"here come my night thoughts on crutches" - c simic

There I was wide awake in the middle of the night with jetlag. My husband was beside me and my thoughts drifted to snore remedies, to pharmaceutical solutions, to side effects, to accidental death to manslaughter, at least the word manslaughter.

What a weird word: the (unpremeditated) slaughter of man. Weird that when the victim is a person, (man)slaughter is 2nd degree murder. When the victim is a cow, slaughter is a side of beef.

Also weird is the idea of involuntary manslaughter. Tell me a word with more aggression and willfulness packed in than slaughter. Massacre comes close, but the “aw” in slaughter slows it down, making it more graphic and tripling the evil! Say someone runs a light and hits a man, fatally. Would we say the driver slaughtered the man? That would be provoking the jury.

Also weird is that involuntary manslaughter can be bloodless as well an unintentional. Like dropping the blowdryer in the bathtub. Like a pharmaceutical side effect.

But the weirdest thing about manslaughter, which gave me the creeps lying in bed wide awake with jetlag, is how broken up and apostrophed it becomes man’s laughter.

Which is usually involuntary.

Charles Simic named Poet Laureate

And not a moment too soon. Shake out the pillows and quilts, beat the rugs clean and delouse the upholstery. Charles Simic not only has a tentacle-like intelligence, he is also a crack-up. Funniest, cutest, most likely to succeed, you name it. I love him. May I be so bold as to say I probably possibly very likely love him more than you do? In 58 shades of maroon? In ten years aboard the Titanic? At impossible temperatures?

(NYT) Charles Simic, a writer who juxtaposes dark imagery with ironic humor, is to be named the country's 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress today.
Mr. Simic, 69, was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States at 16. He started writing poetry in English only a few years after learning the language and has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as essay collections, translations and a memoir.
A retired professor of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990 and held a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant from 1984 to 1989.
He succeeds Donald Hall, a fellow New Englander, who has been poet laureate for the past year.
James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, will announce Mr. Simic's appointment. Mr. Billington said he chose Mr. Simic from a short list of 15 poets because of "the rather stunning and original quality of his poetry," adding: "He's very hard to describe, and that's a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears."
Mr. Simic, speaking by telephone from his home in Strafford, N.H., described himself as a "city poet" because he has "lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years." Before settling into academia, he held a number of jobs in New York, including bookkeeping, bookselling and shirt sales. He originally wanted to be a painter, he said, until "I realized that I had no talent."
He started writing poems while in high school in Chicago, in part, he said, to impress girls. He published his first poems in The Chicago Review when he was 21.
Mr. Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. "I'm sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents," he said. "If they weren't around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity."

bap

I spent yesterday evening finally reading some of Best American Poetry 2006, which I bought last fall. And this morning first thing I did was order two books by foreign poets. I guess it is kind of a statement, although I didn’t connect the two at first.

I don’t mean to be snarky – I enjoyed a number of poems in BAP. I read more today. Of those (about 40 of the 75), my favorites were, in order

Joy Katz’s “Just a Second Ago”
Mark Pawlak’s “The Sharper the Berry”
Christian Hawkey’s “Hour”
Megan Gannon’s “List of First Lines”
James Tate’s “The Loser”
Vijay Seshadri’s “Memoir”
Stephen Dobyns’ “Toward Some Bright Moment”

There were a number of poems I felt lukewarm about. For example, the Charles Simic and Franz Wright were in no way outstanding, though they are two of my favorite poets. Simic relies on image in his poetry, and I found the final image of “House of Cards” anti-climatic. I also felt that, though Franz Wright spends his life writing the same poem over and over (and I like that poem), the version in bap 2007 wasn’t that strong.

There were some that left me shaking my head like a pharisee. The “Briefcase of Sorrow” poem, for example, seemed gimmicky. And the Ilya Bernstein poem “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” didn’t do anything for me but give me a “so what?” kind of feeling.

I would really like to hear what folks thought about individual poems in this volume.

What I ordered:
Vanishing Lung Syndrome by Miroslav Holub
Night Mail by Novica Tadic

These are both part of the Field Translation Series, which is without exaggeration a service to mankind.

