It’s funny ’cause it’s true:
All lyric poems are narcissistic. They are the earliest form of the personal ad. They’ve been saying for more than a thousand years, “I’m a sensitive, vulnerable, misunderstood, barely solvent, lovable little fellow who would like to meet a person of exquisite taste who is not averse to an occasional roll in the hay.” –Charles Simic
(Via Giornale Nuovo, which I found through Caterina; it’s written by misteraitch, who lives “in an apartment in an hotel in a town on the Baltic coast of southern Sweden” and posts all manner of good and beautiful things.)
This reminds me that I failed to acknowledge my source for the quote…
http://www.duke.edu/~tkp1/poetrydefs.htm
This link to the source of Simic’s quote is dead. Do you know when and where he said it?
I’m afraid I don’t; you might write misteraitch and ask if he can retrieve the source (his e-mail is in the left-hand column of this page).
Sixteen years later: the Wayback Machine found the page, but it doesn’t give the source, just the year 1999. Sloppy sourcing!
Found it! It’s from “How to peel a poem: five poets dine out on verse,” in a discussion of Frank O’Hara’s “Music” (1954), about halfway down the page. Boy, was that satisfying.