THC: In an ideal world, who would pick up your book?
CS: I don’t know if there’s an ideal world. Already, people out there seem to understand what goes on in the poems. I’m always stunned when somebody occasionally writes me a note about something, and I realize that there are really readers out there who can read between the lines, who have as much a gift for being readers as people have for being writers. And beyond that, there is, I suppose, some kind of ideal reader who understands you more than you do. I had a friend who used to say love poems are addressed to God, that God was the ultimate reader. But, yes, there’s a kind of ultimately alert sensitive reader that one begs for without quite knowing who that reader is.
Night picnic
by Charles Simic
Harcourt
86 pp., $23