True poetry. Beware the woke left, they would have this silenced as promoting "rape culture," "the male gaze," or some other stupid shit. But profound experiences are *often* at the border of what is acceptable in polite company. The woke wants us always to be polite, never take any risks, and never to venture too far into ambiguity, but that is the path to soul death.
Oh well… having been on the planet with other humans awhile, I think there will always be extreme views. I hesitate giving them one adjective or name… viva la beaute femme!
Further thoughts... I get hated on often for saying Ted Hughes is my favorite poet. Plath worship in America is pretty pervasive. So of course you're supposed to hate Ted Hughes, including his poetry. They don't stop to realize Sylvia regarded him as a walking poetic God! So his writing must needs be really good. Interestingly Galway Kinnel gets a bit of it, too. For just being too manly! I don't know what is wrong with people. I guess they all would eventually align with Plato and have the lot of us poets eliminated. That they did so to Socrates doesn't bode well.
Piss on em' I will read Henry Miller, Bukowski, Hemingway, William Burroughs, etc, and zero fucks given if twittering "feminists" consider those writers to have "toxic masculinity," or whatever.
Wow. You are of course correct. Once I wrote a poem that was looking at the places that growing up Catholic intersected with sexual passion and a Dominance/submissive relationship. This was for a university workshop class. My instructor loved it. But a couple girls who we would identify as woke now, attacked the poem for having elements of exactly your stated reasons. The instructor said it was about baptism. Boy those girls didn't like me after that!
I get similar attacks, but I think especially in the case of young people like this, there is a awkwardness and helplessness to it. They sometimes don’t know how to react or what to think and so they fall back on a ideology or some other kind of structure that does their thinking for them so they don’t have to rely on their own feelings and thoughts. But they are learning. The important thing is not to let them affect you.
Yes it's deeply sad to me that the left that at one time defended writers like D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, etc from censorship are now the social group most likely to advocate for censorship. I actually don't have a problem with many left economic arguments, or with environmentalism, the peace movement, etc, but woke censorship is cancer AIDS.
Agree. But I think this kind of wokeness that judges everything by an ideology will be short-lived. There is something animal and primal in the human condition, in our hormones, in our DNA, that will keep us returning to the brutal and beautiful fundamental things of living, including the kind of longing and underlying sexuality of this poem and poems like it -- don’t worry, the human soul cannot stay repressed for long!
So great to see you celebrating Charlie's work today. After his passing, I was asked to write a short remembrance. Here it is:
What to say about Charlie? Great poet, translator, critic, and essayist. Philosopher of that 3 a.m. wake-up call when, all alone, one contemplates the ironies and cosmic jokes of the universe, when the image of the face of God looking down on you may really just be an apparition brought on by bad sausage. Yes, he was brilliant, but, more important, he was a good guy—kind, generous, and humble in a field that doesn’t often reward humility. He had to have been aware of his brilliance, but his playful self-deprecation always kept any threat of egoism at bay.
It was 1975 and I was twenty-five. I had just arrived at the University of New Hampshire to begin a masters program in literature. Someone mentioned Charlie’s work to me, so I bought Dismantling the Silence and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk and went on the two-and-a-half hour Mt. Washington boat ride around Lake Winnipesaukee.
Lost in those books, I don’t remember sight-seeing much that day. You could write poems like this, I thought, and you can be funny to boot? I couldn’t wait to get home and write down all my so-called profound ideas in a similar simple style. Which of course was quite impossible to expect, even dumb. And yet those two books gave me permission to discover my own voice and feel free to juxtapose the learned and quotidian, to write a poem with the Pope and President standing next to each other wearing “I’m With Stupid T-shirts.” And as discovered later, after speaking with Charlie, I could even do it in a prose poem.
In short, it became apparent to me this morning that there would be no Peter Johnson prose poems if I hadn’t read Charlie on that boat ride, and subsequently met him and studied under him. Now you might argue that it would be a good thing if there wasn’t a Peter Johnson prose poem, but there you have it.
James Tate, Bill Knott, my dear friend Russell Edson, and now Charlie--all gone, but no need for complete sadness with all their wonderful books out there to read over and over. Those are the books I’ll take with me on that last boat ride with Charon at the helm. No wait, it’s not Charon at all, just Charlie half-smiling, half-smirking, wanting to get home quickly so he can keep scribbling in the dark.
Listen to Charlie reading his “Cameo Appearance” to see all his gifts at work.
True poetry. Beware the woke left, they would have this silenced as promoting "rape culture," "the male gaze," or some other stupid shit. But profound experiences are *often* at the border of what is acceptable in polite company. The woke wants us always to be polite, never take any risks, and never to venture too far into ambiguity, but that is the path to soul death.
Oh well… having been on the planet with other humans awhile, I think there will always be extreme views. I hesitate giving them one adjective or name… viva la beaute femme!
