ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores the spaces Charles Simic’s poems create, the particularly spatial conception Simic has of poems, as well as the hospitality Simic’s work offers the reader, of the poem as a place of encounter. It addresses the existential and theological uncertainties of Simic’s poetry and connects his work with the traditions of Christian mysticism. The book assesses the role of humor in Simic’s work, identifying the primary modes in which it operates in his poems: the playful sexuality of his bawdy poems, the bleakness of his gallows humor poems, and the more nuanced tensions of his ambivalently humorous poems. It attempts to draw attention to and explicate the ways that Simic’s work can best be understood as a poetics of uncertainty.
