fallen petals
caught
in my typewriter
Monday, May 11, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
First Picture
out of myth
strange beast
features scribbled green
with alien shape
out of pleasure motion verve
no thought of erasure
alone to the four corners of the paper
easily rustled easily bent
its face a smile
mounted admiringly with fridge magnets
long ago
long since removed
lost forgotten
others too
piled back to back
pressed against the whiteness of pages
frozen in it
many upon many
an ice age of them filed away
tonight in the stove it burns
after years a thaw
yet the ice does not melt
strange beast
features scribbled green
with alien shape
out of pleasure motion verve
no thought of erasure
alone to the four corners of the paper
easily rustled easily bent
its face a smile
mounted admiringly with fridge magnets
long ago
long since removed
lost forgotten
others too
piled back to back
pressed against the whiteness of pages
frozen in it
many upon many
an ice age of them filed away
tonight in the stove it burns
after years a thaw
yet the ice does not melt
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Rorschach In Reverse: Cha[r]les Simic's Selected Early Poems
by Daniel Leonard
Charles Simic is a self-proclaimed insomniac: "The hurricane century tossed my bed around." Raised as Dušan Simić in war-torn Belgrade during World War II, he managed to escape bombings and military strikes, but not without witnessing the requisite atrocities: "My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin." He only began to learn English at age fifteen, and moved with his family a year later to New York City. Simic quickly acquainted himself with the sights and syllables of America (with an outsider's insight into both), but continued to speak in his native Serbian tongue of riddle, myth, and legend, and to think in cruelties and the inscrutable. This sensibility earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer, and the US Poet Laureateship: "Have I been made the official match vendor / Of the great dark night of the soul?"
In Simic's view, we are tirelessly subject to apparent meaninglessness, “History practicing its scissor-clips / in the dark”. But how does one move beyond chaos? Start from a beginning. In Richard Howard's introduction to Dismantling The Silence, he writes, "When we speak of writing as original, as I am bound and determined to do in speaking of Charles Simic's writing at all, we mean that it has to do with something very old, not something very new—it has to do with origins, beginnings, sources." In his oeuvre Simic follows an evolutionary timeline: stones, wind, and grass populate his first poems, followed by dogs and mice, and eventually people. A handful of these early works are "object poems," inkblot tests in reverse in which the commonplace sheds its intimacy and suggests something alien and uncategorizable:
"Poetry is an orphan of silence," Simic says. By some miracle one escapes from speechlessness, suddenly finding words. They come out of nowhere, but cannot go back: their tracks are covered. Though they arrive ex nihilo, this very act destroys nihilo, the preceding void. Ask anything about this prior state, and you disable an answer; one backward glance, and home becomes a pillar of salt. Simic's poems watch themselves happen in an attempt to recapture through reflexivity the breath one loses by saying a word, the whiteness of the page that literally underwrites every scribbled glyph that covers it. It is the sound of one writing implement clapping, to mix a metaphor, and this self-consciousness lets a poem not only alter one's view of a particular subject—say, the possibility of love, or what to think about a war—but reconstitute one's sense of sense, that which colors all, the way in which one "chew[s] on the bitter verb / 'To be'."
If this phenomenological attitude toward poetry intrigues you, John Lysaker's book You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense explores the way Charles Simic realizes Martin Heidegger's poetic ideals. It is perhaps better exemplified than explained; for this, look to the poem White (followed by What The White Had To Say) in Selected. It is the only long poem I have ever endeavored to memorize (I made it about halfway), and according to Lysaker it is "part and parcel of every Simic poem." It and the rest beg to be internalized, or rather entered; they will not let you out unscathed. I can testify to this, having spent many hours reading them aloud, taking them in by breathing them out. I have even set a few to music (most recently Stone) in an effort to hear them differently, to gain intimacy with the poems and ultimately with my own life, to learn to spell my name, to "go inside a stone":
Watermelons"I once sat for hours signing my name before I realized I'd been misspelling it," Charles Simic told me before handing back my copy of The World Doesn't End. I have acquired twenty of his books in the year since because such moments saturate them: the times we stare at a word long enough to rob it of sense, the one or two mornings a year when the mirror takes us by surprise. In them our account of the world shows its seams, and we realize it has always been past explanation. Things are only familiar in the way of family: we are among them, we are of them, we are in need of them. The everyday remains strange in ways we cannot place.
