The World Doesn't End

by Charles Simic

In this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, The United States Of America, Classics, Contemporary

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008

Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.

Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.

Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[دعاء ممدوح · Rating 3 out of 5]

قصائد نثرية مترجمة مليئة بالحكمة، بعضها سهل يصل معناه للقلب بسلاسة ويترك أثرا في النفس والعقل لا ينسى، وبعضها غامض اشبه بصورة سيريالية تحتمل مختلف التأويلات
تستحق القراءة خاصة أن الترجمة جيدة

[Seemita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throw a pebble into the pool and
see 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 doesn't move, but its eyes are
wide open. They love to gaze into our faces
and hearken to our discourse. A discourse that
Simic held more with his various selves than anyone else,
than anything else; like a rigid child who insisted on
crossing the river on his favorite boat, he
rummaged the sack of his life
at random ages,
at natural, magical stages,
to retrieve a moment of ordinary thread
with extraordinary binding; binding dreams
with reality, like some hidden scribbling resembling
'Margaret was copying a recipe for
"saints roasted with onions" from an
old cook book. The ten thousand
sounds of the world
were hushed so
we could hear
the scratchings of her pen.
The saint was asleep in the bedroom
with a wet cloth over his eyes. Outside the window,
the author of the book sat in a flowering apple tree killing
lice between his fingernails.' The sagacity to hear the
stifling voices flapping their wings in
various rooms that never opened to
the world since they made
a poor show of the
rebellious soul,
that malnourished,
fledgling orator who lost his speech
often to collective stupidity of the vanity-laden world,
gave Simic a sword-sharp wit that with a shrewd demeanor,
he slipped into a scabbard of satire, and time and again,
scalped it through obnoxious conventions
to send a biting message to the society
of its vain duplicity; that
if evaporation were
to be the fate of compassion
and goodwill, the same might get
extrapolated to man; like that man who
exchanged clothes with his dog. It was a dog on two legs,
wearing a tuxedo, that they led to the edge of the common
grave. As for the man, blind and deaf as he came to be,
he still wags his tail at the approach of a stranger.
A certain disdain runs deep in Simic’s voice,
the effect of a bitter tonic of lost time
and least treasures perhaps;
or the aftermath of
bitter winter
in life
that stood frozen
for a long time, much beyond
what a child or a teen can bear
or attempt to bear. He seemed to have
felt the thuds of displacement and animosity,
partly due to his destiny and partly, due to his own doing.
But he was quick to note that the rigmarole of events
wed the counts of breath with an unbreakable vow
and swapping places with the
occasional offender
was but
a natural prescription
for keeping this bond going.
He was vocal about it when He said,
‘The salesgirls of Nowhere are going home at the end
of the day. I must assure myself of their reality by begging
one for a dime. She obliges and even gives me a
little peck on the forehead. I'm ready to
throw aside my crutches and walk
but another wags her finger
at me and tells me
to behave myself.’
He behaved, he raved,
he saved the world in the
half-inked sheets of his poems;
he didn’t fill them all up for who knew
what might come crashing onto the
parched heart and the restless mind some day,
shooting a compelling need to accommodate them all
in the song swaying life? After all, it shines,
it mellows, it changes but this world doesn't end, does it?

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I was reading this collection of “poems” from Charles Simic, published in 1989, I was thinking that the only other work I've read that is similar to this is a collection of poems by James Tate, Return to the City of White Donkeys

I thought this was an odd connection to make, especially considering I wasn't familiar with either writer's bio, but lo and behold, when I went to check the publication date of this one, I saw that the book was dedicated to “Jim Tate.”

Coincidence? No. Turns out, Charles Simic once immigrated to the states from the place we used to call “Yugoslavia,” and settled in New Hampshire. James Tate was nearby, in Massachusetts, and, apparently, the two were friends.

(If you know any details about this professional relationship between Simic and Tate, I'd love to know more about it).

For now, I can only contribute that this Charles Simic must have been incredibly bright, and also very funny. For whatever reason, these poems remind me of the movie "Airplane!"

