What is normal? Is it what is most common, what we see the most often, what others tell us is so, what we feel is right? However we define our normality, Charles Simic often aims to disturb it with his poetry, defamiliarizing ‘normal’ objects and practices. Karen Volkman calls him “a laureate of our disquiet” (52), eyes narrowing in on the slightest, most contradictory nuances of American society. She claims that Simic “speak[s] to the uncanniness and latent violence of…provincial American upbringing” (52), which I find especially relevant and, indeed, literal in many ways when applied to Simic’s poem “On the Farm.” The violence in this poem is not an abstraction or some way of repressing the self or desire: this violence is tangible, often
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Principally, this stanza forces readers to confront the fact that what they may be eating for dinner, and certainly what the narrators are eating for dinner, was once very much alive and had the agency to nurture that life. The figurative language focuses both on the physicality and life of the chickens as well as the time of day, connecting the two. As the narrators eat the two chickens that were once out in the fields pecking along with the rest, the living chickens’ shadows lengthen as the day ends and the Sun intensifies the color of the hay bales. Considering common metaphorical usage as well as the events of the following stanza, which I will discuss more in depth later, the ending of this day seems to represent the ending of these chickens’ lives. Furthermore, this impending death is a process; Simic does not write that the chickens’ shadows are long: he writes that they are lengthening. Additionally, the object lit up by the Sun that Simic focuses on is hay. The chickens’ shadows stretch towards an impending death, and the hay, a life-giver to the nonhuman animals, becomes golden—striking and valuable. I would contextualize this value both in terms of the nourishment of the nonhuman animals’ lives and in terms of the narrators’ reaping of profit and food from the nonhuman animals’
Principally, this stanza forces readers to confront the fact that what they may be eating for dinner, and certainly what the narrators are eating for dinner, was once very much alive and had the agency to nurture that life. The figurative language focuses both on the physicality and life of the chickens as well as the time of day, connecting the two. As the narrators eat the two chickens that were once out in the fields pecking along with the rest, the living chickens’ shadows lengthen as the day ends and the Sun intensifies the color of the hay bales. Considering common metaphorical usage as well as the events of the following stanza, which I will discuss more in depth later, the ending of this day seems to represent the ending of these chickens’ lives. Furthermore, this impending death is a process; Simic does not write that the chickens’ shadows are long: he writes that they are lengthening. Additionally, the object lit up by the Sun that Simic focuses on is hay. The chickens’ shadows stretch towards an impending death, and the hay, a life-giver to the nonhuman animals, becomes golden—striking and valuable. I would contextualize this value both in terms of the nourishment of the nonhuman animals’ lives and in terms of the narrators’ reaping of profit and food from the nonhuman animals’