The Monster Loves His Labyrinth - Softcover

Simic, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931337403 ISBN 13: 9781931337403

Publisher: Ausable Press, 2008

Synopsis

“Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill this volume, there is the definite sense that we are getting a rare glimpse into several decades worth of private journals--and, by extension are privy to the tickings of an accomplished and introspective literary mind."—Rain Taxi

Written over many years, this book is a collection of notebook entries by our current Poet Laureate.

Excerpts:

Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping.

Ars poetica: trying to make your jailers laugh.

American identity is really about having many identities simultaneously. We came to America to escape our old identities, which the multiculturalists now wish to restore to us.

Ambiguity is the world's condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a “picture of reality” it is truer than any other. This doesn't mean that you're supposed to write poems no one understands.

The twelve girls in the gospel choir sang as if dogs were biting their asses.

What an outrage! This very moment gone forever!

About this title

About the Author

Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at the University of NH, Charles Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 1996 In 2007 he was appointed Poet Laureate and received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Reviews

The current U. S. poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Simic is famous for his short, cryptic poems that draw on his eventful early life, which he describes in dramatic detail here, in notebooks he has kept for decades but never published in book form. The young Simic and his family lived in Serbia, as bombs fell on it, during World War II; later, they fled to difficult lives in Chicago, where the poet's high-spirited father was often penniless. The first of the notebooks' four sections collect compelling autobiographical reminiscences, of Serbia, of Chicago, and of the young adult poet's time in New York. The second collects the sort of images and juxtapositions that Simic might well have wanted to use in a poem—the best are, in effect, prose poems: Snow arriving this morning at my door like a mail-order bride. The last three of five sections do not always preserve the force of first: their statements about poetry in general, and their reactions to (and against) the academy, bear little surprise. Yet Simic's stature as a maker of poems still makes all of his prose worth reading, and the autobiographical sections make this book a keeper. (Sept.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ausable Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931337403
• ISBN 13: 9781931337403
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128