The Missing Links
Tom McCarthy in conversation with Marita Gluzberg. * Dylan Trigg on disorientation and uncanniness. * Roland Barthes: myths we don’t outgrow. * 1977: the Queen’s punk jubilee. * Palettes of famous painters. * Three early short films by Peter Greenaway. * Black and white pictures of life inside the Chelsea Hotel. * Stiv Bators interview, […]
Maintenant #93 – Charles Simic
When I’m writing, I’m as oblivious as a dog digging a hole in the ground with his paws. There may be a bone there or nothing at all, but while I’m doing it… that is all I know. After decades of reading and listening to debates about tradition versus avant-garde, I’m frankly bored. Good poetry has been written in all sorts of ways since the days of Rimbaud as everyone ought to admit. If someone can get away today by writing poems that sound like Byron or Emily Dickinson, poems that one can’t stop reading, let’s not worry about what the disciples of Gertrude Stein will say.
In the 93rd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Serbian / American poet Charles Simic.
Ghost Cinema
And act like sweethearts
On a bare mattress laid out for their use
On a warehouse floor
Under the bright spotlights.
Standing afterwards
With their foreheads touching
As if about to be hung
By a single rope
From the high ceiling,
By Charles Simic.