Favorite Books 2006

In response to Frank Wilson's query, these were my favorite books this year, none of them actually published this year....

Fiction: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Non-fiction: Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files edited by john ashbery

Poetry: Homage to the Lame Wolf by Vasko Popa, translated by Charles Simic

For the Willing if Unenthusiastic

You probably know someone who generally likes poetry, but doesn’t read it much. That’s already pretty good since so many dislike it, are afraid of it or feel alienated by it, or think it’s either all flowers or funerals. It’s true that sitting down to read poetry is an investment of time and concentration and unless the reader walks away satisfied, next time he may just turn on the tv instead.

But there are some poets who appeal in different ways to lukewarm readers. Here are the ones I can come up with. Any other suggestions? (Why can’t I come up with any women here? One might consider Mary Oliver, who's quite accessible, but whether you like her or not you have to admit she is “poetic” in a way that may turn some readers off. Forget Dickinson, forget Plath, forget Olena Davis and Jorie Graham, forget Brock-Broido. . . Ok, I thought of one: Jane Kenyon.)

Edward Lear: Most people read limericks and "The Owl and the Pussycat" and hopefully "The Akond of Swat" as children. I once had friends pass this book around and read limericks at a little birthday gathering (for me) in my office. They enjoyed it. Sincerely.

There was an old Person of Chester,
Whom several small children did pester;
They threw some large stones, which broke most of his bones,
And displeased that old person of Chester.

Charles Bukowski: Funny, raunchy, real life. At least somebody’s real life. Bukowski looks with humor and honesty at ordinary situations. I would advise against reading too much in one sitting, but it’s refreshing in doses. Here's one.

Charles Simic: Surreal and funny, and not unsophisticated. Weird images, personification of the inanimate (“here come my night thoughts on crutches”), and unexpected dialogue. For the unenthusiastic, I’d stay away from his book of prose poems The World Doesn't End, though it’s excellent, and go with any other collection. Here’s the beginning of “Late Call:”

A message for you,
Mouse turd:

You double-crossed us.
You were supposed to get yourself
Crucified
For the sake of Truth…

Who, me?

Russell Edson: You’d think if someone were insecure with poetry they would be turned off by prose poems. Well, don’t call them ”prose poems.” Just say, I got you this book of weird bedtime stories. I keep “A Chair” framed in a collage near my desk, but if you want an example of an Edson poem with a little more action, try “Fire is not a Nice Guest,” which begins -
“I had charge of an insane asylum, as I was insane. A fire came, which got hungry; so I said you may eat a log, but do not go upstaris and eat a dementia praecox. I said, insane people, go into the atic while a fire eats a kitchen chair for breakfast. But fire wanted a kitchen curtain. . .”

Ted Kooser: Accessible, unpretentious language with a positive vibe and democratic appeal. Here are some poems.

Haiku: Haiku are not “hard to get” and are so short they wouldn’t scare anyone away. You don’t get a few lines into them and start wondering what the hell it’s all about or rolling your eyes at the $100 words. I recommend The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa. Here’s a Basho:

it’s not like anything
they compare it to –
the summer moon.

unknown to exaggerate

dear charles simic,

i love you. i love your name.
i love your hair. i love your trousers.
do you even have hair?
and do you have a glottal stop?
i'll love that, too.

Popa

The funny thing about the book quiz is I recommended myself a book that turned out to be fabulous: Vasko Popa’s “Homage to the Lame Wolf,” translated by Charles Simic. Popa published an anthology of Serbian folklore and it’s obvious in his poems how he’s tied to stories, the weirdness, the magic, the earthiness. He’s surreal and comic and a little scary. As Simic points out in the intro, there’s hardly any “I” in his poems.

Here’s one of my favorites:

---------------------
Seducer

One strokes the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And gives him a sweet sign with its leg

Another kisses a keyhole
Kisses it O how he kisses it
Until the keyhole returns his kiss

A third stands aside
Stares at the other two
Shakes shakes his head

Until it falls off
-------------------

That one is part of a grouping of poems called “Games.” Most of the poems are grouped. There’s a cycle of “White Pebble” poems, “The Little Box” poems, etc. I really recommend this book.