Chance, a lyric force

Excerpt from 'The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks', by Charles Simic

"I admire Claude Levi Strauss's observation that all art is essentially reduction and Gertrude Stein's saying that poetry is vocabulary.

Chance as a tool with which to break up one's habitual associations. Once they're broken, use one of the pieces to launch yourself into the unknown.

We name one thing and then another. That's how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there's a lot of space inside words.

Connotations have their non-Euclidean geometries.

A song sung while understanding each word—the way Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith did it.

Vitrac called chance a "lyric force." He's absolutely right. There's a kind of dreamy exhilaration in not knowing where one is going.

Seeing with eyes open and seeing with eyes closed. That's what Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish" is about.

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...........Poetry is a way of knowledge, but most poetry tells us what we already know.

Between the truth that is heard and the truth that is seen, I prefer the silent truth of the seen.

If I make everything at the same time a joke and a serious matter, it's because I honor the eternal conflict between life and art, the absolute and the relative, the brain and the belly, etc. . . . No philosophy is good enough to overcome a toothache . . . that sort of thing."

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Ambiguity is the world's condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a "picture of reality" it is truer than any other. Ambiguity is. This doesn't mean you're supposed to write poems no one understands.

Metaphor offers the opportunity for my inwardness to connect itself with the world out there. All things are related, and that knowledge resides in my unconscious.

The poets and writers I admire stood alone. Philosophy, too, is always alone. Poetry and philosophy make slow solitary readers.

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