I know quite a few men who would be particularly amused by these “poems,” which aren't like poems, but more like satirical observations on life that are quite funny and clever to the point of occasionally going right over my head.

And, even though this little gem was written in the 1980s, I think most of us could appreciate it right now:

Are Russian cannibals worse than the English?
Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul.
“The soul is a mirage,” I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway.

“Like a superb confit of duck, or like a sparkling littleneck clam still in its native brine?” I inquired. But she just rubbed her belly and smiled at me from across the table.

This one line became a quick favorite of mine: In a forest of question marks you were no bigger than an asterisk.

The man was a genius, quite possibly a freak of nature. I'm headed back to the library, to get another one!

[Praj · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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, pens prose poetry”. “The word you are looking for is “NO”, child!”. “Read me some....” said the clumsy woman covered with specks of fish scales. The silvery mackerel lies half open, the stench of the fish gut spills from the wet stony plank. “Pudding, wear your glasses!”.....

My mother was a braid of black smoke
She bore me swaddled over the burning cities
The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.
We met many others who were just like us................

“War is ugly “, winces Little Lizzie who had cut the sleeves from her husband’s white shirts. A bow tie no more adorns the wispy collars. The Russians, The English, men with Halloween mask, the spirited chimera devoured, the child running through the gray-brick tenements showing off a mask of comedy, the time of minor poets had come.

Thousands of old men with pants lowered sleeping
in public restrooms.
You're exaggerating! You're raving!
Thousands of Marias,of Magdalenas at their feet 
weeping.

A roadside drunk muttering the looming human apocalypse stumbled on his very own Magdalena.It’s past 11am. The lanky moustached butcher walks by waving to Lizzie. He scrubs the blood off the wooden board, the steely cleaver restored with his shining glory. The stained cloth neatly tucked at his tiresome waist. Couple hours into the day and the cloth will once again scrub off the blood; his daughter’s from the walls of his home. The humble cloth, now a poignant memoir of two lives. The old man trying to pick a pebble is flung off the road by a speeding car. “ Say your Hail Marys and read me some more”, yells Little Lizzie.

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. 
Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sound like a black cricket.

Who’s to say? The opaqueness of the stone equating the impenetrable hazy mirror of a man’s past; the chronological anthologies diffused by the lucidity of time. The heart of a black cricket beating in the darkness of a sullen night.

“Hey, Lizzie , will you be making me some Easter Eggs, next month?” “Would you like a purple plump one just like my hair, pudding?” “Could I have five of them, then”. “Child, where are your manners?. It’s please, could I have some?” “ Little Lizzie, are you having fish over rice for dinner?”, I ask smelling the rancid flesh of fish splattered on her palm. “I’ll just dip the dried piece of bread into the coconut sauce. The fish is for my sonny boy. Suddenly, from nowhere a raven flew in and grabbed the fried mackerel. Lizzie smiled, “There, now I’ll eat my bread”. “Read me some Shakespeare!”...... “Shakespeare?... It’s Charles’s prose poem!..... Ah.....” And, then I read....

At least four or five Hamlets on this block alone. Identical Hamlets holding identical monkey-face spinning toys.

The authenticity of one’s self mislaid by the demanding societal responsibility. The reciprocity of human identity destructed by falsehood in a civilization shackled by the distorted patterns of social reflection. The monkey-faced spinning toys were sold at an illuminated street corner where ghostly existence flourished under an inexorable surveillance doomed in the collision of realistic and idealistic puppetry.

“These are dark and evil days”, the mouse told me as he nibbled my ears.

The boy who grew up in poverty nurtured the dream of his father embedded in a faraway land of gold. Born in former Yugoslavia in 1938, he migrated to the land of golden dreams. Famously asserted that Hitler and Stalin were his two travel agents, Charles Simic rebelled the formulated rules of poetry releasing the constrict barriers of stanzas and verses into a boundless scandalous world of prose and honoured it with poetic rousing. Retorting to the selective criticism on his work, Simic articulated, “They look like prose and act like poems, because despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination.”

