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The Life of Images: Selected Prose
A collection of new and selected essays by the Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Poet Laureate. In addition to being one of America’s most famous and commended poets, Charles Simic is a prolific and talented essayist. The Life of Images brings together his best prose work written over twenty-five years. A blend of the straightforward, the wry, and the hopeful, the essays in The Life of Images explore subjects ranging from literary criticism to philosophy, photography to Simic’s childhood in a war-torn country. Culled from five collections, each work demonstrates the qualities that make Simic’s poetry so brilliant yet accessible. Whether he is revealing the influence of literature on his childhood development, pondering the relationship between food and comfort, or elegizing the pull to return to a homeland that no longer exists, the legendary poet shares his distinctive take on the world and offers an intimate look into his remarkable mind.
- GenresEssaysPoetryNonfiction
352 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2015
24 people are currently reading
347 people want to read
About the author
Charles Simic
256 books472 followersU.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008
Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.
Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.
Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.
Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.
Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
May 2, 2025
I expected Charles Simic's collection of essays to be much like essays I had read by Jane Hirshfield and Tony Hoagland: when it came to topics, all poetry all the time.
Alas, it was not to be. Although the opening section of the book is chiefly occupied with thoughts on poetry, much of the rest of the book is just an odd-bodkin collection of essays Charles sold to this magazine or that.
Thus you will read book reviews, you will read about artists Simic is interested in, you will read about photographers that have caught his fancy, and, yes, you will read about things as grand as history and as picayune as Simic's weakness for sausages.
Meaning? What's lost in poetry is gained in variety. And? That Simic can write in a concise matter that should satisfy many readers looking for his prose perspectives on poetry and life.
On my website, I quote Simic extensively on his ideas regarding poetry.
Alas, it was not to be. Although the opening section of the book is chiefly occupied with thoughts on poetry, much of the rest of the book is just an odd-bodkin collection of essays Charles sold to this magazine or that.
Thus you will read book reviews, you will read about artists Simic is interested in, you will read about photographers that have caught his fancy, and, yes, you will read about things as grand as history and as picayune as Simic's weakness for sausages.
Meaning? What's lost in poetry is gained in variety. And? That Simic can write in a concise matter that should satisfy many readers looking for his prose perspectives on poetry and life.
On my website, I quote Simic extensively on his ideas regarding poetry.
January 15, 2023
Photography is a black art like alchemy. It turns matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Still, there are moments when looking at a photograph of a night sky we have a hunch what the word soul means, what the word infinity encompasses.
We lost the poet last week. He left us. He moved into a different realm, I'm not sure of the exchange rate there? Simic might not know yet, but he possibly remembers that his birth name was Dusan. These essays were culled from myriad projects and publications, many are simply reviews. Nearly all reflect nighttime, the senses and the frayed tapestry of memory. I find it fascinating for starters that Simic and his father were philosophy geeks, reading Kant and Bergson for fun, often during bouts of insomnia. Most of the essays philosophical or otherwise are also confessional. I obviously appreciated his thoughts on Beograd--both during his childhood years there during WWII as well as during the Yugoslav Civil Wars of the 1990s. There are lengthy glosses on Buster Keaton and respectful surveys of Roberto Calasso. Simic certainly disbelieves in great leaps forward, collective punishment and ethnic purity. The poet was a remarkable man.
We lost the poet last week. He left us. He moved into a different realm, I'm not sure of the exchange rate there? Simic might not know yet, but he possibly remembers that his birth name was Dusan. These essays were culled from myriad projects and publications, many are simply reviews. Nearly all reflect nighttime, the senses and the frayed tapestry of memory. I find it fascinating for starters that Simic and his father were philosophy geeks, reading Kant and Bergson for fun, often during bouts of insomnia. Most of the essays philosophical or otherwise are also confessional. I obviously appreciated his thoughts on Beograd--both during his childhood years there during WWII as well as during the Yugoslav Civil Wars of the 1990s. There are lengthy glosses on Buster Keaton and respectful surveys of Roberto Calasso. Simic certainly disbelieves in great leaps forward, collective punishment and ethnic purity. The poet was a remarkable man.
December 3, 2020
P22: "Back in 1965 I sent some of my object poems ("Fork" among them) to a literary magazine. They came back with a letter that said something like this: 'Dear Mr. Simic . . . you're obviously a sensible young man, so why do you waste your time writing about knives, spoons, and forks?'"
P22: "Plus, all genuine poetry in my view is antipoetry."
P23: "Poets think they're pitchers when they're really catchers."--Jack Spicer
P24: "We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us."--Gaston Bachelard
P24: "Every new metaphor is a new thought, a fragment of a new myth of reality."
"Metaphor is a part of the not-knowing aspect of art, and yet I'm firmly convinced it is the supreme way of searching for truth. How can this be? I don't know. I have never been able to figure it out to my satisfaction."
