Parsing Poems - Charles Simic Edition (or, I Bitch About Punctuation)
Look, it's National Poetry Month! I will participate by picking at things.
I have no critical training in poetry. I have no critical training in prose or film, either, yet I'm perfectly comfortable with bitching at books and movies. But since I have a much narrower band of experience with poems than with books or movies, I feel as I if I must warn you all that my opinion in this area is more likely to be on crack.
So grain of salt here, folks, grain of salt.
Aaaaand, on to Charles Simic. Who I love.
I played in the smallest theatres
Bits of infernal gravel
On the window sill
Surrounding a solitary
White bread crumb.
See that? That's just way damn cool.
Or:
Police dogs in a dog groomer's window dressed as children. O the starched white pinafores, the lace-bordered undies, the patent-leather shoes! If you're going to sell your soul to the devil, go down that street and ask on the second floor of the house with the dogs.
There's something joyous in these poems, even if they're lonely, even if they're dark. It lies in the imagery, and the strength of the language. Its verve. They're dreamlike, but rather than the effect I usually get when listening to someone relate a dream of theirs (teeth-grinding boredom, because I don't have access to the symbol-system their backbrain's using that's so damn meaningful), these poems feel like they tap into some kind of universal dream, as if they are constantly on the verge of some kind of realization, some kind of prophecy.
They feel like slipstream stories infused with pulp, like oddness standing at the verge of meaning, and for me they create the same sense of unheimlich that Borges or Kelly Link do. They're like stones you can turn over and over in your hand, gaining comfort from the motion and the familiarity of the enigmatic.
...and then we reach this one. With its damn lack of commas.
The Quality of Light
You worship a few oblique truths,
You remind yourself on a morning
So clear you do not recognize the day
You're in a circle of things you call your own.
They measure you, themselves a bit too inanimate
To be real. And this harsh light,
One could speak of it as of a precise instrument.
Better not to ask whose it is.
You understand, you tell yourself, the rituals.
That's why you put on the black overcoat,
And open a black umbrella inside the house,
And sit at this unsteady, round table,
For the usual breakfast of mushrooms,
Which they say got so black and poisonous-
Looking
While you slept naked in the arms of
Some much-aged, big-assed Ariadne.
So, broken out into a sentence format, it reads:
You worship a few oblique truths, you remind yourself on a morning so clear you do not recognize the day you're in a circle of things you call your own.
And I keep feeling like there needs to be some kind of punctuation breaking off, "you're in a circle of things you call your own," whether a comma or a period or a dash. Because I can see a morning so clear you don't recognize the day, and I can see you being in a circle of things you call your own (which is important for the second stanza, at least). But being in a morning so clear that you don't recognize the day you're in a circle of things you call your own just seems jarring to me.
I mean, I don't usually break down the days into days that I'm in a circle of things I call my own vs. days where I'm not, let alone a day with a morning so clear that I might confuse the two categories.
The second stanza resonates for me, but the first one falls dead on the ground with a resounding thud, and it's all because I'm having trouble placing the clause in relation to the rest of the stanza.
And it's driving me a little nuts. Which is why you all get to hear about it.
I have no critical training in poetry. I have no critical training in prose or film, either, yet I'm perfectly comfortable with bitching at books and movies. But since I have a much narrower band of experience with poems than with books or movies, I feel as I if I must warn you all that my opinion in this area is more likely to be on crack.
So grain of salt here, folks, grain of salt.
Aaaaand, on to Charles Simic. Who I love.
I played in the smallest theatres
Bits of infernal gravel
On the window sill
Surrounding a solitary
White bread crumb.
See that? That's just way damn cool.
Or:
Police dogs in a dog groomer's window dressed as children. O the starched white pinafores, the lace-bordered undies, the patent-leather shoes! If you're going to sell your soul to the devil, go down that street and ask on the second floor of the house with the dogs.
There's something joyous in these poems, even if they're lonely, even if they're dark. It lies in the imagery, and the strength of the language. Its verve. They're dreamlike, but rather than the effect I usually get when listening to someone relate a dream of theirs (teeth-grinding boredom, because I don't have access to the symbol-system their backbrain's using that's so damn meaningful), these poems feel like they tap into some kind of universal dream, as if they are constantly on the verge of some kind of realization, some kind of prophecy.
They feel like slipstream stories infused with pulp, like oddness standing at the verge of meaning, and for me they create the same sense of unheimlich that Borges or Kelly Link do. They're like stones you can turn over and over in your hand, gaining comfort from the motion and the familiarity of the enigmatic.
...and then we reach this one. With its damn lack of commas.
The Quality of Light
You worship a few oblique truths,
You remind yourself on a morning
So clear you do not recognize the day
You're in a circle of things you call your own.
They measure you, themselves a bit too inanimate
To be real. And this harsh light,
One could speak of it as of a precise instrument.
Better not to ask whose it is.
You understand, you tell yourself, the rituals.
That's why you put on the black overcoat,
And open a black umbrella inside the house,
And sit at this unsteady, round table,
For the usual breakfast of mushrooms,
Which they say got so black and poisonous-
Looking
While you slept naked in the arms of
Some much-aged, big-assed Ariadne.
So, broken out into a sentence format, it reads:
You worship a few oblique truths, you remind yourself on a morning so clear you do not recognize the day you're in a circle of things you call your own.
And I keep feeling like there needs to be some kind of punctuation breaking off, "you're in a circle of things you call your own," whether a comma or a period or a dash. Because I can see a morning so clear you don't recognize the day, and I can see you being in a circle of things you call your own (which is important for the second stanza, at least). But being in a morning so clear that you don't recognize the day you're in a circle of things you call your own just seems jarring to me.
I mean, I don't usually break down the days into days that I'm in a circle of things I call my own vs. days where I'm not, let alone a day with a morning so clear that I might confuse the two categories.
The second stanza resonates for me, but the first one falls dead on the ground with a resounding thud, and it's all because I'm having trouble placing the clause in relation to the rest of the stanza.
And it's driving me a little nuts. Which is why you all get to hear about it.