gemtactics : a journal

I love Charles Simic. I realized tonight that whatever makes me love Charles Simic is the same thing that makes me dislike Mary Oliver. I'm sorry not to like Mary Oliver, because she is supposed to be a good poet, and very popular. There has got to be something to her, or something lacking in me? I wrote a poem once about disliking Mary Oliver. It was unsuccessful. I'll have to try to find it. I'm afraid at times I start trying to write like Mary Oliver. Danger! Danger! It's not me.

I read some of Charles Simic tonight in The Poet's Notebook. I was a little shocked, a little delighted, a little laughing. Then I went off to scrub the bathtub. I started thinking thoughts like "I don't trust any poet who doesn't scrub the damn bathtub." I don't know if Simic scrubs his bathtub or not. But that's the kind of thinking he causes.

"It's a desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath as one says that there is no god. Just thinking about the possibility of saying shit to everything made me roll on the floor with happiness."

"Form in a poem is like the order of performing acts in a circus."

"My second-grade teacher in Belgrade told me more than forty-five years ago that I was a 'champion liar.' I still remember being mortally offended and kind of flattered."

I was reading The Poet's Notebook because I realized that's what this journal is.

"The head of a poet is more like a town dump than a town library."

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	January 1, 2001

	I love Charles Simic. I realized tonight that whatever makes me love Charles Simic is the same thing that makes me dislike Mary Oliver. I'm sorry not to like Mary Oliver, because she is supposed to be a good poet, and very popular. There has got to be something to her, or something lacking in me? I wrote a poem once about disliking Mary Oliver. It was unsuccessful. I'll have to try to find it. I'm afraid at times I start trying to write like Mary Oliver. Danger! Danger! It's not me. I read some of Charles Simic tonight in The Poet's Notebook. I was a little shocked, a little delighted, a little laughing. Then I went off to scrub the bathtub. I started thinking thoughts like "I don't trust any poet who doesn't scrub the damn bathtub." I don't know if Simic scrubs his bathtub or not. But that's the kind of thinking he causes. "It's a desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath as one says that there is no god. Just thinking about the possibility of saying shit to everything made me roll on the floor with happiness." "Form in a poem is like the order of performing acts in a circus." "My second-grade teacher in Belgrade told me more than forty-five years ago that I was a 'champion liar.' I still remember being mortally offended and kind of flattered." I was reading The Poet's Notebook because I realized that's what this journal is. "The head of a poet is more like a town dump than a town library."