Article
Fly-traps for our imagination: on Charles Simic’s essay ‘Prose poetry’
May 31, 2010
Since then Simic has never felt any need to defend himself. In his essay he writes that if he described how the poems in The World Doesn’t End came about it would only infuriate his critics still more. This is the first time he has confessed to how he came to write prose poems: “I knew a number of my contemporaries who wrote prose poems and I liked what they wrote, but, for me, the writing of poetry was always about form and the struggle to fit words inside a line or a stanza.”
His explanation is terse, but in it Simic touches on an essential point – the issue of form. How can poems that don’t even look like poems be called that? For some people the matter is plain as daylight – poems have a fixed form; prose poems don’t have any. Recently the Dutch right-wing liberal politician Frits Bolkestein resigned from the jury of the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize because he disagreed with the award being given to poet Alfred Schaffer. Schaffer’s collection, Kooi (Cage), also includes prose poems, which, according to Bolkestein, don’t have any proper form.
In fact, form is of considerable importance even in prose poetry. For Simic the short paragraph has proved to be the main component. He discovered this form by chance when he was copying notes from his notebooks onto his computer. He reread these short fragments of prose, liked how they sounded and realised that he “might have a book there”. The problem of what to call these fragments only arose on the eve of publication. In his essay, Simic describes what happened. “‘Don’t call them anything,’ I told my editor. ‘You have to call them something,’ she explained to me, ‘so that the bookstore knows under what heading to shelve the book.’”
It is not improbable that this is just what occurred, but Simic has let little information slip about what won him over to this form at that time. It had to have been more than just the way the poems sounded. Even when their greatest strength was in their sound, there still had to be something to say about what made this poetry contained in short paragraphs so charming, as well as about why these poems, which look like prose, can still be classified as poetry.
Before beginning to answer this question in his essay, Simic quotes one of the prose poems from The World Doesn’t End.
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me 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.
Simic’s essay initially sidesteps the issue, but after quoting this prose poem, it suddenly comes to the point. “The hardest thing for poets is to free themselves from their own habitual way of seeing the world and find ways to surprise themselves. That’s what I liked about these pieces. They seemed effortless and, like all prose poems, came, as James Tate once said, in ‘deceptively simple packaging: the paragraph’.”
According to Simic, it is precisely this seeming simplicity and the apparent absence of any concern with form that gives prose poetry its appeal: “What makes us so fond of it is its clumsiness, its lack of expectation or ambition.”
Many prose poems do indeed make a more casual impression than other poems, but isn’t this just a suggestion or disguise? Simic thinks “That’s difficult to say. Yes, it’s true that awkwardness is a sort of disguise, but on the other hand, I suspect that most poets can’t do anything about it. This is where comedy comes on the scene. In writing a prose poem I always felt like Buster Keaton or Chaplin who in one of these silent comedies try to carry out a simple task and make a total mess of it.”
The question remains whether prose poetry with its different form can, whether deliberately or otherwise, attain something of which other poetry is incapable. “If I could say what it was, I’d be able to define what a prose poem is, but I can’t do that. With me, it is that inability to say what it is that inspires me and makes me read them.”
Simic’s essay is an inspiring foray in which the impossibility of defining prose poetry still offers a fascinating glimpse into what it is able to achieve. And at the end of his essay he comes close to offering us a definition. “They look like prose and act like poems, because, despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination.”
Sources: Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End and ‘Prose Poetry’. The author of this article also had an email interview with Charles Simic.
This article was published in Dutch in the 2010 Poetry International Festival Rotterdam magazine.
Poet and essayist Charles Simic takes great pleasure in making riddles still more enigmatic and creating an even greater mystery with painfully lucid sentences. The essay ‘Prose Poetry’, which he wrote at the invitation of Poetry International, and which is published in the Dutch-language festival anthology Hotel Parnassus, begins with the complaint that “prose poems have been written for almost two centuries now and no one has yet succeeded in coming up with a decent explanation of what they are”. Anyone who is familiar with the work of Charles Simic, who was born in Belgrade in 1938 but has lived and worked for many years in the United States, knows that his motive in writing an essay like this is his fascination for the elusive. He circles round the mystery and, while making an effort to grasp its essence, still leaves it intact.