“This is not poetry, child! Just some eccentric ramblings of a man...” mumbled Little Lizzie as she laid the wrapped plastic doll in her lap, signing an afternoon lullaby to her sonny boy.

O the great God of Theory, he’s just a pencil stub,a chewed pencil stub with a worn eraser at the of a huge scribble.

Life brims with a potent blend of beauty and evils, surrounded by tragedies, eccentricities and obscurity drawing a huge scribble with a worn-out pencil fruitlessly erased by the reticent atheist and the garrulous campaigner waiting with a fork and knife at a dinner table for the hypothetical cooked goose.

“It’s time for me to go home, Little Lizzie.” She lets out a faint yawn, “Pudding, when would you visit me again, I would like to listen more of these bizarre poems. This strange man appreciates the insignificant fringes that are taken for granted.” “ How about tomorrow morning, after my bakery buy.”, I cheer. Lizzie nods in favour with a cranked smile. “And, for Heaven’s sake wear some clothes, child! You’re naked as the day you were born!”

My secret identity is
The room is empty
And the window is open

The world doesn't end but commences through the unbolted window releasing a remarkable poet’s unabashed imagination illuminating the unobserved traits of life and society in general assembling piece by piece the magnificence of succinct surreal reveries and the sardonic rationalities normalising the vagueness of arcane delusions and possibility of a comforting verbal individuality.

Little Lizze died two decades ago, she was 6o at the time. And, I'm no longer a child.

Simic asserts the value of using one’s imagination to capture the essence of surrealism, a rarity, as many are embarrassed by the baffling flight of their imagination. I, the diligent follower.

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is essentially the Holy text for prose poetry.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP Charles Simic, one of the absolute great poets of my life, 1/9/23

The World Doesn’t End

Simic 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, and I don’t even have any clothes on.

The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

Crazy, right? But there's something both funny and thrilling about this narrator being the last Napoleonic soldier, still retreating, and then the wheels come off, he's naked, buys a chicken, has hair four feet long.

Other lines I found compelling from other poems:

``It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards.''

“My Mother was a braid of black smoke. She bore me swaddled over the burning cities. . . The high heavens were full of shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.”

``The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm . . . he takes a seat at one of the tables at the tavern and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head.''

“We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap.”

“It was the epoch of the masters of levitation. Some evenings we saw solitary men and women floating above the dark tree tops.”

“Oh, the great God of Theory, he’s just a pencil stub, a chewed stub with a worn eraser at the end of a huge scribble.”

The last poem:

My Secret Identity

The room is empty
And the window is open

When you read this stuff, you immediately have to see the world differently. You see? Mystery and magic and a touch of craziness and (almost: The World Doesn't End) desolation.

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 of prose from a dozen notebooks. He edited the resulting 120 pieces into the 68 that comprise this book, which became the first collection of prose poems to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, igniting a controversy over the legitimacy of the form.

The flies in the Arctic Circle all come from my sleepless nights. This is how they travel: The wind takes them from butcher to butcher; then the cows' tails get busy at milking time.

When I found this in Powell's Books last summer, I remembered reading prose poems by Russell Edson and Vern Rutsala in the University of Iowa Library back in the 70s and 80s, and decided to try it. Not every poem has clicked for me yet, but I enjoyed visiting this eerie and surreal world again.

Prose poetry is a monster-child of two incompatible impulses, one which wants to tell a story and another, equally powerful, which wants to freeze an image, or a bit of language, for our scrutiny.
~ Charles Simic, Essay on the Prose Poem, delivered at The Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, June 1, 2010

[Ken]

Poetry? So it says, but really "prose poetry" at best. But why bother? It's use of sentences and paragraphs makes it look like sketches. Tableau -- "a graphic description or representation."

I give up. Whatever you want to call it, it's a short jaunt from p. 3 to p. 74, most of the pages composed in white space. You won't even have to pack a lunch.

