Learn more about Rollins' Winter With the Writers festival in my Feb. 5 arts feature, "Winter With the Writers showcases a lively mix." Carol Frost, the Rollins professor who oversees WWW each year, sees her brief in booking the festival season as “strik[ing] a balance between excitement and disquiet.” Which is actually a good description of Charles Simic's poetry. Frost says the Pulitzer Prize-winner has "uncanny insights into the human predicament."
Here's a powerful early poem of Simic's; go to the Poetry Foundation website to hear him read it. (Recommended—he has a very engaging voice.)
ForkThis strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
Charles Simic, “Fork” from Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Charles Simic.
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