Charles Simic

[quasimodo1]

Here's an interview of Charles Simic, "In-Verse Thinking" ...done by Deborah Solomon (NYT). Any Simic fans around here lately? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03wwln-q4-t.html?ref=books#

[Virgil]

I've heard of him and read a poem here or there but nothing that sticks in my memory. I will say that interview seemed so trivial. Good God, did they even talk about his poetry in any depth?

[stlukesguild]

"It’s a kind of feast-in-time-of-plague poetry. I always feel like if I am sitting here having a terrific meal with friends, yes, there is someplace else, not too far away, where something awful is happening."


This quote definitely sums up much of what I sense in Simic. In some ways he reminds me of Renaissance art... art where there is such glorious beauty... and yet such ugly things are happening there as well (I immediately think of Boccaccio or Bosch or all those martyrdoms). I've always been wary of art that seemingly can only recognize the horror that goes on around us... but neither am I overly fond of that which seemingly looks only to beauty by isolating itself from reality. Simic recognizes the ugliness along side of the beauty... and can often jump from one to the other in ways that create mental images that are quite disconcerting. At times one even sense that Simic can recognize the beauty that exists even in ugliness itself... rather like Monet being struck by the play of light across the face of his dead wife.

[quasimodo1]

Hey Virgil, Stlukesguild sadly has a point, but there is some great work with Simic. The interview was trivial; I chose it because it was recent (not good). I had this quote in my files...James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, will announce Mr. Simic’s appointment. Mr. Billington said he chose Mr. Simic from a short list of 15 poets because of “the rather stunning and original quality of his poetry,” adding: “He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears.”

[quasimodo1]

One response from a better interview...J.M. Spalding: Could you talk about your early years and your life before you realized you were a poet?
Charles Simic: Germans and the Allies took turns dropping bombs on my head while I played with my collection of lead soldiers on the floor. I would go boom, boom, and then they would go boom, boom. Even after the war was over, I went on playing war. My imitation of a heavy machine gun was famous in my neighborhood in Belgrade.

[quasimodo1]

A Book Full of Pictures


Father studied theology through the mail
And this was exam time.
Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book
Full of pictures. Night fell.
My hands grew cold touching the faces
Of dead kings and queens.

There was a black raincoat
in the upstairs bedroom
Swaying from the ceiling,
But what was it doing there?
Mother's long needles made quick crosses.
They were black
Like the inside of my head just then.{excerpt from the poem by Simic}

[Virgil]

A Book Full of Pictures


Father studied theology through the mail
And this was exam time.
Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book
Full of pictures. Night fell.
My hands grew cold touching the faces
Of dead kings and queens.

There was a black raincoat
in the upstairs bedroom
Swaying from the ceiling,
But what was it doing there?
Mother's long needles made quick crosses.
They were black
Like the inside of my head just then.{excerpt from the poem by Simic}

That looks like a good poem. Thanks Quasi.

[stlukesguild]

from: The Massacre of the Innocents

The poets of the late Tang Dynasty
Could do nothing about it except to write:
"On the Western hills the sun sets...
Horses blown by the whirlwinds tread the clouds."

I could not help myself either. I felt joy
Even at the site of a crow circling
As I stretched out on the grass
Alone now with the silence of the sky...

from the collection, A Wedding in Hell:

The Pleasures of Reading

On his deathbed my father is reading
The memoirs of Casanova.
I'm watching the night fall
A few windows being lit across the street.
In one of them a young woman is reading
Close to the glass.
She hasn't looked up in a long while,
Even with the darkness coming.

While there's still a bit of light,
I want her to lift her head
So I can see her face
Which I have already imagined,
But her book must be full of suspense.
And besides, its so quiet'
Every time she turns a page
I can hear my father turn one too,
As if they are reading the same book.

[stlukesguild]

My favorite book by Simic is still Dimestore Alchemy... a collection of poetic meditations upon the work/inspired by the work of the Artist Joseph Cornell:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/cornell.mediciprincesssmall.jpg

Simic admits to wishing that he could have created art in the same manner as Cornell... and then to have struggled to create a poetry from "found" images in the same manner as Cornell created visual art from such. His earlier work was often termed as Minimalist and Imagist and there is certainly a magical... almost Surrealist use of or creation of visual imagery. One critic referred to Simic's poetry as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes".

[quasimodo1]

You know Stlukesguild, after your first comment, recalling the relative plus or minus energy in Simics various works, it struck me there were many of the "awfulizing" style. Still in many others he struggled for a lighter touch. I am just remembering now you mentioned about the Simic/Cornell inspiration and also this surrealist sense you feel about Cornell. I'm not a believer in spooky co-incidence but this concept of surreal has just been jumping off alot of texts lately. I would be interested in your spin or definition for this word. Not denotation.

[stlukesguild]

I think Surrealism is an artistic trend that has held on far beyond the aesthetic worth of its founders. There are some nice passages by Breton and some of the other Surrealists... but neither he, nor the rest of the group ever strike me as major writers. The same is largely true of the official Surrealist artists. Ernst is a rather mediocre painter (his collages are more interesting) and none of the others save Dali really do much for me. On the other hand... there is a large group of artists working within a manner that might appear Surrealist: that employ fantasy and dream imagery and the unexpected juxtaposition of imagery. By this definition Henri Rousseau, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, and many others were Surrealists... and far greater artists than any of the official Surrealists. This strain continues into late Modern and Contemporary art with painters such as Francis Bacon, Arshile Gorky, perhaps Philip Guston, John Bellany, Douglas Bourgeoise, Gregory Gillespie, John Kirby, Paul Rumsey, Roberto Marquez, Paul Cadmus, Richard Linder, Aron Wiesenfeld, Leonard Koscianski, and many others. What I sense in all of these works is disconcerted feeling... a blurring of what is dream or fantasy... and reality... an incredibly heightened "realism". I think of the same in literature. Its not Breton who is the model, but rather Kafka and from him we have George Trakl, Hermann Hesse, perhaps some of Beckett, some of the darker moments of O'Connor, as well as Borges, Marquez, and much of the Latin-American Renaissance.

Surrealism strikes me as something difficult to pull off well. Perhaps the weakness of Breton is that I get the feeling he is simply engaging in intellectual games. Kafka is for real. So is Henri Rousseau. There are any number of high-school and even college art students churning out lame examples of Surrealism: flying pigs and melting guitars, etc... There's something not so easy about Borges' or Cortazar's or Simic's imagery. Its not a clever formalist game, but rather something of a world view... the only way, perhaps, to convey something of the absurdity... the unreality... of reality?

[quasimodo1]

Yes, the "unreality of reality". That could be a course. But who could teach it. Just getting your mind around that moment of realization is something of a shock. Getting far afield of Mr. Simic here, but when the expression "big bang" is used as an astonomical explanation of universal origen...well...it makes me want to write satire. Art, like science, is an evolution of continual eclipses. The human difficulty comes when an entity like the RC church digs in its dogmatic heals because of necessary re-evaluation.