For tomorrow night's radio show, Charles Simic's poetry will be on my lips. Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell's magnificent boxes led me to Simic's poetry. The image above is one of Cornell's boxes. Dating from 1945, "Untitled (The Hotel Eden)," is assembled from various precious objects and found fragments. That's what Cornell was all about - collecting the unusual. Simic wrote a book of poems, loosely interpreting Cornell's boxes, and also collecting the unusual. That small book, Dime-Store Alchemy, published in 1992, is a delight.
Simic was deeply influenced by the absurd and dark days of his childhood. He grew up in Yugoslavia in the lap of World War II. His poems can be as bleak as a Russian winter, and yet sometimes they are giddy with strange things. This is the way of people who come through wars. They can have a strange sense of center. The poems thump in places you wouldn't expect, and touch in places they probably shouldn't. As he says in his newest book, Master of Disguises, "…Making everything very quiet in my room. / I thought I heard myself cry for a long, long time."
Tomorrow's "Audio Saucepan" radio show (April 17) is "The Headstrong Ways Episode.” I'll be reading the poems “Summer Storm” by Charles Simic (from Master of Disguises, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); "Flow Chart” by Elizabeth Willis (from Address, Wesleyan University Press); and “Trade Deficits” by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallager (from Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, BOA Editions, Ltd.).
There's a wonderful interview with Simic in The Paris Review. It's a good place to learn more.
"Audio Saucepan" is a one-hour weekly journey into poems, philosophical fragments and literary excerpts intermixed with music from across the globe. The show airs Sundays, 5-6PM (Mountain Time) on Santa Fe Public Radio KSFR 101.1FM with simultaneous access via the internet at www.ksfr.org. Please tune in!
So as I was saying...looking forward to audio saucepan today with this taste of what is to come......I loved Joseph Cornell's boxes from the first time I saw them. We are also coming to Antigone this week.
ReplyDeleteYour buddy, Fran
So this may come in on Bob's Creative-Native Project email.....I don't know..this techie stuff.....
Fran,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the note.
Joseph Cornell used to roam New York City, as Simic said in an interview, "looking around and finding from time to time some odd, seemingly useless item, which he saved and then brought together with other, equally useless items. A Cornell box is like a poem, a place where unlikely things come together to give the viewer a new aesthetic experience. Beauty for Cornell is something one finds."
I love that possibility of not really looking but somehow finding what you were looking for. As a visual artist, you'd probably say that of the best art. I think it can be true of all creative mediums, as long as the skills and experience are in place, and the work is created from a place of deep truth.
So glad you'll be at the Antigone performance on Wednesday. It will be a very moving evening.