Prize-winning poet Charles Simic to give a Back Roads Reading at Brownington

Until I looked him up on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic, I didn't know Charles Simic was out-and-out famous.  I only knew that I liked his poems in The New Yorker.  Don't know how we are so lucky as to receive him in the NEK, but a mailing from the Old Stone House Museum lists an event in the Back Roads Reading series at Brownington Congregational Church, Sunday August 6 at 3 pm with a reception at the Samuel Read Hall House across the road.

Two earlier readings are on July 9th, for Leland Kinsey, and July 23, Ellen Bryant Voight.

Here's a sample, Stone:

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom

This from NYC, 42nd St. approach to the big public library

Millions have walked on this plaque in sidewalk approaching the NYC big one, but its message shines through to us even so.

a page from another blog with old picture, new (and newly published) poem

Monday, 5 June 2017

Photo vieille, poème nouveau

Une photo vieille, Venice-au-Quebec, Lake Memphremagog

et aussi un poème publié recemmant en Waterways

Tant Pis

written with (rather) fine black marker
your only margin note on page roman 6, vi

vi to sound like swiftness or life
in French, vit or vie

to rhyme with pis or English pee

or vi as in English vinegar
for that matter if it matters in this
piss and vinegar state we share

and it must because we share, too,
thanks to you, The First Man by Camus,
and this in English

for your one black note on white,
marginal, before you realized
you were in the copy you meant for me,
tant pis, and moved on to your own

for rather fine notes in black
on marginal white, free to write now
on your own.

[written for Mary Teague]

(That other blog is Quebec Journal,at www.quebecjournal.blogspot.com.)