4thace reviewed Little Mr. Prose Poem by Charles Simic
A strange collection of very short pieces of writing
3 stars
I was brought to this author's work by a comment by Lydia Davis who found they had an impact on her writing, which I like very much. The way I think about these peculiar little prose poms is that the author was maybe not trying to write good poems according to usual standards. He wrote self-contradictory scraps of language that leveraged what our brains believe about story and poetry to produce a particular vertigo-inducing effect he was after. The way I can imagine writing in this style is to set out writing some lines that feel consciously bad, because violate rules about plot or motivation or decency or things that nobody's bothered to name because it's always been assumed. And in the course of writing, the idea is to stay conscious of the uncanny state you can get just before the piece collapses into ruin. You can con the reader …
I was brought to this author's work by a comment by Lydia Davis who found they had an impact on her writing, which I like very much. The way I think about these peculiar little prose poms is that the author was maybe not trying to write good poems according to usual standards. He wrote self-contradictory scraps of language that leveraged what our brains believe about story and poetry to produce a particular vertigo-inducing effect he was after. The way I can imagine writing in this style is to set out writing some lines that feel consciously bad, because violate rules about plot or motivation or decency or things that nobody's bothered to name because it's always been assumed. And in the course of writing, the idea is to stay conscious of the uncanny state you can get just before the piece collapses into ruin. You can con the reader to end up in this weird error state where it doesn't seem right, whatever you've read, and yet it still insists on its own existence.
The poems are often funny, disgusting, vapid, pathetic. They are peopled with characters and things who fail to connect with one another because they are more intent on following some ritual nobody's bothered to explain to the reader. Sometimes people dies in them and it's implied that everyone can die in a way that also makes no sense. It takes a poem that is bad by conventional standards to see how badness isn't something a person can avoid. Maybe you shouldn't even try, even if it makes you look and feel foolish. There is tension in our minds because we were endowed with confusing feelings that often don't line up with our confusing thoughts and confusing words. But it's possible to write something that feels like it went badly but also succeeds in putting a reader's mind someplace no sensible poem could have brought them to.
No poem here is longer than a few small pages, because it doesn't take more than that to lead a reader to a strange destination. They vary wildly in what I think of them - many strike me as almost worthless, but a few are the kind I want to save and re-read later to figure out what just happened there. But that could just be me. It won't take long to read through this collection and decide for yourself whether it says anything to you.