Creating terse, imagistic poems

 

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

Simic, born in Belgrade in 1938, won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The World Doesn’t End and writing with a style called literary minimalism, creating terse, imagistic poems. Critics have referred to Simic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes."

Displaced by World War II and eventually emigrating to the U.S., Simic didn’t speak English until he was 15, but once he learned the language he became one of our most prolific writers, producing some 60 books, the last being No Land In Sight: Poems, published in 2022.   Named U.S. Poet Laureate 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.