Some books automatically make me talk of parts and whole. This is a prime example. The parts are gorgeously dense examples of creativity, exploring the DMZ between non- and sequitur. The parts don't ostensibly connect, though there might be some strands reminiscent of war (Simic's early days are thus rooted). Let me give you an example of one entry. OK, "poem":

The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm.

The apple trees are in flower. He's making his way to the village tavern with everybody watching. There, he takes a seat at one of the tables and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head. My mother wipes her hands on her apron and serves him.

It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backward.

Get it? Or are you as confused as a river? The good knight Sir Real, maybe. For me it brought Gogol to mind. The Gogol who wrote "The Nose," about a man's nose that declares independence, buys itself expensive clothes, and travels among Moscow's elite social circles.

Gezundheit!

Bottom line: As I read this, I enjoyed each individual piece for its sheer imagination. As a whole, though, it was less fulfilling. Like a creative writing drill assigned to class where, every time writing group's gather to offer critique, little Charles's work is chosen to be read aloud as an exemplar. Luckily, the students could give a good damn whether it's poetry or prose. They leave that to ivory tower heads with nothing better to do. The sort of people who gather to award books like this the 1990 Pulitzer Prize.

[Steve]

Charles Simic (1938-2023)

My mother was a braid of black smoke.
She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.
The sky was a vast and windy place for a child
to play.
We met many others who were just like us.
They were trying to put on their overcoats with
arms made of smoke.
The high heavens were full of little shrunken
deaf ears instead of stars.

Born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia and witness to atrocities of both Nazis and Stalinists, experiences which naturally echoed repeatedly in his work, the poet, essayist and translator Charles Simic was taken by his mother when he was fifteen first to Paris and then to rejoin his father in the USA. Drafted into the Vietnam era US Army, he completed a B.A. at NYU in 1966, though his first poems appeared already in 1959. For most of his professional life he was a professor at the University of New Hampshire.

Since his death due to complications of dementia on January 9, I have been reading/re-reading his poetry and translations, re-connecting with his unique voice and both lamenting his passing and celebrating his career. Over the decades I have amassed quite a shelfful of his books indeed, so an overview of nearly sixty years of his fecund gifts is out of the question. Instead, I shall focus on The World Doesn’t End (1989), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

Ordinarily, I am not an aficionado of prose poetry – a most unfortunate oxymoron for a hybrid form of literature which usually fails to convince me of the utility of its existence. However, occasionally the rare poet can pull it off, and, for me, Simic does so in The World Doesn’t End.

Often delivered with a deceptive playfulness and offhandedness, Simic’s poetry ranges from the surreal metaphysical to pointed, often dark humor, generally expressed with brief and unembellished sentences whose seeming credibility contrast mightily with the outrageous scenes he is portraying.

In the fourth year of the war, Hermes showed
up. He was not much to look at. His mailman’s
coat was in tatters; mice ran in and out of its pock-
ets. The broad-brimmed hat he was wearing had
bullet holes. He still carried the famous stick that
closes the eyes of the dying, but it looked gnawed.
Did he let the dying bite on it? Whatever the case,
he had no letters for us. “God of thieves!” we
shouted behind his back when he could no longer
hear us.

Nonetheless, some strike me as enormously evocative.

O witches, O poverty! The two who with a
sidelong glance measured the thinness of my neck
through the bars of the birdcage I carried on my
shoulder…
They were far too young and elegant to be
storybook witches. They wore low-cut party
dresses, black seams in their stockings, lips thickly
painted red.
The big-hearted trees offered their leaves by
whispering armfuls over the winding path where the
two eventually vanished.
I was left with my cage, its immense heaviness,
its idiotic feeding dish, the even more absurd vanity
mirror, and the faintly sounding silver bell.

Perhaps you will have a similar reaction.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 Rainbow).
This book reminds so much of the short magical little pieces by Kafka that I totally fell in love for it. It's not coughka-esque, but rather inhabits a different part of the same world that Kafka's short short stories reside in.

He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail, the stupid kid! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother's cupboards. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell --and for what? Just because some people don't know how to bring their children up!