"Poetry attracts me because it makes trouble for thinkers."
P25: "I like a poem that understates, that leaves out, breaks off, remains open-ended. A poem is a piece of the unutterable whole. To 'complete,' to pretend that is possible to do so (and here, too, I'm following Heidegger), is to set arbitrary boundaries to what is boundless."
"Emily Dickinson's poems do that for me. Her ambiguities are philosophical. She lives with uncertainties, even delights in them. . . . The nature of presence itself is her subject. The awe of . . . the supreme mystery of consciousness watching itself."
P25: "Something must be for something to be said."--Paul Ricoeur
P29: "I say the word or two that has to be said . . . and remind every man and every woman of something."--Walt Whitman
P30 to 31: "The poet sits before a blank piece of paper with a need to say many things in the small space of the poem. The world is huge, the poet is alone, and the poem is just a bit of language, a few scratchings of the pen surrounded by the silence of the night."
"It could be that the poet wishes to tell you about his or her life. A few images of some fleeting moment when one was happy or exceptionally lucid. The secret wish of poetry is to stop time. The poet wants to retrieve a face, a mood, a cloud in the sky, a tree in the wind, and take a kind of mental photograph of that moment in which you as a reader recognize yourself. Poems are other people's snapshots in which we recognize ourselves."
"Next the poet is driven by the desire to tell the truth. 'How is truth to be said?' asks Gwendolyn Brooks. Truth matters. Getting it right matters. The realists advise: open your eyes and look. People of imagination warn: close your eyes to see better. There's truth with eyes open and there's truth with eyes closed and they often do not recognize each other on the street."
"Next one wishes to say something about the age in which one lives. Every age has its injustices and immense sufferings, and ours is scarcely an exception. . . . The task of poetry, perhaps, is to salvage a trace of the authentic from the wreckage of religious, philosophical, and political systems."
"Next, one wants to write a poem so well crafted that it would do honor to the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens . . . ."
"At the same time, one hopes to rewrite that tradition, subvert it, turn it upside down and make some living space for oneself."
"At the same time, one wants to entertain the reader with outrageous metaphors, flights of imagination, and heartbreaking pronouncements."
"At the same time, one has, for the most part, no idea of what one is doing. Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is merely the bemused spectator. The poem is as much the result of chance as of intention. Probably more so."
"At the same time, one hopes to be read and loved in China in a thousand years the same way the ancient Chinese poets are loved and read in our own day, and so forth."
"This is a small order from a large menu requiring one of those many-armed Indian divinities to serve as a waiter."
"In the cold light of reason, poetry is impossible to write."
P32: To be a genius meant ". . . to believe your own thoughts, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men."--Ralph Waldo Emerson
P33: "America is not finished, perhaps never will be."--Walt Whitman, (who if he saw the behavior of the party of Lincoln now would say, "America, you are finished!" [my addition])
P35: "Homer never wrote on an empty stomach."--Rabelais
P46: Simic and James Tate collaborated on some poems by playing a free association game. For example, the word "match" and the word "jail" would become "matchstick jail." They would stop at different points to see what they had. The would even do a literary analysis. Then they would revise again and free associate again as they wrote an unknown poem.
Russell Edson said about free association writing, "This kind of creation needs to be done as rapidly as possible. Any hesitation causes it to lose its believability, its special reality."
Two examples are James Tate's "the wheelchair butterfly" and Bill Knott's "razorblade choir."
P47: "Only literary critics do not know that poems mostly write themselves. Metaphors and similes owe everything to chance."
P99: "Was it Charles Olson who said that myth is a bed in which human beings make love to the gods?"
P108: "The secret of the prose poem lies in its economy and surprise. It must dazzle, and it must also have a lightness of touch. I regard the comic spirit as its true Muse. Playful and irreverent treatment of every subject is usually the custom. In order to free poetry of its mannerisms and tics, the prose poem must not take itself too seriously. Impossible to write, illegitimate in the view of so many poets and critics, it must remain a pariah and an object of ridicule to survive."
P138: "I went on to make a poem of things overlooked, slighted, and forbidden. Still and all, my exuberant praise of all matters sexual was a permanent scandal in a country founded by the followers of Calvin."
P153: Hart Crane: "As a poet I may be possibly more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay of metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perception involved in the poem."
P163-4: Foucault: "We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events without a landmark or point of reference."
P164: "This is where the poet comes in. In place of the historian's broad sweep, the poet gives us a kind of reverse history of what in the great scheme of things are often regarded as 'unimportant' events, the image of a dead cat, say, lying in the rubble of a bombed city, rather than the rationale for that air campaign."
P 164: "Poetry succeeds at times in conveying the pain of individuals caught in the wheel of history."
P 238: Standartenfuhrer Steinbrecher: "Knowledge is the prerequisite for all evil." He claims that crime on a large scale "comes from the learned." This goes against the Socratic idea that "No one does evil voluntarily." They do it out of ignorance. The evil people are doing now to the planet is on many levels a case of clear knowledge.
