"You don't make art, you find it. You accept everything as its material… The collage technique, that art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, is the most important innovation in the art of this century… The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized." (p 19, 'We Comprehend by Awe')"Modernism in art and literature gave unparalleled freedom to the individual to invent his or her own world from the parts of the existing one. It abolishe...

This little book is a treasure. Being a poetry ignoramus, I had no idea how prolific and inventive a writer Charles Simic is. I read this after I had finished Utopia Parkway, a biography of Joseph Cornell. It is a beautiful coda to that book, adding breadth and a poetic appreciation, not only to Cornell's life and work, but to art's place in life.

Dreamy, poetic and beautiful.

quotable platitudes about modernism, magic, dreams, and memorybland, ponderous descriptions of boxes, like crawling through mud when looking at the boxes themselves is like floating in airunseemly worship of the artist and mythologizing of his supposed reclusivitymusings and prose reveries about boxes that are so unimaginative, so stilted, and so imo inaccurate that i felt several times like throwing this book across the roomi really feel like this book is an injustice to cornell’s arthow do so

?OK. Now that I've read Dime-Store Alchemy, I'll write something. The goodreads forum has helped me reconnect with my literary life. I've sorted through half my library and collected several dozen to donate (not enough!), but all the inspiration around here made me succumb to a latent book-buying "sickness" and I placed a few on-line orders. "Asylum Dance" had been an elusive find, so when it turned up, I placed an order and added a few more titles to get "free" shipping. When the package arrive...

An air of danger, eroticism, and crushing solitude play hide-and-seek in the crowd. The indeterminate, the unforseeable, the etherial, and the fleeting rule there. The city is the place where the most unlikely opposites come together, the place where separate intuitions momentarily link up.Written from inside a Joseph Cornell shadow box. Simic conjures all the dreamy Utopia Parkway basement aromas 0f glue and antiqued wood and gobs of white paint, the mouldering Baedeker maps and toys and figuri...

Beautiful assessment of Joseph Cornell's work made by taking a Cornell-like approach to the task: little bits here and there--Cornell's diary entries, biographical notes, observations and descriptions of Cornell's works--baubles--that, arranged just so, create a mood and impression of Cornell similar to those invoked by Cornell's shadowboxes.

"All art is a magic operation, or, if you prefer, a prayer for a new image."

I loved learning about Joseph Cornell's surreal art. Things that are not sayable. This poetry celebrates the beautiful world that just can't be put into words - but Simic is going to use words anyway. I need to read more about Cornell.

This book is excellent. It has writing about Cornell and from Cornell and inspired by Cornell. It has prose poems and references to poets and art and artists writing about art. What it doesn't have, unfortunately, is the art itself. There are few poorly-reproduced black-and-white photos of Cornell's works, lumped together in the middle, but that's it. And Simic rarely elucidates which (if any) particular piece he is thinking of. If you, reader, are familiar with Cornell's corpus you may sometime...

A beautiful poet on a beautiful artist. I love everything about this book and recommend it to anyone interested in Cornell's work.

The great artist Joseph Cornell is a subject perfectly suited to the great poet Charles Simic. One might even say that Simic's poems are like Cornell boxes.

I always want to like Simic more than I do.

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, a...

At some point my need for a solution was replaced by the poetry of my continuous failure. -Charles Simic, "Chessboard of the Soul"

"inside everyone there are secret rooms. they're cluttered and the lights are out. there's a bed in which someone is lying with his face to the wall. in his head there are more rooms. in one, the venetian blinds shake in the approaching summer storm. every once in a while an object on the table becomes visible: a broken compass, a pebble the color of midnight, an enlargement of a school photograph with a face in the back circled, a watch spring – each one of these items is a totem of the self.ev...

Update: After some rereading and processing, I have come to a much fuller appreciation of this text and can rate accordingly. Art is recreating, reassembling what has been tragically sundered. Art is seeking, looking, paying attention without dragging meaning into everything. Art is image. Art is collecting unlikely objects and looking in unlikely corners for beauty — not new beauty, just beauty that has skittered into the shadows and needs dusting off, making over and over and over again.4/10/2...

Simic + Cornell = What's Not to Love??

Simic, a poet, wrote this thoughtful appreciation of Cornell’s life work in 1992, some twenty years after Cornell passed away in a house in Bayside, Queens, that the artist had longed lived in on Utopia Parkway with his mother and brother. Cornell built boxes that contained found objects arranged for display within the boxes. Ignorant of Cornell’s life, work and residence, I ran by his house pretty regularly in the last two years of his life, the late teens of mine, heading up Utopia toward the

Simic is a terrific poet. Cornell's boxes are great. Psychogeography. Transience. Maps of dreams. Explorations. The reticence and magic spaces you get in in -f'rinstance -the music of Augustus Pablo are present in this work. Same way they are in Cornell's boxes. The ear and the eye hear and see...the mind connects what's seen and heard and read. Trust me -a terrific, and terrifically short- book.