Remind Me

My Noiseless Entourage: Poems by Charles Simic

Charles Simic, the new U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is known for poems that infuse the everyday world with evocative imagery and haunting insight. Recently I sat down with one of his collections, My Noiseless Entourage. Using contemporary images in unique ways, the poems in this volume resonate long after the final word, giving us a new-found appreciation for what is usually deemed ordinary, and accomplishing what Wordsworth considered to be the ultimate goal of poetry: taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary.

For example, "One Chair" uses anthropomorphic images to create a unique view of a creaky, household chair:

That can't help creak at night
As if a spider
Let itself down
By a thread
To hang over it
With the chair quaking
At the outcome.

Short, funny, yet impressionistic, this poem reminded me of all the various creaks and squeaks I hear in everyday life and made me look at them anew. It was a fresh, lighthearted interpretation of something we all take for granted or may see as a nuisance.

Another favourite of mine was the fun, naughty and highly sensual poem, "Sweetest":

Little candy in death's candy shop,
I gave your sugar a lick
When no one was looking,
Took you for a ride on my tongue
To all the secret places,

Trying to appear above suspicion
As I went about inspecting the confectionary,
Greeting the owner with a nod
With you safely tucked away
And melting to nothing in my mouth.

The great thing about poetry--aside from its amazing and succinct use of language and the way it uses imagery to communicate ideas in a contained and compact form--is its universality and its evocativeness. Single-paged, perfectly-formed poems are easy to pick up and read in the space of a single moment. Modern poetry in particular uses contemporary language and deals with everyday experiences, so those of us who don't feel well-versed in poetry need not fear that they will fail to understand. If anything, great poets like Charles Simic open up the world to us and provide us with a greater appreciation of what we may not be able to put eloquently into words ourselves.