P 312: Andre Breton: "Poetry is made in bed like love."
P22: "Plus, all genuine poetry in my view is antipoetry."
P23: "Poets think they're pitchers when they're really catchers."--Jack Spicer
P24: "We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us."--Gaston Bachelard
P24: "Every new metaphor is a new thought, a fragment of a new myth of reality."
"Metaphor is a part of the not-knowing aspect of art, and yet I'm firmly convinced it is the supreme way of searching for truth. How can this be? I don't know. I have never been able to figure it out to my satisfaction."
"Poetry attracts me because it makes trouble for thinkers."
P25: "I like a poem that understates, that leaves out, breaks off, remains open-ended. A poem is a piece of the unutterable whole. To 'complete,' to pretend that is possible to do so (and here, too, I'm following Heidegger), is to set arbitrary boundaries to what is boundless."
"Emily Dickinson's poems do that for me. Her ambiguities are philosophical. She lives with uncertainties, even delights in them. . . . The nature of presence itself is her subject. The awe of . . . the supreme mystery of consciousness watching itself."
P25: "Something must be for something to be said."--Paul Ricoeur
P29: "I say the word or two that has to be said . . . and remind every man and every woman of something."--Walt Whitman
P30 to 31: "The poet sits before a blank piece of paper with a need to say many things in the small space of the poem. The world is huge, the poet is alone, and the poem is just a bit of language, a few scratchings of the pen surrounded by the silence of the night."
"It could be that the poet wishes to tell you about his or her life. A few images of some fleeting moment when one was happy or exceptionally lucid. The secret wish of poetry is to stop time. The poet wants to retrieve a face, a mood, a cloud in the sky, a tree in the wind, and take a kind of mental photograph of that moment in which you as a reader recognize yourself. Poems are other people's snapshots in which we recognize ourselves."
"Next the poet is driven by the desire to tell the truth. 'How is truth to be said?' asks Gwendolyn Brooks. Truth matters. Getting it right matters. The realists advise: open your eyes and look. People of imagination warn: close your eyes to see better. There's truth with eyes open and there's truth with eyes closed and they often do not recognize each other on the street."
"Next one wishes to say something about the age in which one lives. Every age has its injustices and immense sufferings, and ours is scarcely an exception. . . . The task of poetry, perhaps, is to salvage a trace of the authentic from the wreckage of religious, philosophical, and political systems."
"Next, one wants to write a poem so well crafted that it would do honor to the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens . . . ."
"At the same time, one hopes to rewrite that tradition, subvert it, turn it upside down and make some living space for oneself."
"At the same time, one wants to entertain the reader with outrageous metaphors, flights of imagination, and heartbreaking pronouncements."
"At the same time, one has, for the most part, no idea of what one is doing. Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is merely the bemused spectator. The poem is as much the result of chance as of intention. Probably more so."
"At the same time, one hopes to be read and loved in China in a thousand years the same way the ancient Chinese poets are loved and read in our own day, and so forth."
"This is a small order from a large menu requiring one of those many-armed Indian divinities to serve as a waiter."
"In the cold light of reason, poetry is impossible to write."
P32: To be a genius meant ". . . to believe your own thoughts, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men."--Ralph Waldo Emerson
P33: "America is not finished, perhaps never will be."--Walt Whitman, (who if he saw the behavior of the party of Lincoln now would say, "America, you are finished!" [my addition])
P35: "Homer never wrote on an empty stomach."--Rabelais
P46: Simic and James Tate collaborated on some poems by playing a free association game. For example, the word "match" and the word "jail" would become "matchstick jail." They would stop at different points to see what they had. The would even do a literary analysis. Then they would revise again and free associate again as they wrote an unknown poem.
Russell Edson said about free association writing, "This kind of creation needs to be done as rapidly as possible. Any hesitation causes it to lose its believability, its special reality."
Two examples are James Tate's "the wheelchair butterfly" and Bill Knott's "razorblade choir."
P47: "Only literary critics do not know that poems mostly write themselves. Metaphors and similes owe everything to chance."
P99: "Was it Charles Olson who said that myth is a bed in which human beings make love to the gods?"
P108: "The secret of the prose poem lies in its economy and surprise. It must dazzle, and it must also have a lightness of touch. I regard the comic spirit as its true Muse. Playful and irreverent treatment of every subject is usually the custom. In order to free poetry of its mannerisms and tics, the prose poem must not take itself too seriously. Impossible to write, illegitimate in the view of so many poets and critics, it must remain a pariah and an object of ridicule to survive."
P138: "I went on to make a poem of things overlooked, slighted, and forbidden. Still and all, my exuberant praise of all matters sexual was a permanent scandal in a country founded by the followers of Calvin."
P153: Hart Crane: "As a poet I may be possibly more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay of metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perception involved in the poem."
