Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Simic, Charles (Vol. 130) - Richard Jackson (essay date Winter 1980)

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Richard Jackson (essay date Winter 1980)

SOURCE: “Charles Simic and Mark Strand: The Presence of Absence,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter, 1980, pp. 136-45.

[In the following essay, Jackson discusses Heideggerian meaning in the poetry of Simic and Mark Strand.]

“If Cleopatra's nose changed the course of the world, it was because it entered the world's discourse, for to change it in the long or short term, it was enough, indeed it was necessary, for it to be a speaking nose.” So writes Jacques Lacan in his essay “The Freudian Thing,” incidentally suggesting, for our purposes, something of the surrealistic moods of Charles Simic and Mark Strand, and the absolute priority these two poets give to the ontological function of language. Actually, to headnote a discussion of these two poets by citing a French linguistic psychoanalyst is to follow Simic's advice in a recent essay entitled “Negative Capability and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Hayden Carruth (review date Summer 1971)
   2. James Atlas (review date February 1975)
   3. Richard Jackson (essay date Winter 1980)
   4. Peter Schmidt (essay date Fall 1982)
   5. Bruce Bennett (review date 12 March 1983)
   6. Charles Simic with Sherod Santos (interview date 1984)
   7. Kenneth Funsten (review date 16 March 1986)
   8. Peter Stitt (review date Spring 1987)
   9. Marci Janas (review date Spring 1991)
   10. Steven Cramer (review date January 1992)
   11. Ileana A. Orlich (essay date Spring 1992)
   12. Edward Hirsch (review date 21 December 1992)
   13. Lisa Zeidner (review date 21 March 1993)
   14. Tam Lin Neville (review date Spring 1993)
   15. Philip Miller (essay date Summer 1993)
   16. Scott Edward Anderson (review date November-December 1993)
   17. Judith Kitchen (review date Winter 1995)
   18. Christopher Merrill (review date 19 March 1995)
   19. Helen Vendler (essay date 1995)
   20. Charles Simic with Molly McQuade (interview date 1995)
   21. David Sofield (review date 13 January 1996)
   22. David Bafer (review date April 1996)
   23. Paul Breslin (review date July 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright