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The World Doesn't End

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Charles Simic reading at the Library of Congress.

The World Doesn't End is a collection of prose poems published by Charles Simic in 1989. The collection won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990.[1]

Contents

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The collection begins with an epigraph from Fats Waller: "Let's waltz the Rumba."[2]

The collection is divided into three parts of untitled prose poems, each ranging between two and five lines.[3] Each poem is indicated in the collection's table of contents by the first several words of each poem:

Part I
[my mother was]
[Scaliger turns deadly]
[I was stolen]
[It's a store]
[She's pressing me]
[We were so poor]
[I am the last]
[Everybody knows the]
[He held the Beast]
[It was the epoch]
[Ghost stories written]
[In the fourth year]
[The city had fallen]
[I Played in the Smallest Theatres]
[The stone is]
[They wheeled out]
[Lover of endless]
[The flies]
[History lesson]

Part II

[The hundred-year-old]
[In a forest of]
[Everything's foreseeable]
[He calls one dog]
[A dog with a soul]
[Time—the lizard]
[Margaret was copying]
[A poem about sitting]
[Dear Friedrich]
[Tropical luxuriance]
[The clouds told him]
[Are Russian cannibals]
[An actor pretending]
[The dead man]
[My guardian angel]
[The dog went]
[Things were not]
[A hen larger]
[The old farmer]
[The rat kept]
[O witches, O poverty]
[Once I knew]
[The ideal spectator]
[Thousands of old men]
[My thumb is]
[Gospel]

Part III

[M.]
[A century]
[A black child]
[Police dogs]
[Ambiguity created by]
[The time of minor poets]
[At least four]
[Comedy of errors]
[The fat man]
[A week-long holiday]
[Lots of people]
[O the great God]
[I knew a night owl]
[My father loved]
[An arctic voyager]
[All this gets us]
[From inside the pot]
[Where ignorance is]
[He had mixed up]
[Someone shuffles]
[A much dwindled]
[My Secret Identity Is]

Reception

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Some critics have credited The World Doesn't End with a resurgence of the prose poem form in American Poetry.[3][4] Christopher Buckley argued that Simic chose the prose poem form because it most closely approximates the Eastern European folk tale.[2]

Footnotes

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  1. ^ "The World Doesn't End (1990 Pulitzer Prize Winner)". pulitzer.org.
  2. ^ a b Christopher Buckley 2008, p. 96.
  3. ^ a b Lux 1989, p. 9.
  4. ^ Dourado 2017, p. 197.

Works cited

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