Poetry Corner
Charles Simic blows. I say that as someone who likes his buddy Mark Strand pretty well. But there’s something cloying and fake about Simic’s faux folktales that doesn’t mar Strand’s best work. When I tried to read Simic a decade ago I got too annoyed and stopped. Now, he can’t be a more embarrassing choice for Poet Laureate than Billy Collins. I always admired Collins’ ambition. He was a man who looked at America’s worst professional poet, Mary Oliver, and dared to ask, “Can’t America do worse yet?” and proved that it could. But that just made Billy Collins America’s worst poet.
Oddly, Aaron Haspel’s Simic pastiche is, I think, better Simic than Simic. Why? Read the three Simic prose poems Terry Teachout reprints. All but the last ends with a gambit that amounts to “Ha ha just kidding lolz!!1!” The first four sentences of “I was stolen by gypsies” are promising. The second one is good right through “the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear.”
Comment by matthew hogan —
August 11, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
Hamlet, by Charles Simic:
Maybe while here I should kill myself; maybe not. It sure is a dilemma. I see various slings and arrows to face up to; maybe not.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 11, 2007 @ 8:38 pm
No no no. Your “ending” is not an unprepared 90-degree departure from what has come before. You need something more like . . .
Maybe while here I should kill myself; maybe not. I see various slings and arrows to face up to; maybe not. A wolf removes its pelt and goes for a swim.
Comment by bryan —
August 12, 2007 @ 1:51 am
okay I read the simic poems and didn’t like them, but I think your critique is bull, for example:
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.
It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.
How is the last part end with: Ha ha just kidding lolz!!1!
I don’t think the last part has no relation to the first part.
I think that the last part where one father is doing something and the other father is doing another thing matches fine with the preceding where one mother is nursing him and another feeding him with a long silver spoon.
Comment by Chris Quinones —
August 13, 2007 @ 7:18 pm
Just a nitpick, but the post in question is by one of Teachout’s co-bloggers, not the man himself.