Creating terse, imagistic poems

 

“Poetry is an orphanof silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” –Charles Simic  

Simic, born in Belgradein 1938, won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for TheWorld Doesn’t End and writing with a style called literaryminimalism, creating terse, imagistic poems. Critics have referred toSimic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes."

Displaced by World War IIand eventually emigrating to the U.S., Simic didn’t speak English until he was15, but once he learned the language he became one of our most prolificwriters, producing some 60 books, the last being No Land In Sight: Poems, published in 2022.   Named U.S. PoetLaureate and winner of the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement, he died in 2023.    For Saturday’s Poem here is Simic’s,

                                                 The Wooden Toy

     The wooden toy sitting pretty.

   No … quieter than that.

      Like the sound of eyebrows

      Raised by a villain 

      In a silent movie.

    Psst, someone said behind my back.