Scaliger turns deadly pale at the sight of watercress. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, passes out at the sight of a caged fox. Maria de Medici feels instantly giddy on seeing a rose, even in a painting. My ancestors, meanwhile, are eating cabbage. They keep stirring the pot looking for a pigfoot which isn’t there. The sky is blue. The nightingale sings in a Renaissance sonnet, and immediately someone goes to bed with a toothache.
Charles Simic
Cathy McCallum writes: This is a prose poem by Charles Simic, the poet laureate of the United States. It's from his book The World Doesn't End which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. I really like the oddness of his imagery, the way he sets up a thought visually. You don't need to know the people he mentions to 'get' it.
2 comments:
Now, would you just look at that. Cathy posts a prose poem and Schreiber would say there is no such a thing. 'Where is the recurring meter and the rhythym? What does he make us feel emotionally? The whole thing runs like a paragraph in a novel'.
I might ask, is Simic just dropping or using names of the past famous he hopes will impress or is it really something he has thought about because he read of their foibles in a history or a novel?
It brings the article I posted into focus, for although I do not dislike prose as poetry, I can see what Schreiber is on about. Can anyone else?
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