Thinking about Simic, I post this item here...Ron Price, Tasmania
AFTER A WHILE
In January 2001 American poet Charles Simic was interviewed. Today I read that interview on the Internet. In that interview Charles said that "after a while" he found writing poetry became an obsession, a passion. This frequent and intense poetic experience was fuelled, he felt, by his isolation and the isolation of poets in general from society, by the lack of understanding of the poet in society. He felt drawn to writing, to poetry, to this form of work. He could not help himself. For the last ten years, 1992-2002, I have found this same passion, this obsession, to be part of my life as well. The "after a while" for me was the twelve year period: 1980-1992.-Ron Price, "Interview with Charles Simic:1/10/01," Internet, 3/01/02.
Part of the essence of what
I'm all about is poetry and I
like to think that it's good stuff--
my poetry--if it sounds good
when it's read. It comes from
a time(or so I like to think) when
the world was being transformed
yet again and when I grew from
a child into what I often feel to be
an old man even now not yet sixty.(1)
It was an immensely fertile seed time(2)
and I trust when you read this you will
get a strong sense of whom the poem
belongs to, a strong sense of the tree
of my life being clothed with the blossoms
and fruits of that consecrated joy, while I
sit in passive wonder at who I was when
I said what I said that day and when I
slipped and fell onto those words on the page.
1 1953-2003
2 Robert Pinsky, "Interview, October 1st, 1997." My seedtime has been that half century 1953-2003.