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 that his mother is thinking that her son "has always been a little nuts."

This is the last line to one of his prose poems that I hope I can remember in my daily life.
"In goldfish heaven there's peace and calm."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/05...

[Alan]

Don’t really have anything of value to say about this. We didn’t get along.

Here is one of the poems:

“Tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul,” writes Nietzsche. I always felt that, too, Friedrich! The Amazon jungle with its brightly colored birds squawking, squawking, but its depths dark and hushed. The beautiful lost girl is giving suck to a little monkey. The lizards in attendance wear ecclesiastical robes and speak French to her: “La Reine des Reines,” they intone. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.

Seeing the awards for Simic and this book, I guess I’m in the wrong. Fair enough. I can handle that.

[Nahed.E · Rating 3 out of 5]

عودة إلي الشاعر الصربي تشارلز سيميك، اللقاء الثالث لي معه، ولكن اليوم القصائد نثرية كفقرات قصيرة صادمة في فلسفتها، وبمجرد أن تبدأ بها تجدها قد انتهت .. فلا تبحث لها عن تكملة، ولا تظن أنها ناقصة .. أن فكرتها قد اكتملت بالفعل ! فهذا الفأر، وكوب الحليب، والعجوز الشمطاء، والنافذة المفتوحة في الغرفة الخاوية، هي القصة، والحبكة، والبداية، والنهاية، وأنت القارئ ستقرأ وتنتظر أن تفهم ما خط هنا بلغة سريالية رمزية، ستجبرك علي الفهم، وإعادة القراء، وإذا لم تحاول، فسيكون وقتك قد ضاع سدي!

سيميك ... شاعر سريالي بنكهة نيتشويه بامتياز، مزيج بين عبثية بوكوفسكي، وجنون مايكوفسكي، مع قليل من بودلير، وغموض بو .. ذكرني هذا الديوان بكتاب الآتي من الزمان أسوأ للأديب الإسباني رفائيل فرلوسيو، فتقريبا النكهة نفسها ...
سيميك، أنت أنت في كل لقاء لي معك، تصدمني بسرعة، وأنسي ماقرأت بسرعة، عدا بعض الاقتباسات التي لا تغادر ذاكرتي، فكثير من قلمك يمحي، والنادر يبقي .
ولكنك تستحق ..

[Bud Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 of every leaf on the tree outside my window. Just keep the thing alive. Any means necessary. Even after the world IS dead. Keep it alive.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where ignorance is bliss, where one lies at
night on the bed of stupidity, where one prays on
one'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 same
snatch of a love song over and over. For breakfast
on the terrace we are having some eye-fooling
painted grapes which even the birds peck at. And
now the kisses . . . for which we forgot to remove
our Halloween masks.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 poem. I’m still scratching my head over many of these, but in a way that leaves me wanting to return to them again and again. The fact that Simic does do this by design was reinforced by a quote I found buried in an interview with him in the Paris Review (Spring 2005):

“We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view.”

I suppose I've read poetry similar to Simic's before, but in reading over the above statement, it would still be a reach. I'm somewhat reminded of Zbignew Herbert, but I sense Simic is following a more radical path. However, I'll need to read more of him to get a better handle.

A number of GR reviewers have posted up their favorites samples from this collection. Here’s one of mine (page 41):

Things were not as black as somebody painted
them. There was a pretty child dressed in black and
playing with two black apples. It was either a girl
dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed as a girl. What-
ever, it had small white teeth. The landscape outside
its window had been blackened with a heavy and
coarse paint brush. It was all very teleological,
except when the child stuck out its red tongue.

