[lit-ideas] If you can mimic Simic, you too can be Poet Laureate
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 11:25:56 -0500
"Charles Simic, Surrealist With Dark View, Is Named Poet Laureate" [New York
Times 8/2/07]
"Mr. Simic [age 69], 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'."
Yay! for Charlie.
I thought of Simic just the other day when reading Sidney Harmon's comment on
poets. I thought of Simic's poem "Stone".
STONE
Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So 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.
********
Mr. Simic seems to do the opposite of what Mr. Harmon admires about poets. He
takes a simple rock and turns it into something none of us can begin to
understand -- the universe.
Mike Geary
Memphis
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