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Breathtaking in his simplicity, intoxicating in his imagery, stupefying in his power to repeatedly cut you right down to the bone. Simic is the rarest of writers who can take up the esoteric and transform it into the near-universal. I read this book and felt my brain being rearranged.
I revere this work.
Winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, 'The World Doesn't End' is a swan song for the 20th century, and a funereal procession through the tattered remains of memory, the city, and at times, the canon of Western philosophy as a whole. The collection is a three part series of disparate moments, characters, scenes, and sentences quilted together into a connective web. The collaged prose-poem style that Simic displays in other collections like Dime-Store Alchemy is much less whimsical in this book, with...
and so again. the used bookstore. floating quietly among the stacks. looking. looking. waiting for a book to be sitting just slightly out from the rest on the shelf, as though a hand had held and tentatively put it back. but not quite. and this poem, there in the poetry section.The time of minor poets is coming. Good-byWhitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whosefame will never reach beyond your closest family,and perhaps one or two good friends gathered afterdinner over a jug of fierce red wine...
Unexpected is the word that comes top of mind when trying to describe this collection of prose poetry by Charles Simic, who received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The World Doesn't End. For me, reading these poems was akin to walking through an exhibit of surrealist art."You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or bottom of a paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society or a wistful, grim memory of Worl...
This is my first Simic and it's just as everyone expected: I'm taken. I'm smitten with this Simic. I've been prepped for it and prodded to hurry up and read some and now I have and I feel like I could knock down a bull with one blow, or at least handle Professor Bibi Andersson more handily than normal in a wrestling match. Here's my favorite poem. It has to do with witches and I'm wondering if I'm entering a witch phase, what with all the witch haus and witch google image searching. Anyway: "O w...
Throw a pebble into the pool andsee it dissolve into shimmering currents,carrying burdens of ashen leaves that autumn has swept beneath the silent tremors, teaming to cry their laments; Or hide behind a ripe tree and cast a glance, all the way to that faint window where a boy, on one palm, is counting stars and fanning the other to soothe his bruises and in his eyes, dances the night, like a celebrating comet, about to go ablaze in just a matter of Time; Time— the lizard in the sunlight. It d...
“Pudding, why on earth would you roam the streets in a torn skirt?”“Little Lizzie, it’s you isn't it?” The woman with purple dye in her hair stood at the tiny iron gate. “Yes, it’s me, you wayward child!” An infant cradled among the exposed saggy breasts. “Shssshhh...... my sonny boy is trying to sleep”. She shoos the birds from pecking the child’s forehead. “What is that you are reading?” “ Charles Simic”, I say. “Is he that one-legged shorty who rings the church bells?” “ Nah-uh! He’s a poet,
This is essentially the Holy text for prose poetry.
We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. "These are dark and evil days," the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.In 1988, while inputting all his poems to a new computer his son had given him, as a way of learning how to use it, Simic also decided to load the unfinished scraps...
The World Doesn’t EndSimic is the great Yugolsavian absurdist/surrealist poet. I loved re-reading these poems the past two days.Here’s a taste of the book and his humor and horror, his history, and all his mystery and invention and magic. Oh, and these are prose poems:I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken,
My favorite book ever, taken on an overall enjoyment per-word mathematical formula, would probably be the very short stories and aphorisms that make up Kafka's Parables and Paradoxes. I like other books probably more, but those books have lots of words, and they are long and in a quick moment just opening up to a page there is most likely not going to be any immediate enjoyment gleaned from the pages (unless if luck was on my side and I opened up to say that talking light bulb scene of Gravity's...
Some beautiful imagery in many of the poems, but also some that I don't understand. I was curious about what type of poems would win a Pulitzer as this book of poems did in 1990. They're prose poems. The author, Charles Simic wrote an article in the New York Review of Books, entitled 'Why I Still Write Poetry.' In it, he says, that his mother when she was old and in the nursing home, ask him if he still wrote poetry. When he tells her that he does, she shakes her head and sighs, and Simic thinks...
Where ignorance is bliss, where one lies atnight on the bed of stupidity, where one prays onone's knees to a foolish angel . . . Where one fol-lows a numbskull to war in an army of beatific dunces . . . Where the roosters crow all day . . .The lovely emptyhead is singing the samesnatch of a love song over and over. For breakfaston the terrace we are having some eye-foolingpainted grapes which even the birds peck at. Andnow the kisses . . . for which we forgot to removeour Halloween masks.
This genius received the PEN, and a Guggenheim and a MacArthur and a Pulitzer too, and the book showed up print on demand with the page count too low for his name or the title to be printed on the spine. The book is amazing. The work of the author is amazing. I don’t want anything this good to ever go out of print. If it has to be print on demand through the corporation that controls the puppet strings of the whole world or if the elves come out every night and write this book on the undersides
Imagine the Cirque du Soleil (“Quidam” edition) being transformed into a book of poetry. If possible, it might come out looking like The World Doesn’t End. In way of review, that might be about the best I can do, especially after only one reading. At the half way point, I wasn’t even sure what I thought of the collection. But by the end I was hooked. In all of these prose poems, Simic employs an effective, absurdist Mix & Match that can be confusing, beautiful and startling, often in the same po...
Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)Charles Simic won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The World Doesn't End, and it is blessedly easy to see why. This collection (which, despite its subtitle, is mostly prose poems, with a few "regular" poems thrown in for good measure) could easily be a primer for the aspiring poet on exactly how to write a prose poem. (Would that more who attempt it had read this!) In the days when prose poetry has fallen so...
This is for my updated 2019 re-read. I had an hour to kill in the waiting area of a recovery clinic before visiting hours started. Along with Lincoln in the Bardo and Dreams of Bunker Hill, I’d brought this book along for my brother to read while he was in between meetings. It had been some time since I’d read Simic so I figured I might as well flip through the pages of an old favorite. The result was an hour that probably couldn’t have been more pleasurable, given the circumstances.I’m under qu...
A series of vignettes, of poetic vignettes to be sure, that sometimes read like an unsanitized children's tale or fairy book, sometimes like a Taoist who's thrown in the towel. Many of them are short enough and sure enough of their power to be aphorisms and should, perhaps, be listed in Bartlett's. While others resemble an entry in a gifted writer's dream-journal. Here is one of those:My thumb is embarking on a great adventure. "Don't go, please," say the fingers. They try to hold him down. Here...
Some of the poems in this collection are really amazing and make one feel a range of emotions, from shock to confusion to love to laughter.The rest of them sound like a mentally insane, drunk, homeless man's preaching of an extraterrestrial gospel on the street corner.