6 August - The poetry of Charles Simic

Today's show was dedicated entirely to Charles Simic, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. On the air today I read my favorite Simic poems, shared some of his biography provided by the Poetry Foundation, and listened to a few MP3s of Simic reading his own work. Some of the poems on this program were:

Prodigy
Toward Nightfall
Little Night Music
Medieval Miniature
Mystic Life
Muttering Perhaps, or Humming
De Occulta Philosophia
Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators
Riddle
Dark Farmhouses
The Street of Martyrs
Mystics
Evening Walk
The Devils
My Shoes
Jackstraws
For the Sake of Amelia
St. Thomas Aquinas
The Devils
Trees at Night
Watch Repair
Butcher Shop
Fork

In preparing for the show, I read all of the Simic I had on hand. I put together a nice list of what I wanted to read. To my knowledge, I had never read Simic aloud until today. Doing so gave me a new appreciation for poems I'd overlooked until now. I also realized today that Charles Simic is obsessed with clocks and shadows.

Mystics

Help me to find what I've lost,
If it was ever, however briefly, mine,
You may have found it.
Old man praying in the privy,
Lonely child drawing a secret room
And in it a stopped clock.

Seek to convey its truth to me
By hints and omens.
The room in shadow, perhaps the wrong room?
The cockroach on the wall,
The naked lovers kissing
On the TV with the sound turned off.
I could hear the red faucet drip.

Or else restore to plain view
What is eternally invisible
And speaks by being silent.
Blue distances to the North,
The fires of the evening to the West,
Christ himself in pain, panhandling
On the altar of the storefront church
With a long bloody nail in each palm.

In this moment of amazement...
Since I do ask for it humbly,
Without greed, out of true need.
My teeth chattered so loudly,
My old dog got up to see what's the matter.
Oh divine lassitude, long drawn-out sigh
As the vision came and went.

These poems and the others read today were selected from Unending Blues, Selected Early Poems, Jackstraws, The Book of Gods and Devils, Hotel Insomnia, A Wedding in Hell and The Voice at 3:00 A.M..