P163-4: Foucault: "We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events without a landmark or point of reference."
P164: "This is where the poet comes in. In place of the historian's broad sweep, the poet gives us a kind of reverse history of what in the great scheme of things are often regarded as 'unimportant' events, the image of a dead cat, say, lying in the rubble of a bombed city, rather than the rationale for that air campaign."
P 164: "Poetry succeeds at times in conveying the pain of individuals caught in the wheel of history."
P 238: Standartenfuhrer Steinbrecher: "Knowledge is the prerequisite for all evil." He claims that crime on a large scale "comes from the learned." This goes against the Socratic idea that "No one does evil voluntarily." They do it out of ignorance. The evil people are doing now to the planet is on many levels a case of clear knowledge.
P 312: Andre Breton: "Poetry is made in bed like love."
September 30, 2017
"Quando vedo uno scarafaggio non divento violento come tutti gli altri, mi fermo come se tra noi fosse passato un cenno di riconoscimento"
"Se scrive versi prendilo a pedate" si sentiva consigliare un novello padre a Roma, duemila anni fa. Oggi è fa. Oggi è uguale. I genitori preferiscono che i figli facciano i tassidermisti o gli esattori delle imposte piuttosto che i poeti. Come dargli torto? a voi piacerebbe di più che la vostra unica figlia scrivesse poesie o che facesse l'entraîneuse in qualche sordido night club? Il dubbio è lecito. Perfino i veri poeti detestano la poesia. "Vi sono cose più importanti di tutte queste inezie" dice la nostra Marianne Moore. Non senza ragione: alcune delle più grosse idiozie pronunciate dagli esseri umani si trovano nelle poesie. La poesia, di norma, mette in imbarazzo gli individui, come le nazioni.
Anche se ci trovassimo a vivere nel paese più schifoso del mondo, in un'epoca di abiezione e stupidità senza precedenti, scopriremmo che si scrivono comunque poesie.
"Se scrive versi prendilo a pedate" si sentiva consigliare un novello padre a Roma, duemila anni fa. Oggi è fa. Oggi è uguale. I genitori preferiscono che i figli facciano i tassidermisti o gli esattori delle imposte piuttosto che i poeti. Come dargli torto? a voi piacerebbe di più che la vostra unica figlia scrivesse poesie o che facesse l'entraîneuse in qualche sordido night club? Il dubbio è lecito. Perfino i veri poeti detestano la poesia. "Vi sono cose più importanti di tutte queste inezie" dice la nostra Marianne Moore. Non senza ragione: alcune delle più grosse idiozie pronunciate dagli esseri umani si trovano nelle poesie. La poesia, di norma, mette in imbarazzo gli individui, come le nazioni.
Anche se ci trovassimo a vivere nel paese più schifoso del mondo, in un'epoca di abiezione e stupidità senza precedenti, scopriremmo che si scrivono comunque poesie.
August 11, 2019
So I've finally finished this project book! I liked it--I thought Simic was thoughtful and engaging and his prose style was very readable, though I felt it lacked the verve of his poetry in some places. The reason it took me so long to get through and also why I haven't rated it higher, is that the essays largely didn't stick for me. I would finish an essay and not always have a good sense of why it had been selected for this volume, even if I followed it well. For example, there were several very insightful book reviews of books I had never heard of--were they being collected here in the hopes of garnering a new audience for those books? were they being collected here as a sort of display of Simic's erudition? some of them were re-collected; were the motives for their original and current collection the same or different?
Obviously, essays like "Food and Happiness", or "The Romance of Sausages" or "The Singing Simics" or "The Life of Images" are narrative or philosophical (in the colloquial, rather than strictly academic, sense) and he thinks about culture and about his own life and about art in terms general and specific. I'm glad to have the book if I ever find myself wanting to hunt up his thoughts on these things, but I had trouble with getting them to lodge firmly. When I read Yeats or T.S. Eliot, I saw ways of reading both their work and others' and of thinking through literature. I had more trouble reading Simic as a sort of map, even a provisional one. That's fine--he doesn't have to be a map, but it did result in me not always knowing what to do with the essays since I'm not always a huge fan of the essay as a genre. I think a serious SImic afficionado or big reader of essays would probably get more out of this book than I did, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.
Obviously, essays like "Food and Happiness", or "The Romance of Sausages" or "The Singing Simics" or "The Life of Images" are narrative or philosophical (in the colloquial, rather than strictly academic, sense) and he thinks about culture and about his own life and about art in terms general and specific. I'm glad to have the book if I ever find myself wanting to hunt up his thoughts on these things, but I had trouble with getting them to lodge firmly. When I read Yeats or T.S. Eliot, I saw ways of reading both their work and others' and of thinking through literature. I had more trouble reading Simic as a sort of map, even a provisional one. That's fine--he doesn't have to be a map, but it did result in me not always knowing what to do with the essays since I'm not always a huge fan of the essay as a genre. I think a serious SImic afficionado or big reader of essays would probably get more out of this book than I did, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.
