, on the same street in the same town, USA. This is a collection of poetry by one of America’s most celebrated poets, spanning over thirty collections and offering the reader the opportunity of experiencing the full range of this poets oeuvre and the chance to retrace the career of one of the most prolific and yet unique voices in contemporary literature.

It's been a while since I've read poetry just for myself. And it's challenging, and maddening, and lovely to explore language in its most distilled form.

My God, Charles Simic writes some darkly gorgeous stuff. Rich words used ever so sparingly = a sated me.

Club Midnight, selezione di poesie di Charles Simic, poeta laureato USA del 2007.
Nella terna della giuria popolare del Premio Napoli 2009.
Una luce (non-luce, in effetti) nuova su un'America non a tutti ignota, notturna e insonne, con un immaginario che va su da Stephen King a Edgar Allan Poe, passando forse per Lee Masters, forse per Grace Metalius. In una scala di neri abbaglianti e grigi polverosi, le zanzariere sbattono, le scale scricchiolano, vecchie sedie a dondolo oscillano vanamente. Ma il tutto non trasmette terrore, semmai solidarietà, e a volte sprazzi d'umor nero o d' inusitata dolcezza, come L'uccellino che "alza un canto in lode del bel tempo/ dei vermetti attorcigliati (little wiggling worms)/ e d'altre faccende del genere". Bello.

Very uneven. The bulk of the book is comprised of one-liners, which alternate between banal and interesting. Occasionally one contains the germ of what makes his poetry so striking. But most people will prefer the poetry.½

Simic's Homage to Things that Go Unnoticed: Charles Simic is a poet, yes, but he is more than that highest compliment in literary circles. Simic is a visionary because he is in tune with the atoms and microns that float through our atmosphere, either discarded or simply ignored, or worse, never noticed by us, the usual beings. He manages is so few terse words to nudge us into awareness.

'Extraordinary efforts are being made
To hide things from us, my friend.
Some stay up into the wee hours
To search their souls.
Others undress each other in darkened rooms.'

Pause on every page of this physically slim but potent collection of his latest poems and see if you can turn away unchanged. Brilliant poetry from a consistently brilliant poet. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, September 05

I've always loved the art of Joseph Cornell; these poems, not so much.

If you don't know Cornell's work, he was an artist, sculptor, and experimental filmmaker, influenced by the surrealists and best know for "assemblage"--creating wooden boxes filled with what seem to be randomly found objects that generate a meaning of their own. You can see some of his boxes here.

For me, Simic's poems--most of which are short prose pieces describing what he imagines as Cornell's typical daily activities--did not really evoke the same response as the art itself. There are few images, and the details of Cornell's unusual life remain buried, except for the short introduction to the book. Many of the poems incorporate brief quotes jotted down in Cornell's journals.

The book does include a small but nice selection of full-color photos of several boxes. But as one who was introduced to Cornell by Elizabeth Bishop's poems, I was disappointed.½

This adorable book is a pleasure to hold in the hand! 7.25" x 5" and bound in midnight blue cloth lettered in silver and with a Cornell image applied to the front cover it the perfect size and shape for this group of appreciations and quotations from Joseph Cornell's notes by the poet Charles Simic. I'm in love! But it is only fair to admit that I was a beeg fan of the work of both men before I ever saw this volume. It would be the perfect gift for that quirky, discerning friend. Contains an attractive center section of small colored plates of Cornell works.

Poetic fancy, dream thoughts, wisdom snatched from the subconscious. Mr. Simic's elegant little book defies convention and obeys only the whimsical dictates of his unique and discerning mind.

"In a house closed up since last summer, the phone won't stop ringing."

"I dreamt that God asked me for a blurb for his creation."

and, brilliantly:

"...there's a lot of space inside words."

Koan-like utterances but infused with depth of thought and a fierce, observant intellect.

Highly recommended.

Brilliant, as is his poetry, and the account of growing up under the Nazis then emigrating to the U.S. is fascinating.

I would agree with the other review. Is this poetry? Is it deserving of a Pulitzer prize? It's a very quick read and I found this form of prose poetry to be less than appealing to me. I did find a few of these short story snippets enjoyable. Perhaps I'm not as familiar with Simic's work as I should be so I won't completely write this off. It's short enough to read and garner your own opinion.

Fascinating conversation between Simic and the dead Cornell: surreal, maccabre, joyous.

Disappointing book, mostly for production reasons. Simic seems to have found a recipe for poems, and these don't veer much from that, though his humor may be getting a little more arch and dark. The book itself though, is badly printed, sloppily bound, and the worst affront (in my opinion)-- in the list of his previous publications at the front of the book, they list "Charon's Cosmetology", which should obviously be "Charon's Cosmology." Shocking and unforgivable! This is the newest book, in hardcover, by the poet laureate of the United States, and the distinguished publisher Harcourt, and it's got typos. The book made me realize that almost no one in the poetry old-guard establishment cares about poetry any more. Sad.