The World Doesn't End

Rating:
Summary: Finest Living Poet
Review: A truly original mystical poet. Reading this book was expensive for me, leaving me no choice but to order numerous, Charles Simic books.

Rating:
Summary: Mind-bogglingly good.
Review: 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. *****

Rating:
Summary: Shaking hands with Simic himself
Review: In a time when many critics despise the prose poem, brushing it aside, refusing to accept such work into the usual canon of lyric poetry, Charles Simic defies all boundaries, combining prose form with a lyrical quality often absent in accepted "lyric" verse.
Simic's world of fantasy and surrealism don't come off as dreamy as one might think. If anything, he is somewhat of a journalist, reporting on events, images, people, animals, gypsies, etc., but from a purely personal perspective, a perspective we all can identify with because we see the world in similar fashion.
There are few poets more intimate than Simic. When looking through his eyes, which have seen and survived much, one can't get closer to one of contemporary poetry's strongest voices.

Rating:
Summary: In this hotel I would remain awake
Review: Simic is the master of poetic dislocation; he finds beauty amid urgency and ruin, and his brand of surrealism has a special charm. It consists of the melancholy of survival, the haunting melodies of World War II, the consciousness of being a foreigner in New York, young, hungry, lonely, in love with jazz, and too happy to be alive to worry about the hole in his pocket where a few coins once rang. This particular book is essential reading for anyone who would understand the prose poem in its recent incarnation as an American poetic institution.

Rating:
Summary: A landmark volume of poetry
Review: This is one of the best books of poetry that has been published in the past 15 years. The strength of this Pulitzer Prize-winning volume comes from its deceptive simplicity. The prose poems are easy and fun to read, but Simic can get very strange very fast. One poem starts, "We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap." On one level, a delightful line. On another level, it is a disturbing image. In the same poem, as the mouse nibbles on his ear, the mouse whispers, "These are dark and evil days." The juxtaposition of the levity and the darkness creates a landmark volume of poetry, truly an essential book.