In 1990, Simic won the renowned Pulitzer Prize for his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End. In the aforementioned essay, he tells how the award was greeted with a fair amount of criticism. He doesn’t go into his detractors’ objections in his essay, but in an interview he says that conservative critics didn’t view his prose poems as poetry: “Poetry has stanzas and a metre; prose poetry is just prose and it is scandalous to honour it as though it were poetry.”Since then Simic has never felt any need to defend himself. In his essay he writes that if he described how the poems in The World Doesn’t End came about it would only infuriate his critics still more. This is the first time he has confessed to how he came to write prose poems: “I knew a number of my contemporaries who wrote prose poems and I liked what they wrote, but, for me, the writing of poetry was always about form and the struggle to fit words inside a line or a stanza.”
His explanation is terse, but in it Simic touches on an essential point – the issue of form. How can poems that don’t even look like poems be called that? For some people the matter is plain as daylight – poems have a fixed form; prose poems don’t have any. Recently the Dutch right-wing liberal politician Frits Bolkestein resigned from the jury of the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize because he disagreed with the award being given to poet Alfred Schaffer. Schaffer’s collection, Kooi (Cage), also includes prose poems, which, according to Bolkestein, don’t have any proper form.
In fact, form is of considerable importance even in prose poetry. For Simic the short paragraph has proved to be the main component. He discovered this form by chance when he was copying notes from his notebooks onto his computer. He reread these short fragments of prose, liked how they sounded and realised that he “might have a book there”. The problem of what to call these fragments only arose on the eve of publication. In his essay, Simic describes what happened. “‘Don’t call them anything,’ I told my editor. ‘You have to call them something,’ she explained to me, ‘so that the bookstore knows under what heading to shelve the book.’”
It is not improbable that this is just what occurred, but Simic has let little information slip about what won him over to this form at that time. It had to have been more than just the way the poems sounded. Even when their greatest strength was in their sound, there still had to be something to say about what made this poetry contained in short paragraphs so charming, as well as about why these poems, which look like prose, can still be classified as poetry.
Before beginning to answer this question in his essay, Simic quotes one of the prose poems from The World Doesn’t End.
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me 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.
Simic’s essay initially sidesteps the issue, but after quoting this prose poem, it suddenly comes to the point. “The hardest thing for poets is to free themselves from their own habitual way of seeing the world and find ways to surprise themselves. That’s what I liked about these pieces. They seemed effortless and, like all prose poems, came, as James Tate once said, in ‘deceptively simple packaging: the paragraph’.”
According to Simic, it is precisely this seeming simplicity and the apparent absence of any concern with form that gives prose poetry its appeal: “What makes us so fond of it is its clumsiness, its lack of expectation or ambition.”
Many prose poems do indeed make a more casual impression than other poems, but isn’t this just a suggestion or disguise? Simic thinks “That’s difficult to say. Yes, it’s true that awkwardness is a sort of disguise, but on the other hand, I suspect that most poets can’t do anything about it. This is where comedy comes on the scene. In writing a prose poem I always felt like Buster Keaton or Chaplin who in one of these silent comedies try to carry out a simple task and make a total mess of it.”
The question remains whether prose poetry with its different form can, whether deliberately or otherwise, attain something of which other poetry is incapable. “If I could say what it was, I’d be able to define what a prose poem is, but I can’t do that. With me, it is that inability to say what it is that inspires me and makes me read them.”
Simic’s essay is an inspiring foray in which the impossibility of defining prose poetry still offers a fascinating glimpse into what it is able to achieve. And at the end of his essay he comes close to offering us a definition. “They look like prose and act like poems, because, despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination.”
Sources: Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End and ‘Prose Poetry’. The author of this article also had an email interview with Charles Simic.
This article was published in Dutch in the 2010 Poetry International Festival Rotterdam magazine.
© Mischa Andriessen
Translator: Donald Gardner
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