Un libro con in copertina una fotografia di Saul Leiter parte molto bene, dunque io lo compro a scatola chiusa, ignaro dell'autore e immaginando un saggio su temi di estetica o storia dell'arte. Scopro - prima ammissione di ignoranza - che Simic è un poeta. Leggendo i primi scritti, mi ritrovo in un mondo di filosofia letta di notte, salsicce, blues strazianti, casualità con cui fare i conti, fotografie misteriose. E le prime 100 pagine circa volano con gran piacere, fra un riferimento a Emily Dickinson e uno a William Carlos Williams (che conosco solo grazie a Paterson di Jarmusch - seconda ammissione di ignoranza). Le pagine successive - che non sono poche - diventano un po' più frammentarie in quanto maggiormente legate a recensioni (di esposizioni o testi). Emergono riflessioni nuovamente vitali - per esempio quelle autobiografiche o lo scritto su Cornell - ma su un tono minore rispetto a quello della per me folgorante apertura di libro. A ogni modo, lettura piena di libertà, ironia e meraviglia, che lascia almeno un paio di compiti a casa (leggere le poesia di Simic - e anche quelle di Williams e Vicente Huidobro, magari). ( )

This book by one of my favorite poets is an eclectic assemblage of all kinds of essays, an odd basket-full containing biographies of obscure writers and lesser-known artists, memoirs of a childhood and youth spent living in the kinds of historical times that are now denied, and whimsical ruminations on things, habits, and music. I think you would have to be several different people to enjoy every piece in the volume.

Yet I repeatedly considered purchasing it to re-read and annotate (I had taken it out of the library). Simic knows more than most the viciousness, cold-hearted evil, and deliberate violence that lives under the mask of civilization, but he also knows that sausage and popular music can make up for a lot of the carnage, and that surrealism is best served up with humor, earthiness, erudition, and sometimes, childishness. There are many, many sentences and paragraphs here that deserve to be nailed up on telephone poles to be ignored by those who believe in nationalism, Utopia, or human perfectibility.

In other words, he still has a great deal of Yugoslavia in his soul even if he has lived in the US since he was a teenager.

One year, when I was an English teacher and he was the Poet Laureate of the United States, I went to an English teacher's convention and heard him read his poems in a small room. Gentle-voiced, with a slight accent and a deadpan face, he wore tinted glasses and read his wonderful, absurd poems to a small, bewildered audience who perhaps were there because other talks were full and because they needed to rest their feet.

I recommend the book highly but only if you want to have a funny, cynical view of the human race beaten into your head by accident with a saucepan by someone who is quoting obscure Polish or Argentinian writers in the process. ( )