Pithy & Company

I grabbed The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks by our poet laureate Charles Simic from the new shelf at the public library. I love having bite sized smarticisms. I pop them in my brain as I take the subway or wait on line to buy Dayquil. Some make me laugh. Many make me think. He takes on poetry, history, nationalism, insomnia, jazz, and love, to name a few. I feel inspired to gather together my own pronouncements and aphorisms, dress them up in some nice nouns and sit them in their appropriate classrooms...but could I fill an entire book and keep it this refreshing, sage, and funny? No way! Simic's collection makes a good companion.

A short sampling of Simic:

Imagism is realism minus the moral. If Imagist poems were didactic, people would find them more acceptable.

Religion: Turning the mystery of Being into a figure who resembles our grandfather sitting on the potty.

Orphan factories and scapegoat farms are the Balkans' chief economy.

Poetry like the movies worries about sequencing, framing, montage, and cutting.