June 1, 2020
Oheburukoa. Jatorra, egiazkoa, beharrezko gai ugari garatzen ditu. Serbia eta Yugoslaviako historia ondo ez ezagutzeagatik, atal batzuetan galduta egon naiz. Bestela, poesiari eta arteari dagozkion hausnarketak beti zorrotzak eta hala ere naturalak. Bizitza oso batek eman dezakeen perspektibatik idatzia, eta hala ere kaleko berbetan adierazia.
August 6, 2022
“At the moment the writer realises he has no ideas he has become an artist.”
— Gilbert Sorrentino, quoted in ‘Shop, Le Bacarès, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, 1950’
“It took me years to admit the poem is smarter than I am. Now I go where it wants me to go.”
— Charles Simic, ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’
I stepped away from poetry (and other constructed forms of writing) for a while because I felt that both of us had run out of grand, sweeping, deep, meaningful things to say. I didn’t write it; I barely read it. And then I found Charles Simic’s poetry collection, The World Doesn’t End, and then this The Life of Images, a prose collection, and most of all his essay “Food and Happiness” in which he describes pivotal moments of — you guessed it — food and happiness in his life. It was the brightest and realest thing I'd read in a while, and it ignited in me a small flame of love again, not just for poetry, but for existence. Poetry, and whatever we write, is just an outpouring of who we are. Simic’s voice conveys a spirit of generosity, humour, curiosity, wit, scowling delight. While he philosophises on the nature of poetry and art, there’s nothing forced about his work. There is no calculated message beyond the animating force of his voice: to live, to be alive.
One thing about the medium of words that can be limiting — that makes them “impoverishments, splendid poverties” (‘Reading Philosophy at Night’), as Simic puts it — particularly for those who think of themselves as writers, is that it makes you want to impose a will, rationally formed, upon experienced reality and force it into digestible proposition with clear and visible progression. This is often a great and vital thing. It brings order, clarity, and as a thought process it is incredibly useful. But, when practised as a way of approaching every single moment in life, it can drive you insane. It demands a particular kind of answer where this isn’t one to be found. And so, Simic meets insanity: “one has, for the most part, no idea of what one is doing. Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is merely the bemused spectator. The poem is as much the result of chance as intention. Probably more so” (‘The Flute Player in the Pit’).
This isn’t to say there is no craft to poetry. The point is, rather, that one needs to get the self out of the way and access a world beyond mere logic. He juxtaposes philosophers with poets, writing: “Philosophers say that poets delude themselves when they dwell lovingly on particulars. The identification of what remains untouched by change has been the philosopher’s task. Poetry and the novel, on the contrary, have been delighted with the ephemeral—the smell of bread, for instance. As far as poets are concerned, only fools are seduced by generalisations. … I’m the mystic of the frying pan and my love’s pink toes.” (‘The Trouble with Poetry’). See the way he puts it: “dwell lovingly”, “delighted”, “mystic”. To write well, to write truly, is to inhabit a way of being in the world. And that way of being begins and ends with observing and existing in the world that’s at hand.
For that mode of forever seeking the 'deeper meaning' leads one to exchange the present for some distant, hoped-for idea of the eternal. He describes poetry as "the defense of the individual against all generalizations that seek to enclose reality in a single conceptual system. In that sense it is anti-utopian. Its core belief is that we can reach truth through the imagination. It has no trust in abstractions, but proceeds empirically by concrete particulars" (‘Reading About Utopia in New York City’). The deeper meaning is the delicious meal in front of you. It is truth through the fullness of being in a particular moment and, one would hope, in most moments. Important as philosophy can be, it shouldn't detract from the colours of our lives. I'm always reminded of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in which he writes, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth it riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place”. And what is that if not a demand for us to be better, see better, look closer, love deeper?
The rest of the collection reads as a collection of candid observations on life, history, memory, works of art, humour, irreverence, food. I didn't agree with everything, of course, but I thoroughly enjoyed the disagreement because I enjoyed the spirit in which it was said. Some very beautiful poems are also thrown into the mix. He even tells something of a fable in ‘The True Adventures of Franz Kafka’s Cage’, in which an empty cage leaves home and spends fifty years searching for a bird, only for the story to end with a wise man telling the cage: “It’s because you kept searching … If you had stayed in Aunt Zelda’s kitchen all these years, one day when the window was open a bird would have flown in on its own and made the acquaintance of your charming self.” Stop trying so hard and stay open, he seems to be saying, stay open to the wonder and delight of life, be right with yourself, be right with the world, and ‘it’ will find you.
