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 Its Children” (Antaeus, Spring 1978) in...