Charles Simic on the pencil

Charles Simic writes about “The Poet’s Pencil”:

I knew a poet who could only write his poems with a stub of a pencil. Nothing else worked for him as well. His family and friends bought him fountain pens, ballpoints, typewriters, and laptops, but he kept away from them. “It’s like giving a dog a wristwatch for Christmas,” his wife said.

The poet, of course, is Simic himself.

About Simic’s offhand characterization of “an age of computers and smartphones when pencils are becoming extinct”: with enough use, individual pencils have always become extinct. But the species? No. Not now. Not yet.