"Baked Ham and Cold Beer"

Charles Simic – whose translation of Milan Djordjevic’s Oranges and Snow has been sitting patiently on my desk for weeks – has captured the self-image of many American poets (and, I’d guess, writers in general) in a blog post for The New York Review of Books. He not only illustrates the desk-to-fridge lifestyle, but defends it. “Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience,” Simic writes, taking a playful jab at the bedrock of American individualism. He continues:

“We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it.” (Where is Poetry Going? by Charles Simic, NYRBlog)

Sadly, I think the same thing can be said of most journalists.