Watermelons"I once sat for hours signing my name before I realized I'd been misspelling it," Charles Simic told me before handing back my copy of The World Doesn't End. I have acquired twenty of his books in the year since because such moments saturate them: the times we stare at a word long enough to rob it of sense, the one or two mornings a year when the mirror takes us by surprise. In them our account of the world shows its seams, and we realize it has always been past explanation. Things are only familiar in the way of family: we are among them, we are of them, we are in need of them. The everyday remains strange in ways we cannot place.
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
Charles Simic is a self-proclaimed insomniac: "The hurricane century tossed my bed around." Raised as Dušan Simić in war-torn Belgrade during World War II, he managed to escape bombings and military strikes, but not without witnessing the requisite atrocities: "My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin." He only began to learn English at age fifteen, and moved with his family a year later to New York City. Simic quickly acquainted himself with the sights and syllables of America (with an outsider's insight into both), but continued to speak in his native Serbian tongue of riddle, myth, and legend, and to think in cruelties and the inscrutable. This sensibility earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer, and the US Poet Laureateship: "Have I been made the official match vendor / Of the great dark night of the soul?"
In Simic's view, we are tirelessly subject to apparent meaninglessness, “History practicing its scissor-clips / in the dark”. But how does one move beyond chaos? Start from a beginning. In Richard Howard's introduction to Dismantling The Silence, he writes, "When we speak of writing as original, as I am bound and determined to do in speaking of Charles Simic's writing at all, we mean that it has to do with something very old, not something very new—it has to do with origins, beginnings, sources." In his oeuvre Simic follows an evolutionary timeline: stones, wind, and grass populate his first poems, followed by dogs and mice, and eventually people. A handful of these early works are "object poems," inkblot tests in reverse in which the commonplace sheds its intimacy and suggests something alien and uncategorizable:
ForkIn later poems, ordinary images and tropes come in contact with one another, forming "tribes"; here it is the interplay which baffles. Simic compares these to Joseph Cornell's sculptures, three-dimensional collages of found objects arranged in boxes. The displays have an effect Simic calls "dime-store alchemy," a fitting description of his own work. What we call ordinary, we have ordered according to our contexts and purposes, but seen differently by way of juxtaposition it can subvert our usual thinking, even creep us out. One could criticize Simic's more recent work as formulaic, many versions of the same unsettling poem, but only as a side effect common to many artists who find a path and follow where it leads. As for his early volumes, they consistently surprise because they remain in search of a stride and can only look to themselves for advice.
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
"Poetry is an orphan of silence," Simic says. By some miracle one escapes from speechlessness, suddenly finding words. They come out of nowhere, but cannot go back: their tracks are covered. Though they arrive ex nihilo, this very act destroys nihilo, the preceding void. Ask anything about this prior state, and you disable an answer; one backward glance, and home becomes a pillar of salt. Simic's poems watch themselves happen in an attempt to recapture through reflexivity the breath one loses by saying a word, the whiteness of the page that literally underwrites every scribbled glyph that covers it. It is the sound of one writing implement clapping, to mix a metaphor, and this self-consciousness lets a poem not only alter one's view of a particular subject—say, the possibility of love, or what to think about a war—but reconstitute one's sense of sense, that which colors all, the way in which one "chew[s] on the bitter verb / 'To be'."
If this phenomenological attitude toward poetry intrigues you, John Lysaker's book You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense explores the way Charles Simic realizes Martin Heidegger's poetic ideals. It is perhaps better exemplified than explained; for this, look to the poem White (followed by What The White Had To Say) in Selected. It is the only long poem I have ever endeavored to memorize (I made it about halfway), and according to Lysaker it is "part and parcel of every Simic poem." It and the rest beg to be internalized, or rather entered; they will not let you out unscathed. I can testify to this, having spent many hours reading them aloud, taking them in by breathing them out. I have even set a few to music (most recently Stone) in an effort to hear them differently, to gain intimacy with the poems and ultimately with my own life, to learn to spell my name, to "go inside a stone":
[...] perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