[Mohamed Elshawaf · Rating 2 out of 5]

لوحات سيريالية مكتوبة شعراً

فلو افترضنا مثلا هذه اللوحة، كيف يمكن لشاعر أن يكتبها


حسنا إن الأمر يكون ممتعا إذا كان خيالك فى حالة صحوه التامة، وأعنى بالتامة النسبة 100% أما لو كان منقوصا فأذن بحرب ضروس مع الملل

مجهدة إلا حد ما خصوصا إذا كان الجو حارا والكهرباء زائر لايأتى صيفا.
هناك رأى أتبناه يقول: وما الداعى لإعمال الخيال بكل قوته لاستحضار صور عجائبية كهذه؟: كأن يصور الصخرة بمرآة لا تعمل، أو يصور أمه بضفيرة من دخان أسود! أو قردة لها رؤوس سقراط!... إعمال الخيال فى حد ذاته شيء ممتع وضرورى، بعض الصور ممتعة إذا اكتملت داخل عقلك، ولو استطعت ببعض الحذق أن تضفى عليها بعض الإسقاطات، فستشعر بنشوة الفاهم الذى اعتقد أنه فكّ شفرة دافنشى..

النصوص أيضا فيها عيب ما: تخيلوا رواية من الواقعية السحرية (كبدرو بارامو مثلا ) اجتُثت من بين دفتيها قطع صغيرة، تُرى هل تفهمها، أو حتى تندمج فى عالمها.. لا أظن !

فلو أن الشاعر عنون كل قطعة بعنوان يدل على الحالة الشعورية، أو القضية التى كتب فيها نصه لكان الأمر سلساً...

النصوص لا تعدو عن كونها لوحات سيريانية لكنك أنت من يرسمها...

[Angie · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Sajid · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a forest of question marks you were no bigger than an asterisk.
O the season of mists! Someone blew the hunting horn.
The dictionary said you were a sign indicating an omission; then it changed the subject abruptly and spoke of "asterisms," which supposedly have to do with crystals showing a starlike luminous figure.
You didn't believe a word of it. The question marks had valentines carved on their trunks so you wouldn't look up and notice the ropes.
Greasy ropes with baby nooses.

I laughed, i laughed and i couldn’t stop laughing!

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 far from the poetic tree that a new subgenre, "flash fiction," had to be invented for the mass of the unpoetic claptrap, Simic gives us a book full of wonderful tall tales, flights of fancy, and utterly poetic language, all without ever once straying from the idea that what he is writing in these small pieces is, in fact, poetry.

"The dog went to dancing school. The dog's owner sniffed vials of Viennese air. One day the two heard the new Master of the Universe pass their door with a heavy step. After that, the man exchanged clothes with his dog. It was a dog on two legs, wearing a tuxedo, that they led to the edge of the common grave. As for the man, blind and deaf as he came to be, he still wags his tail at the approach of a stranger." --untitled (p. 40)

The World Doesn't End caused me to re-evaluate my ideas on what poetry is. Perhaps it is not, as Eliot would have it, language elevated; perhaps, instead, it is language as it should be. The standard as opposed to the elevation, the diction we should be striving for in our daily lives.

The finest book of poetry to cross my desk since Reznikoff's classic By the Waters of Manhattan half a decade ago. Must reading for poetry fans, and engaging stuff in prose form for those who don't do poetry. Just think of it as the best flash fiction ever written. In any case, whatever you have to do to convince yourself to do so, read this book. *****

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 qualified to speak critically about poetry. Over the years I’ve managed to overhear a few opinions from poets about what poetry ought to be, or what its nature is, or what it can be distilled down to. Poetry seems too personal for any one of these opinions to be an effective critique, in my opinion. If that makes me a dilettante, I’m fine with it.

Forgiving the prologue, this book seems like it has a poem for everyone. It’s laden with apocalyptic imagery, but there is life as well. While most of the poems seem to take on a tone of desperation, there is silliness and playfulness sprinkled in as well.
Finally, this is a book that contains wonderful enigmas. It is a delight to lose yourself in many of these poems and try to find your way out again.

[Brent Legault · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 comes a black limousine with a veiled woman in the back seat, but no one at the wheel. When it stops, she takes a pair of gold scissors out of her purse and snips the thumb off. We are off to Chicago with her using the bloody stump of my thumb to paint her lips.

The vivid and original final image almost overpowers the awkwardness of "--the thumb off. We are off--" of which there are many similar examples.