Lest this be too utopic and motivational, lest it take itself too seriously, it rings true even in the darkest and most absurd of times — something Simic saw no shortage of when growing up in war-torn Europe. Life is tough and bleak but Simic admires Buster Keaton’s hope to “see if we can make our fate laugh”, to poke fun at the gods and love and laugh because there's nothing else we can do. And poetry is best “when it finds itself at the heart of the human comedy; there’s no more reliable reporter of what it means to be in this pickle” (‘In Praise of Folly’).
— Gilbert Sorrentino, quoted in ‘Shop, Le Bacarès, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, 1950’
“It took me years to admit the poem is smarter than I am. Now I go where it wants me to go.”
— Charles Simic, ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’
I stepped away from poetry (and other constructed forms of writing) for a while because I felt that both of us had run out of grand, sweeping, deep, meaningful things to say. I didn’t write it; I barely read it. And then I found Charles Simic’s poetry collection, The World Doesn’t End, and then this The Life of Images, a prose collection, and most of all his essay “Food and Happiness” in which he describes pivotal moments of — you guessed it — food and happiness in his life. It was the brightest and realest thing I'd read in a while, and it ignited in me a small flame of love again, not just for poetry, but for existence. Poetry, and whatever we write, is just an outpouring of who we are. Simic’s voice conveys a spirit of generosity, humour, curiosity, wit, scowling delight. While he philosophises on the nature of poetry and art, there’s nothing forced about his work. There is no calculated message beyond the animating force of his voice: to live, to be alive.
One thing about the medium of words that can be limiting — that makes them “impoverishments, splendid poverties” (‘Reading Philosophy at Night’), as Simic puts it — particularly for those who think of themselves as writers, is that it makes you want to impose a will, rationally formed, upon experienced reality and force it into digestible proposition with clear and visible progression. This is often a great and vital thing. It brings order, clarity, and as a thought process it is incredibly useful. But, when practised as a way of approaching every single moment in life, it can drive you insane. It demands a particular kind of answer where this isn’t one to be found. And so, Simic meets insanity: “one has, for the most part, no idea of what one is doing. Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is merely the bemused spectator. The poem is as much the result of chance as intention. Probably more so” (‘The Flute Player in the Pit’).
This isn’t to say there is no craft to poetry. The point is, rather, that one needs to get the self out of the way and access a world beyond mere logic. He juxtaposes philosophers with poets, writing: “Philosophers say that poets delude themselves when they dwell lovingly on particulars. The identification of what remains untouched by change has been the philosopher’s task. Poetry and the novel, on the contrary, have been delighted with the ephemeral—the smell of bread, for instance. As far as poets are concerned, only fools are seduced by generalisations. … I’m the mystic of the frying pan and my love’s pink toes.” (‘The Trouble with Poetry’). See the way he puts it: “dwell lovingly”, “delighted”, “mystic”. To write well, to write truly, is to inhabit a way of being in the world. And that way of being begins and ends with observing and existing in the world that’s at hand.
For that mode of forever seeking the 'deeper meaning' leads one to exchange the present for some distant, hoped-for idea of the eternal. He describes poetry as "the defense of the individual against all generalizations that seek to enclose reality in a single conceptual system. In that sense it is anti-utopian. Its core belief is that we can reach truth through the imagination. It has no trust in abstractions, but proceeds empirically by concrete particulars" (‘Reading About Utopia in New York City’). The deeper meaning is the delicious meal in front of you. It is truth through the fullness of being in a particular moment and, one would hope, in most moments. Important as philosophy can be, it shouldn't detract from the colours of our lives. I'm always reminded of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in which he writes, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth it riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place”. And what is that if not a demand for us to be better, see better, look closer, love deeper?
The rest of the collection reads as a collection of candid observations on life, history, memory, works of art, humour, irreverence, food. I didn't agree with everything, of course, but I thoroughly enjoyed the disagreement because I enjoyed the spirit in which it was said. Some very beautiful poems are also thrown into the mix. He even tells something of a fable in ‘The True Adventures of Franz Kafka’s Cage’, in which an empty cage leaves home and spends fifty years searching for a bird, only for the story to end with a wise man telling the cage: “It’s because you kept searching … If you had stayed in Aunt Zelda’s kitchen all these years, one day when the window was open a bird would have flown in on its own and made the acquaintance of your charming self.” Stop trying so hard and stay open, he seems to be saying, stay open to the wonder and delight of life, be right with yourself, be right with the world, and ‘it’ will find you.
Lest this be too utopic and motivational, lest it take itself too seriously, it rings true even in the darkest and most absurd of times — something Simic saw no shortage of when growing up in war-torn Europe. Life is tough and bleak but Simic admires Buster Keaton’s hope to “see if we can make our fate laugh”, to poke fun at the gods and love and laugh because there's nothing else we can do. And poetry is best “when it finds itself at the heart of the human comedy; there’s no more reliable reporter of what it means to be in this pickle” (‘In Praise of Folly’).
