Friday, April 24, 2009  Simic and Sudoku  Sometime in the mid
90s, my friend Al (Hellus) - God rest his soul - told me about
Charles Simic. On Al's recommendation, I read Simic's Pulitzer
Prize-winning (prose) poems in The World Doesn't End. I was
blown away. I thought they were great. I'd never read poems that
twisted logic to its own ends like that before.  Since then,
I've talked to other poets who say of these poems that they
"don't get them". I understand that because, the first time - at
least the first time - I read the poems, I often didn't know
what to make of them either. More than half of the poems are
untitled. Clearly though, the poems feature recurring
atmospheric elements such as life after wartime, barking dogs,
poverty and an overhanging sense of a distant governing
authority that may use force to obtain the cooperation of the
governed. Occasionally a poem will allude somehow to art and/or
literature.  More recently I read the 51 poems in Simic's book
of poems (2005, Harcourt) titled my noise