being shines through

The pleasures of philosophy are the pleasures of reduction—the epiphanies of hinting in a few words at complex matters. Both poetry and philosophy, for instance, are concerned with Being. What is a lyric poem, one might say, but the recreation of the experience of Being. In both cases, that need to get it down to its essentials, to say the unsayable and let the truth of Being shine through.

—Charles Simic, “Reading Philosophy at Night,” The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015)

things begin to appear

My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These objets trouvés of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge. That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.

—Charles Simic, "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy," Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (Poets on Poetry series, U. of Michigan Press, 1990)

defense of folly

Every defense of poetry is a defense of folly.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

permanently contemporary

Poets worth reading usually believe things the age they live in no longer does. Poets are always anachronistic, obsolete, unfashionable, and permanently contemporary.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

common object

The common object is the sphinx, whose riddle the contemplative poet must solve.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

narcissism

We can put up with someone’s narcissism providing it makes interesting reading and it doesn’t run on too long.

–Charles Simic, ‘The Power of Ruins’ (review of Louise Glück’s Averno in NYRB)

silence

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