Vague evasions do not obviate the fact that it is the progressive woke left who demand censorship of the arts.
Further thoughts... I get hated on often for saying Ted Hughes is my favorite poet. Plath worship in America is pretty pervasive. So of course you're supposed to hate Ted Hughes, including his poetry. They don't stop to realize Sylvia regarded him as a walking poetic God! So his writing must needs be really good. Interestingly Galway Kinnel gets a bit of it, too. For just being too manly! I don't know what is wrong with people. I guess they all would eventually align with Plato and have the lot of us poets eliminated. That they did so to Socrates doesn't bode well.
Piss on em' I will read Henry Miller, Bukowski, Hemingway, William Burroughs, etc, and zero fucks given if twittering "feminists" consider those writers to have "toxic masculinity," or whatever.
Wow. You are of course correct. Once I wrote a poem that was looking at the places that growing up Catholic intersected with sexual passion and a Dominance/submissive relationship. This was for a university workshop class. My instructor loved it. But a couple girls who we would identify as woke now, attacked the poem for having elements of exactly your stated reasons. The instructor said it was about baptism. Boy those girls didn't like me after that!
I get similar attacks, but I think especially in the case of young people like this, there is a awkwardness and helplessness to it. They sometimes don’t know how to react or what to think and so they fall back on a ideology or some other kind of structure that does their thinking for them so they don’t have to rely on their own feelings and thoughts. But they are learning. The important thing is not to let them affect you.
Yes it's deeply sad to me that the left that at one time defended writers like D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, etc from censorship are now the social group most likely to advocate for censorship. I actually don't have a problem with many left economic arguments, or with environmentalism, the peace movement, etc, but woke censorship is cancer AIDS.
Agree. But I think this kind of wokeness that judges everything by an ideology will be short-lived. There is something animal and primal in the human condition, in our hormones, in our DNA, that will keep us returning to the brutal and beautiful fundamental things of living, including the kind of longing and underlying sexuality of this poem and poems like it -- don’t worry, the human soul cannot stay repressed for long!
Good thoughts, thanks.
Beautiful
So great to see you celebrating Charlie's work today. After his passing, I was asked to write a short remembrance. Here it is:
What to say about Charlie? Great poet, translator, critic, and essayist. Philosopher of that 3 a.m. wake-up call when, all alone, one contemplates the ironies and cosmic jokes of the universe, when the image of the face of God looking down on you may really just be an apparition brought on by bad sausage. Yes, he was brilliant, but, more important, he was a good guy—kind, generous, and humble in a field that doesn’t often reward humility. He had to have been aware of his brilliance, but his playful self-deprecation always kept any threat of egoism at bay.
It was 1975 and I was twenty-five. I had just arrived at the University of New Hampshire to begin a masters program in literature. Someone mentioned Charlie’s work to me, so I bought Dismantling the Silence and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk and went on the two-and-a-half hour Mt. Washington boat ride around Lake Winnipesaukee.
Lost in those books, I don’t remember sight-seeing much that day. You could write poems like this, I thought, and you can be funny to boot? I couldn’t wait to get home and write down all my so-called profound ideas in a similar simple style. Which of course was quite impossible to expect, even dumb. And yet those two books gave me permission to discover my own voice and feel free to juxtapose the learned and quotidian, to write a poem with the Pope and President standing next to each other wearing “I’m With Stupid T-shirts.” And as discovered later, after speaking with Charlie, I could even do it in a prose poem.
In short, it became apparent to me this morning that there would be no Peter Johnson prose poems if I hadn’t read Charlie on that boat ride, and subsequently met him and studied under him. Now you might argue that it would be a good thing if there wasn’t a Peter Johnson prose poem, but there you have it.
James Tate, Bill Knott, my dear friend Russell Edson, and now Charlie--all gone, but no need for complete sadness with all their wonderful books out there to read over and over. Those are the books I’ll take with me on that last boat ride with Charon at the helm. No wait, it’s not Charon at all, just Charlie half-smiling, half-smirking, wanting to get home quickly so he can keep scribbling in the dark.
Listen to Charlie reading his “Cameo Appearance” to see all his gifts at work.
https://poetryarchive.org/poet/charles-simic/
Thank you for introducing me to the beauty and awe of natural wonders of the night. 🙏
I love the moments solitude in nature bring
A voyeuristic hallucination? /
perhaps / perhaps not.
A vision of beauty added to my morning. Thank you.
" solitude playing tricks "
as it sometimes will ...
And therein, a woman becomes a water nymph.
Intrigue is wonderful in poetry congrats
Bathing in life,
Wind as our motor,
Looking back,
The Waves,
Memories unleashed,
Bathing in life,
Our clothing right there,
Swimming, bathing,
Life of tender care,
The Waves,
Beside us,
Beside me,
Life's flow gotta be,
Hold me.
Beautiful poem, thanks
To the pure of heart, all things are pure. Beautiful.