Charles Simic: Poet Laureate

August 27, 2007

As anyone likely to read my ramblings already knows, Charles Simic is the new Poet Laureate. I’m glad I dropped most of my poetry blog reading list and picked up only a select few I could remember because I can just imagine the working-over that Simic, the choice of Simic, and the position and idea of Poet Laureate itself will get in the world of avant poetry.

I like Simic’s work. I know he’s not surreal enough, not tormented/exuberant enough, not post-avant enough, not innovative enough, not hard enough. I just enjoy his poems.

Given my long-standing and mostly subdued craziness for the game of chess, I find it hard to resist chess poems, most of which don’t have much to recommend them except for their mention of the world’s greatest game. But Simic demonstrates a knowledge of chess as both game and metaphor in two poems that are otherwise quite dissimilar. The first is a couplet, a trifle, but with a keen edge:

Evening Chess

The Black Queen raised high
In my father’s angry hand

The other

Simic’s poetry is brief, another quality I admire. If a poem goes more than a few pages it had to be _very_ compelling, otherwise I’d rather read a story. Very few of my favorite Simic poems are longer than a page, and many are quite short:

Watermelons

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

Many of Simic’s poems are rather traditional, though they almost always carry the undefinable “spark” that I find myself drawn to in more mainstream poems, a combination of interesting, fitting images and straight– but still beautiful– language:

Clouds Gathering

It seemed the kind of life we wanted.
Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.
Sunlight in every room.
The two of us walking by the sea naked.

Some evenings, however, we found ourselves
Unsure of what comes next.
Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,
With birds circling over our heads,
The dark pines strangely still,
Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

We were back on our terrace sipping wine.
Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?
Clouds of almost human appearance
Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely
With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.
The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

The aspect of Simic’s poetry that seems to draw out both the wolves’ teeth and the donkeys’ brays of the critics has to do with his “soft surrealism.” A good example might be a poem like this:

Read Your Fate

A world’s disappearing.
Little street,
You were too narrow,
Too much in the shade already.

You had only one dog,
One lone child.
You hid your biggest mirror,
Your undressed lovers.

Someone carted them off
In an open truck.
They were still naked, travelling
On their sofa

Over a darkening plain,
Some unknown Kansas or Nebraska
With a storm brewing.
The woman opening a red umbrella

In the truck. The boy
And the dog running after them,
As if after a rooster
With its head chopped off.

I don’t see these vaguely surreal poems as being “soft”– I see them as making use of surreal, unreal and what has come to be known as magically real imagery together with traditional poetic techniques rather than in lieu of them. I have strange culinary tastes– I like eating lemons like oranges, raw and whole, but I don’t consider lemon meringue pie or lemon scones to be a “soft recipes.”

In fact, in a quick scan over the Simic poems I could immediately find, most of them don’t even work in that mode at all, though they are often concerned with “unreal” imagery:

Eyes Fastened With Pins

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death’s laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death’s supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can’t figure it out
Among all the locked doors…
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death’s side of the bed.

This carries over into his prose poems, which are what initially turned me on to Simic’s work and which I return to in my ongoing quest to make some sense of the shape of the boundaries of category. Here are two untitled pieces:

My mother was a braid of black smoke.

She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.

The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.

We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.

The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

The hundred-year-old china doll’s head the sea washes up on its gray beach. One would like to know the story. One would like to make it up, make up many stories. It’s been so long in the sea, the eyes and nose have been eraswed, its faint smile is even fainter. With the night ocming, one would like to see oneself walking the empty beach and bending down to it.

I’ll leave my scattered notes about Simic’s poetry with a short prose poem about poetry:

Our Angelic Ancestor

Rimbaud should have gone to America instead of Lake Chad. He’d be a hundred years old and rummaging through a discount store. Didn’t he say he liked stupid paintings, signs, popular engravings, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers?

Arthur, poor boy, you would have walked the length of Fourteenth street and written many more “Illuminations.”

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

Unsurprisingly, Simic is deft with words in many contexts. I’ve only recently discovered his nonfiction work and look forward to reading more of it. One of the funniest pieces in the surprisingly good anthology In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction Simic reminisces about dinner with his Uncle Boris. This work is best heard in Simic’s own voice– his accent clarifies the rhythm and pacing– but I will share a few snippets anyway:

I am the reasonable type. I try to lay out the pros and cons as if I were a judge making a summation to the jury. I believe in the calming effect of an impeccable logical argument. Before I can get very far, my brother interrupts to tell me that I’m full of shit. His philosophy is: The more reasonable it sounds, the less likely it is that it’s true. My father, on the other hand, always takes the Olympian view. “None of you know what the fuck you are talking about,” he informs us, and resumes slurping his soup.

[...]

“It’s what you said about Hoover,” my brother says, guffawing. Both he and my father are enjoying themselves, while I’m debating whether to punch Boris in the mouth. He’s really pissed too. He says I even look like Trotsky with my wire-rim glasses. “Get me the FBI on the phone,” he yells to my aunt. He’s going to speak to J. Edgar personally about me.

It’s hard to tell with boris if he’s entirely serious. He loves scenes. He loves opera. It’s the third act, we are all dead on the stage, and he is caterwauling. Without histrionics life is boring. This is bliss, as far as he’s concerned.

Watching him rant like that, I get an inspiration. I rise from the table, walk over, and solemnly kiss him on the top of his bald head. He’s stunned speechless. It takes him some time to collect himself. Finally he smiles sheepishly and embraces me in turn.

“Forget about the FBI,” he yells to my aunt in the kitchen.

[...]

Boris, for instance, right now is singing. He studies opera singing for years, tried to make a career of it, and failed. Now he sings only when he’s happy. He has a huge, beautiful tenor voice, but no ear. When he starts hitting the high notes, you have to run for your life. It’s no use. HE can be heard across the stree. He has the world’s loudest voice, and it’s off-key.

He sings for us an aria from _Otello_. We survive that somehow, but he’s not through yet. We are going to hear Tristan’s death scene. Across the table my father looks grim. My brother has vanished. I am lying on the floor at Tristan’s feet, trying my best to keep a straight face. Boris paces up and down conducting the Berlin Philharmonic as he sings. From time to time he stops to translate for us. “Tristan is going mad,” he whispers. No doubt about that. This Tristan is ready for the loony bin. His tongue is lolling, and his eyes are popping out of his head. He’s standing on the sofa and leaning against the wall, arms spread as if he is about to be crucified.

“_Verflucht wer dich gebrant_!” he shrieks.

“Stop it Boris,” my aunt says calmly, coming in from the kitchen with the cake.

“Please let him sing the death scene, Auntie,” I say, and now even my father has to grin.

[...]

The last time Boris had a bottle of expensive wine he had us sip it from a teaspoon. He went around the table pouring drops of a fine old Margaux into a spoon and making all of us in turn say “Aaaaaahh” like a baby doctor.

I’ll leave the theory and “real” criticism to others, content with expressing my satisfaction at the choice of Charles Simic as Poet Laureate (a position which isn’t about much more than simple recognition anyway as there are no duties and Laureates are in a kind of “damned if you do; damned if you don’t” position if they attempt any activism).

Tags: essays, poetry, Writing