Warrior Poet Prose

NYbooks has a recent post by poet Charles Simac that is worth reading in its entirety here.

His tenacity & perseverance is also reflected in his poem further below…

But first, why does he keep writing poems?

“The mystery to me is that I continued writing poetry long after there was any need for that. My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going.” 

He adds later:

“The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.”

“I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance.”

Thanks to Poemhunter.com we have many of his poems to choose from.

Here’s one of them…

Learn more about Charles Simac click here:

Talking To Little Birdies