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
Charles Simic is a self-proclaimed insomniac: "The hurricane century tossed my bed around." Raised as Dušan Simić in war-torn Belgrade during World War II, he managed to escape bombings and military strikes, but not without witnessing the requisite atrocities: "My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin." He only began to learn English at age fifteen, and moved with his family a year later to New York City. Simic quickly acquainted himself with the sights and syllables of America (with an outsider's insight into both), but continued to speak in his native Serbian tongue of riddle, myth, and legend, and to think in cruelties and the inscrutable. This sensibility earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer, and the US Poet Laureateship: "Have I been made the official match vendor / Of the great dark night of the soul?"
In Simic's view, we are tirelessly subject to apparent meaninglessness, “History practicing its scissor-clips / in the dark”. But how does one move beyond chaos? Start from a beginning. In Richard Howard's introduction to Dismantling The Silence, he writes, "When we speak of writing as original, as I am bound and determined to do in speaking of Charles Simic's writing at all, we mean that it has to do with something very old, not something very new—it has to do with origins, beginnings, sources." In his oeuvre Simic follows an evolutionary timeline: stones, wind, and grass populate his first poems, followed by dogs and mice, and eventually people. A handful of these early works are "object poems," inkblot tests in reverse in which the commonplace sheds its intimacy and suggests something alien and uncategorizable:
ForkIn later poems, ordinary images and tropes come in contact with one another, forming "tribes"; here it is the interplay which baffles. Simic compares these to Joseph Cornell's sculptures, three-dimensional collages of found objects arranged in boxes. The displays have an effect Simic calls "dime-store alchemy," a fitting description of his own work. What we call ordinary, we have ordered according to our contexts and purposes, but seen differently by way of juxtaposition it can subvert our usual thinking, even creep us out. One could criticize Simic's more recent work as formulaic, many versions of the same unsettling poem, but only as a side effect common to many artists who find a path and follow where it leads. As for his early volumes, they consistently surprise because they remain in search of a stride and can only look to themselves for advice.
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
"Poetry is an orphan of silence," Simic says. By some miracle one escapes from speechlessness, suddenly finding words. They come out of nowhere, but cannot go back: their tracks are covered. Though they arrive ex nihilo, this very act destroys nihilo, the preceding void. Ask anything about this prior state, and you disable an answer; one backward glance, and home becomes a pillar of salt. Simic's poems watch themselves happen in an attempt to recapture through reflexivity the breath one loses by saying a word, the whiteness of the page that literally underwrites every scribbled glyph that covers it. It is the sound of one writing implement clapping, to mix a metaphor, and this self-consciousness lets a poem not only alter one's view of a particular subject—say, the possibility of love, or what to think about a war—but reconstitute one's sense of sense, that which colors all, the way in which one "chew[s] on the bitter verb / 'To be'."
If this phenomenological attitude toward poetry intrigues you, John Lysaker's book You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense explores the way Charles Simic realizes Martin Heidegger's poetic ideals. It is perhaps better exemplified than explained; for this, look to the poem White (followed by What The White Had To Say) in Selected. It is the only long poem I have ever endeavored to memorize (I made it about halfway), and according to Lysaker it is "part and parcel of every Simic poem." It and the rest beg to be internalized, or rather entered; they will not let you out unscathed. I can testify to this, having spent many hours reading them aloud, taking them in by breathing them out. I have even set a few to music (most recently Stone) in an effort to hear them differently, to gain intimacy with the poems and ultimately with my own life, to learn to spell my name, to "go inside a stone":
[...] perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Clerihews
Barack Obama,
an Oxford comma:
some prefer, some attack,
plus it’s black.
---
Joe Biden
needn't widen.
Cheney post-campaign?
Skip that train.
---
John McCain
ended up in the drain.
Don’t know where he went wrong—
fundamentals are strong.
---
Sarah Palin
beat the nail in,
glad to shelve
‘til 2012.
---
George Walker Bush
is out on his tush.
Hope it won’t throb
when he can’t find a job.
an Oxford comma:
some prefer, some attack,
plus it’s black.
---
Joe Biden
needn't widen.
Cheney post-campaign?
Skip that train.
---
John McCain
ended up in the drain.
Don’t know where he went wrong—
fundamentals are strong.
---
Sarah Palin
beat the nail in,
glad to shelve
‘til 2012.
---
George Walker Bush
is out on his tush.
Hope it won’t throb
when he can’t find a job.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Reading Railroad
Holler. It's a new year--did you notice? Something in the air. I'm packing my things up for Wheaton right now, and I figured this would be a good time to put a list of the books I received for Christmas before they get mixed in with all the others. A few other noteworthy presents: a subscription to Paste Magazine (from Laura), a subscription to Poetry Magazine (from my mom), a nice cardigan sweater, sweatervest, two t-shirts, and two nice pairs of socks (Mom), nice gloves (Mom and Katie, separately), Wall-E DVD (Mom), Bill Evans DVD (Mom).
A neat addition to our Christmastivities this year: my mom decided to participate in the "spend less, give more" attitude Life Church is propagating by spending less on our gifts and letting us choose charities and worthy causes to give to instead. I hope this is more in line with the true meaning of Christmas than Freddy's idea that "baby Jesus got nice presents and we are supposed to be like him."
Anyway, the books (many of which I found online used or cheap, hence the quantity):
Simply Christian (N. T. Wright) - (read) The best general-consumption book about Christianity I've read in a long time, maybe ever. It's unfortunate that the people who would benefit most from this (everyone) probably won't read it. I think it surpasses Mere Christianity as an explanation of the overall story of Christian faith, particularly to those living in a postmodern culture. I can't say enough good things about it overall, and would gladly lend it to anyone who'll be at Wheaton this semester. I'm hoping to keep it off my shelf.
Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell) - (given by Laura) (read) A really interesting account to place side-by-side Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Creativity, as it creates a broader picture of success that includes not only personal characteristics but systemic aspects, heritage, opportunities, etc. This was a quick read, and many of the ideas and anecdotes are still on my mind. Two of my friends got this for Christmas as well, so I'm looking forward to discussing it further and figuring out how it's relevant to my own life.
Say Uncle (Kay Ryan) - (read twice, flipped through many times) A great book of poems. I find myself drawn deeper every time I read them, which is a good sign. How can her approach be so original/unique and so compelling at the same time?
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (Douglas R. Hofstadter) - (about 1/4 read) From the author of Godel Escher Bach, a book about poetry and the idea of 'translation' as it ties into intelligence and human connectedness. He is a nerd's nerd, and this is right down my alley; the title alone is a pun about five times over. My honeymoon is over with him, though: he doesn't understand contemporary poetry, music, or philosophy, and seems a bit more opinionated and hypocritical than I remembered. Regardless, he gives me plenty to think about, and sometimes you pay better attention when you're looking for an argument. He makes me want to learn French at the least, and apply myself more generally and passionately to intellectual tasks.
Homage to the Lame Wolf (Vasko Popa/tr. Charles Simic) - A book of poems by one of Simic's favorite poets, translated by the man himself. I've only read a little of it, but it seems meditative--images that come together and mean not necessarily after lots of "piecing together", but after much reflection.
The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (ed. & tr. Charles Simic) - Again, learning from the master how he master learned. These are poems with teeth.
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (Charles Simic) - Simic sees himself as the poet arranging found objects in little boxes. A good follow-up to my ekphrastics class, and possibly a good complement to Art Survey this semester. I probably wouldn't have bought this one on my own, at least not for a while; Merry Christmas to me!
Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs; Hotel Insomnia; A Wedding in Hell; Night Picnic (Charles Simic) - Filling out my collection.
Free Verse: An Essay On Prosody (Charles O. Hartman) - an explication, analysis, and legitimization of the tradition of free verse poetry. Recommended by Charles Simic. Douglas Hofstadter needs to read this (as do I; I think it could help with my IDS project).
Elephant Rocks (Kay Ryan) - These are poems that give you the feeling that they are good poems. Simic's are more deeply philosophical and reflexive than sonically playful and overtly abstract. Kay's are also more openly empathic, encouraging, and hopeful, at least sometimes. Maybe a cross between Simic and Miranda July? KR & CS are good poet-parents for me right now.
New Selected Poems (Mark Strand) - I kept picking up his books in the bookstore and getting floored, but not getting to know him in private. Now I have the chance.
The Harmony of Bill Evans (Jack Reilly) - A collection of articles analyzing Bill Evans' compositions. From the back cover: "Evans's compositions must be studied and played. They are rich and full of wondrous invention and genius. I get much pleasure from playing Chopin, Brahms, et. al. [sic] From Evans, I get a great deal more. His music is a synthesis of all western classical music plus the many years of jazz. He is America's Chopin." He's some kind of something, that's for sure.
New Years Resolution #31: Read these.
New Years Resolution #32: Still manage to apply yourself and be devoted to every class, especially the philosophy ones.
New Years Resolution #33: Learn to fly.
New Years Resolution #33A: Not on US Airways.
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