November 17, 2016
I’m very glad I read this. The poet Simic has an interesting collection of essays. I must have read some of them before…but I didn’t remember them. Reading some of them in the wake of the election results was very interesting. His reflection on last century’s history gave me a lot to think about. His powerful writing was so evocative I found myself writing prose poems rooted in the drama of the past week.
August 16, 2015
This is now in my top five and a book I know I will return to again and again. I'd take this to a desert island since it is so full of things to think about and savor (art, philosophy, history, poetry, creativity), and is both serious and laugh out loud funny. I read the hardback, not ebook (having trouble switching editions)...this is a book to make notes in:-)
April 27, 2019
This book by one of my favorite poets is an eclectic assemblage of all kinds of essays, an odd basket-full containing biographies of obscure writers and lesser-known artists, memoirs of a childhood and youth spent living in the kinds of historical times that are now denied, and whimsical ruminations on things, habits, and music. I think you would have to be several different people to enjoy every piece in the volume.
Yet I repeatedly considered purchasing it to re-read and annotate (I had taken it out of the library). Simic knows more than most the viciousness, cold-hearted evil, and deliberate violence that lives under the mask of civilization, but he also knows that sausage and popular music can make up for a lot of the carnage, and that surrealism is best served up with humor, earthiness, erudition, and sometimes, childishness. There are many, many sentences and paragraphs here that deserve to be nailed up on telephone poles to be ignored by those who believe in nationalism, Utopia, or human perfectibility.
In other words, he still has a great deal of Yugoslavia in his soul even if he has lived in the US since he was a teenager.
One year, when I was an English teacher and he was the Poet Laureate of the United States, I went to an English teacher's convention and heard him read his poems in a small room. Gentle-voiced, with a slight accent and a deadpan face, he wore tinted glasses and read his wonderful, absurd poems to a small, bewildered audience who perhaps were there because other talks were full and because they needed to rest their feet.
I recommend the book highly but only if you want to have a funny, cynical view of the human race beaten into your head by accident with a saucepan by someone who is quoting obscure Polish or Argentinian writers in the process.
Yet I repeatedly considered purchasing it to re-read and annotate (I had taken it out of the library). Simic knows more than most the viciousness, cold-hearted evil, and deliberate violence that lives under the mask of civilization, but he also knows that sausage and popular music can make up for a lot of the carnage, and that surrealism is best served up with humor, earthiness, erudition, and sometimes, childishness. There are many, many sentences and paragraphs here that deserve to be nailed up on telephone poles to be ignored by those who believe in nationalism, Utopia, or human perfectibility.
In other words, he still has a great deal of Yugoslavia in his soul even if he has lived in the US since he was a teenager.
One year, when I was an English teacher and he was the Poet Laureate of the United States, I went to an English teacher's convention and heard him read his poems in a small room. Gentle-voiced, with a slight accent and a deadpan face, he wore tinted glasses and read his wonderful, absurd poems to a small, bewildered audience who perhaps were there because other talks were full and because they needed to rest their feet.
I recommend the book highly but only if you want to have a funny, cynical view of the human race beaten into your head by accident with a saucepan by someone who is quoting obscure Polish or Argentinian writers in the process.
April 22, 2020
I greatly appreciated and fully enjoyed seeing through Charles Simic's eyes a lot of this world as it is and has been for the last 75 years. His responses to here, life here, are cogently expressed, and at the same time, highly sensory -- I saw, I heard, I touched, I smelled, I tasted, and I simultaneously grew a little smarter, maybe somewhat wiser, and certainly more observant, and more grateful for more. He also expresses his thoughts, his opinions without causing me the reader to feel less than, nor without me the reader bristling. I felt totally willing to listen and knew that if he and I were in a room, he would offer me the same courtesy.
I had read a few of his poems, but not many. I will pursue reading them now.
I had read a few of his poems, but not many. I will pursue reading them now.
May 30, 2017
I've read numerous books of poetry by Simic, own a few of them, and love his work. This is the first prose of his that I've read and I'm just as impressed by his prose. The chapters are short and cover a variety of topics including sausage, the devil, the artist Joseph Cornell, and Marina Tsvetaeva, a Russian poet who lived in poverty, lost her family, and eventually committed suicide, but wrote some great poems. Simic is insightful, funny, and clearly has a keen conscience. This is a great read.
November 2, 2017
The essays in this book are filled with startling turns of phrase and conclusions which left me thinking. You know when you can feel your mind expand? That's what reading 90% of this book is like. At times, I'd finish an essay and then return to the beginning to reread. The only flaw in this work is that, at times, Simic unintentionally undermined the point he was trying to make. This is a book made to be digested and contemplated, returned to in the midst of serious thought about certain issues, and debated or argued with if the mood so takes you.
