Charles Simi, Prose-Poetry and Me
BEGINNING IN ’59 OR WAS IT ’69?*
* In 1869 Baudelaire, arguably the founder of modern prose-poetry, published his Petits Poems en Prose. In 1959 Charles Simic published his first poem and I became a Bahá'í.
American poet Charles Simic's first works were published in 1959 when he was twenty-one. Between that year and 1961, when he entered military service, he churned out a number of poems, most of which he has since destroyed. My first poems came from these years as well. They were never published and they were thrown away soon after they were written. I was 15 in 1959 and had just joined the midget baseball league and the Bahá'í Faith, in that order.
Simic and I earned our BA degrees in 1966. I was 22; he was 28. Simic went on to publish poetry and I went on to the teaching profession. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. Simic's quite original poetry in English and translations of important Yugoslavian poets began to attract critical attention by the time I had moved to Australia in 1971. In The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid-Century Geoffrey Thurley notes that the substance of Simic's earliest work was “European and rural rather than American and urban. The world his poetry created was that of central Europe and its woods, ponds and peasant furniture."
Simic's work defies easy categorization. Some poems reflect a surreal, metaphysical bent and others offer grimly realistic portraits of violence and despair. Hudson Review contributor Vernon Young maintains that memory with its taproot deep into European folklore is the common source of all of Simic's poetry. Simic is a graduate of NYU; he is married and a father living in pragmatic America. When he composes poems, Simic turns to his unconscious and to earlier pools of memory. I am a graduate of McMaster in Hamilton. I, too, married and became a father in pragmatic Australia. When I compose poems I turn to memory and to my experience in the Bahá'í community.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 5th 2006.
We both wrote a type of prose-poetry
whose rules are never clearly defined,
no resolution of its issues of meaning,
of its short expressions of feeling,
its stylistic, imagistic density,
its ornamental variation of prose,
its passionate promptings, undulations
and intimately inward contours.
Some say prose-poetry is not poetry;
it fights against the mainstream, flaunts
and flies in the face of poetic purists.
Evolving and elusive and valid, I’d say.
There’s a sort of formal speech here,
not metered but a natural rhythm,
identifying with the lyrical impulses
of the soul, revery’s ebbs and flows.
Some say it started with Bertrand
and Baudelaire in the 1840s-1850s
or the 1890s and others say you can
go all the way back to the Old Testament.
Our work is motivated by many
things: to turn the gaze inward
and trace the movement mind
and the gaze of readers, to turn
thought to the ills of society
and graphically describe in order
to analyse with a personal voice,
intimate matters, autobiographical
detail, a certain psychic weight,
something imponderable---yet
I want to ponder…..
….and I ponder using this
inherently ambivalent, hybrid,
generic instability, duality, traces
from two worlds, cross-discursive
discourse, with contradictions,
paradoxes and complications,
the sentence and the line with
loose borders between journals,
diaries and a lot of other stuff
right back to the birth of this
new Revelation when things
were separated and put together
again in new forms, ways, styles.
Ron Price
May 6th 2006
A very good one, for aged writers.
Only one cervantes
it's no use, Iv'e got to admit,
I am into my first real
writers block
over five decades
of typing.
I have some excuses:
Ive had a long illness
and im nearing the age of 70.
and when you are near
70 you always consider the
possibility of
slippage.
but i am bucked up
by the fact that
Cervantes wrote his
greatest work at
the age of 80.
but how many cervantes are
there?
i have been spoiled by
the easy way
i have created things,
and now theres
this miserable stoppage.
and now
spiritually constipated,
i have grown testy,
have screemed at my wife
twice this week,
once smashing a glass into the sink.
bad form, sick nerves, bad style.
I should accept this writers block.
hell, im lucky im alive,
im lucky i dont have cancer.
im lucky in 100 different ways.
sometimes at night, in bed,
at 1 or 2 a.m. i will think of how lucky i am
and it keeps me awake.
now ive always written in a selfish way, that is
to please myself.
by writing things down i have
been better to live with them.
now, thats stopped.
I see other old men with canes
sitting at bus stop benches,
staring straight into the sun and seeing
nothing.
and i know there are other old men
in hospitals and nursing homes
sitting upright in their beds,
grunting over bedpans.
death is nothing, brother,
its life thats
hard.
Writing has been my fountain of youth
my whore,
my love,
my gamble.
the gods have spoiled me.
yet look, i am still lucky,
for writing about writers block is
better than not writing at all.
Charles Bukowski
Anyone else like this poem?
