The World Doesn't End
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
3. Primary Texts: Poetry
Charles
Simic. The
World Doesn't End.
(1989)
Supporting References:
- Stitt, Peter. "Simic, Charles." The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. : Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference. 2003. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
This article
references the poet and not the text specifically.
“Simic, Charles (1938– ), was born in Yugoslavia and emigrated
with his family to the United States at the age of 11. Perhaps it is
because his formative years were spent in a country occupied by the
Nazis that Simic's most persistent thematic concern should be with
the effect of cruel political structures upon ordinary human life. It
is this context that explains the series of almost miniaturist poems,
on such subjects as ‘Fork’, ‘Spoon’, ‘Knife’, ‘Ax’,
and ‘Stone’, that Simic included in his first book, Dismantling
the Silence (1971). Rather than constituting the poet's major
achievement, as some critics insist, these poems should be seen as
defining momentary stays against confusion. The world of Simic's
poems is frightening, mysterious, hostile, dangerous; by focusing on
such unimportant, everyday objects, he is able to create, however
briefly, some degree of order, comprehension, and control. Elsewhere
in his early books Simic presents himself only as a clown, joking the
night away; it is this sort of poem that he chose, wisely, not to
reprint in his Selected Poems: 1963–1983 (New York, 1985,
revd. edn., 1990; London, 1986), which collects from his first six
volumes. In his most typical poems, Simic tells stories that are
amusing and sinister at the same time: in ‘Rough Outline’, the
‘famous torturer’ meets a bride in a wedding-dress, who begs him
to spare her beloved. I can't do that, he replies, for he must be
tortured tonight, but ‘You can come along and help him lament his
fate’. The bride declines this invitation, and as the poem ends, ‘a
dog-like creature’ howls ‘Down by the slaughterhouse’ and ‘the
snow start[s] to fall again’. As befits the professor of literary
theory and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, the
texture of Simic's poems is conceptual and sophisticated; he
regularly alludes to a wide range of western thought and literature.
“Since Selected Poems,
Simic has published three volumes: Unending Blues (1986),
The World Doesn't End (1989), and The Book of Gods and
Devils (1990—all San Diego, Calif.). His prose is collected
in The Uncertain Certainty (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1988).”
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