I think this is a better read for people who either don't much like poetry or who have never read it at all and would like to ease their way into the stronger stuff.

[Belal · Rating 5 out of 5]

"
هل أَكَلَةُ لحوم البشرِ الرّوسُ أسوأ من أقرانهم الإنكليز؟
بالتأكيد. فالإنكليز يأكلون القَدَمَ فقط، بينما يأكلُ الرّوسُ الرّوحَ. "الروح سرابٌ،" قلتُ لآنا ألِكساندروڤنا، لكنها مضتْ تأكل روحي رغم ذلك.
"أمثل طبق "كونفيت " البطّ رائع المذاق، أم مثل بطلينوس العنق القصير المذهل الآتي لتوِّهِ من موطنه المالح؟" تساءلتُ. بينما اكتفتْ بِفَرْكِ بطنها وابتسمتْ لي عبر الطاولة.
"

[Francisco Barrios · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Simic (Belgrado, 1938) pertenece a la misma estirpe que Joseph Conrad, quien adoptó el inglés como lengua para llevar a cabo su actividad literaria; sin embargo, a diferencia del polaco, su quehacer ha sido poético más que novelístico.

Es en este escenario donde Simic ha sido el gran renovador del poema en prosa al interior de la literatura norteamericana: creando una poética de los noctámbulos (cercana a los cuadros de Hopper) donde la belleza de los paisajes urbanos y las escenas cotidianas acercan el descubrimiento poético al gran público, y donde no se requiere un lenguaje grandilocuente o el Diccionario Oxford para acceder a sus poemas (algunos de los cuales son de apenas unos renglones) y poder echar así a volar la imaginación, en situaciones que involucran a todos los habitantes de las grandes ciudades (como característica dominante de nuestro tiempo):

Lección de historia

Las cucas parecen
aldeanos cómicos
en dramas serios.

[History Lesson

The roaches look like
Comic rustics
In serious dramas]

Lo cual hace de este poemario uno de esos libros que admiten una infinidad de (re)lecturas y glosas a manos de otros lectores y poetas, y permite explicar que este haya sido el primer poemario en prosa ganador del Premio Púlitzer de Poesía 1990.

Un texto que tiene algunas erratas en la parte en inglés, pero cuya traducción a cargo de Jordi Doce está bastante bien cuidada. A pesar de haber sido un libro de actualidad hace más de 30 años, debe cobsiderarse imperdible para todos aquellos interesados en el poema en prosa en nuestros días.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

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-by
Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose
fame will never reach beyond your closest family,
and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after
dinner over a jug of fierce red wine . . . while the
children are falling asleep and complaining about
the noise you're making as you rummage through
the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife
might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.

It's snowing, says someone who has peeked
into the dark night, and then he, too, turns towards
you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner
somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red,
the long rambling love poem whose final stanza
(unknown to you) is hopelessly missing.

--After Aleksandar Ristovic'

there among the books of the dead and the books discarded for space. this. a light in an otherwise dim day. i held it in my hand up to the register with its clicks and walked out to the impossible evening. with my mother on my mind. and my father all head in his hands. and my sister and brothers just going about their lives one thousand miles away.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole
me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again.
This went on for some time. One minute I was
in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new
mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table
eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.
It was the first day of spring. One of my
fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one
was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical
bird.

[Matthew Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[أماني خليل · Rating 5 out of 5]

ديوان يدمي القلب.. صور شعرية مختلفة مفجعة في انسانيتها. لغة تتشقق عن التكرار لتكتمل في البلاغة والرهافة.
شكرا لاسلام يوسف الترشيح دم بود يا صديقي

[Abeer · Rating 1 out of 5]

الغرفة خاوية والنافذة مفتوحة؟😅
فن:))

[لين Warie · Rating 5 out of 5]

قصائد تشارلز سيميك النثرية غاية في البساطة لغةً ، غاية في العمق والتعقيد فيما وراء الصورة. ساخرة، تخترقك حتى قاع الحزن