Tuesday, January 27, 2015
The Magic of Impossible Imagery: Charles Simic
In Charles Simic's prose poems, he uses the magic of originality and obscurity. For example, in one of his poems, he talks about an "old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards." His personification the river paints an image in the reader's mind of the river being an old woman or man. And, rivers cannot flow forwards or backwards; they just flow. But, when Simic put it down on paper that this river flows backwards, he made it possible. When he writes,"The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm," Simic makes this possible, because the reader pictures it. In this way, the magic in Simic's poetry exists in the mental imagery that cannot exist in this world's reality.
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Hi Claire,
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting the magic in his poetry, because he ignores the laws of physics and science and creates his own truths. By stating the rivers are flowing backwards, it does because that is what he has written. I feel as though this also connects with visual art as well, especially surrealist art. If Salvador Dali paints clocks melting, then that is what is the truth in that context. The magic lays were the writer makes up their own rules to reality, and the reader must accept these conditions contrary to their previous knowledge of how the world operates.