October 1, 2017
"La poesia dimostra una volta di più che le teorie generali riguardo a qualsiasi argomento non funzionano. La poesia continua a essere la serenata di gatti sotto le finestre della stanza in cui si scrive la versione ufficiale della realtà." (p. 42)
"L'occhio attento rende il mondo misterioso." (p. 284)
"L'occhio attento rende il mondo misterioso." (p. 284)
August 21, 2020
Charles Simic is that remarkable, and rare blend of wild imagination with precision analysis. This book shows the range of his interests, the power of his commitment to poetry, and the depth of his belief in the individuality of the human person, and so of the artist. His insights often had me let the book fall on my lap for a while as I mused.
January 16, 2019
This took a while to get going; I was close to giving up on the book when it suddenly changed gear and got going. Some brilliant, insightful prose.
After a weak start, things ebb and flow somewhat, but the good stuff is worth the not quite so good.
After a weak start, things ebb and flow somewhat, but the good stuff is worth the not quite so good.
July 15, 2023
Introduces a lot of writers and artists who were unfamiliar to me and who I now want to know more of eg Gombrowicz and Cioran. I love his poetry and the sheer ebullience of his writing is very attractive.
November 17, 2021
Excellent exploration of a poet's life through images, though he touches on philosophy and acting as well. Read it years ago, just reviewed it now.
February 6, 2023
Cool Yugoslavic-american grandad thoughts
February 20, 2023
A wide-ranging collection of essays by one of my favorite poets that reveals his breadth of knowledge, his humor, and his thoughts about his life and craft.
September 29, 2023
Una fantastica miscellaea di pensieri, curiosità e spunti di riflessione.
September 11, 2025
Excellent collection of occasional essays. Some book reviews, some poetic reveries, some pastels in prose.
September 8, 2017
Simic speaks his mind. His writing is bold and straightforward. Creating prose from the things and situations we observe in everyday life. His words touch upon war, prejudice, love, family, food etc. This book will feed your soul. There were chapters I liked more than others even chapters I reread instantly because I loved the point of view Simic had. I would recommend him to those who like short stories, prose and slower paced but thought provoking materials.
December 18, 2017
Fantastic in every way. I hate having to put it down - there is some stuff in here that I never dreamt I would even imagine.
December 2, 2021
4.0-4.5/ 5.0
A wonderful collection of essays by Simic, I am genuinely sad to have finished them. His style is approachable, laced with humour and intelligence, regardless of the subject at hand. As for the subjects he covers poetry, philosophy, art, cinema, food, the blues, childhood memories, war and much more. Simic recollects his own life and family experiences which are fascinating. There are also essays and reviews focusing specifically on the works of Buster Keaton, Hieronomous Bosch, Odilon Redon, Emil Cioran, Marina Tsvetaeva, Roberto Calasso, Joseph Cornell and Borislav Pekic.
A wonderful collection of essays by Simic, I am genuinely sad to have finished them. His style is approachable, laced with humour and intelligence, regardless of the subject at hand. As for the subjects he covers poetry, philosophy, art, cinema, food, the blues, childhood memories, war and much more. Simic recollects his own life and family experiences which are fascinating. There are also essays and reviews focusing specifically on the works of Buster Keaton, Hieronomous Bosch, Odilon Redon, Emil Cioran, Marina Tsvetaeva, Roberto Calasso, Joseph Cornell and Borislav Pekic.
June 23, 2019
I'm not a person who seeks answers for questions that rather don't matter to me at all but in this book it gave me some answers to questions that I thought were trivial to me, questions that I just thoughts were better off unanswered, it also introduced me to poets and artist that I'm growing to be fond off, definitely one of my favorite reads and a book that will leave it's mark on me.
February 5, 2016
A marvelous book of essays, a book to read, and re-read! The important subjects in life; art, philosophy, humor - all discussed in a fine personal voice.
August 30, 2017
Un libro con in copertina una fotografia di Saul Leiter parte molto bene, dunque io lo compro a scatola chiusa, ignaro dell'autore e immaginando un saggio su temi di estetica o storia dell'arte. Scopro - prima ammissione di ignoranza - che Simic è un poeta. Leggendo i primi scritti, mi ritrovo in un mondo di filosofia letta di notte, salsicce, blues strazianti, casualità con cui fare i conti, fotografie misteriose. E le prime 100 pagine circa volano con gran piacere, fra un riferimento a Emily Dickinson e uno a William Carlos Williams (che conosco solo grazie a Paterson di Jarmusch - seconda ammissione di ignoranza). Le pagine successive - che non sono poche - diventano un po' più frammentarie in quanto maggiormente legate a recensioni (di esposizioni o testi). Emergono riflessioni nuovamente vitali - per esempio quelle autobiografiche o lo scritto su Cornell - ma su un tono minore rispetto a quello della per me folgorante apertura di libro. A ogni modo, lettura piena di libertà, ironia e meraviglia, che lascia almeno un paio di compiti a casa (leggere le poesia di Simic - e anche quelle di Williams e Vicente Huidobro, magari).
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