I found “Fork” to be rather dark and full of disturbing images. He compares a fork to a bird’s foot and his fist to a large, bald, beakless, blind bird. The opening lines “This strange thing must have crept right out of hell” curious. Has he never seen a fork? If he has, why perceive it so strangely evil? He compares the fork to a “birds foot worn around a cannibals neck” and later in the poem stabs a piece of meat. Is it human meat? I couldn’t get the image of a cannibal out of my head but as the poem continued the image of a bird reappears. “It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird: Its head which is like your fist, is large, bald, beakless, and blind.” Comparing his arm to the rest of a bird was fantastic and a curious way to see oneself. It left an interesting image in my mid. After reading the poem and doing some research on Simic I found an interesting quote where he says “Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics.” I wonder if that has anything to do with the tone of the poem. T. G.
You took that quote completely out of context.
ReplyDelete"Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on May 9th 1938, the first son of George and Helen (Matijevic) Simic.
As a boy, Simic received what he quotes Jan Kott as calling “a typical East European education” – an education, that’s to say, in which “Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics.” What the basics involved is well described in the poet’s recently published memoir, A Fly in the Soup, where, amongst other things, he tells us that “[b]y the time my brother was born, and he and my mother had come home from the clinic, I was in the business of selling gunpowder. Many of us kids had stashes of ammunition, which we collected during the street fighting.”
http://waywiser-press.com/imprints/simic.html
I had a similar reaction after reading the poem - Is he on hallucinogenic drugs? I had never before heard a fork rendered so sinister. The image of the "cannibal's neck" wasn't the part of the poem that stayed with me after reading it, but your analysis and question of whether the meat was human or not definitely took the poem to a whole new level of dark and strange, as did the quote about Hitler and Stalin. Intense!
ReplyDeleteInteresting to hear the background of the quote, thanks for posting it!
ReplyDeleteThanks Rob, the site I was looking didn't include the part about his memoir.
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