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Charles Simic, The Art of Poetry No. 90 Charles
Simic, Nghệ thuật Thơ Charles
Simic sinh tại Belgrade, Yugoslavia, vào ngày 9 tháng Năm, 1938. Tuổi
thơ của ông
như thế làm sao không mang nặng dấu ấn của cuộc xâm lăng Nazi, và một
số bài thơ
mãnh liệt của ông là từ hồi ức những năm đó. Trong bài "Hai con chó",
thí dụ, ông
nhớ lại cảnh lính Ðức đi tuần hành qua nhà ông, vào năm 1944: Ðất rung
chuyển, chết tiếp diễn… Ông già của
Simic bị tó vài lần, và sau cùng bỏ chạy quê hương Yugoslavia vào năm
1944 qua Ý,
ở đây, ông lại bị bỏ tù. Khi được thả vào lúc chấm dứt cuộc chiến ông
bố trải
qua 5 năm ở Trieste, và sau đó dời đi Mẽo; chỉ tái hợp với gia đình là
vợ và
hai con trai vào năm 1954.
Lần chót ông “về” Belgrade? 1982. Tôi được học bổng
Fulbright và trải qua mùa hè ở đó, đi đủ
thứ nơi. Thú lắm, tuy nhiên tôi cảm thấy xa lạ hơn, so với chuyến 1972.
Nhiều nhà
văn, nhà trí thức, nhân sĩ vẫn giả đò như là VC thuận thành, hoặc ít
lắm thì cũng
Mạc xịt, thành ra có nhiều chuyện phải tránh hỏi hay phê. Tôi không
được phán nhảm
như mình vẫn thường, và cũng thấy mệt mất 1 thời gian. Sau đó, vào
những năm
Milosevic thì lại khác hẳn. Những báo chí lề trái mà tôi cộng tác, thì
thật là tự
do, và can trường hơn cả đồng nghiệp ở Tây Phương. Ông thường không viết thẳng về những biến
cố chính trị hoặc tai ương
đặc biệt nào, nhưng rõ ràng là cuộc chiến vùng Balkans mà những viễn
tượng lịch
sử u ám của nó là nền của những bài thơ như “Ðọc lịch sử”, và “Ðế
Quốc”, cả hai
đóng vào lịch sử những năm đầu thập niên 1990 Ðúng như thế.
“Ðọc Lịch Sử” được viết sau 1 trận nhậu tới chỉ và đọc cả một đống sách
lịch sử
Tầu và Ấn. Cứ vài trang là cái có 1 cú tàn độc, một cuộc đâm chém,
chiến trận, cả
ngàn người chết. "Ðế Quốc" là 1 bài thơ về bà ngoại của tôi, mất năm
1948 khi tôi
10 tuổi. Bà trông nom săn sóc tôi, từ khi còn nhỏ xíu, khi bố mẹ tôi
phải đi làm.
Bà thường nghe đám khùng điên lèm bèm trên la dô, những đấng như
Hitler,
Stalin, Mussolini… Bà biết vài ngôn ngữ, còn tôi thì chẳng hiểu gì cả,
và bà rất
bực vì những lời dối trá của đám này. "Có gì trật với thế giới", bà ưa
hỏi mọi
người. Quả là 1 câu hỏi thật bảnh. Tôi tới giờ mà cũng không tìm ra câu
trả lời.
Có quá nhiều cuộc chiến trong cuộc đời của
tôi. Có quá nhiều chết chóc, chém giết. Tôi cũng không hiểu được, như
bà ngoại
của tôi. Cái sự dễ dàng, và ngạo mạn, và luôn cả cái khốn nạn "đường ra
trận mùa
này đẹp lắm", qua đó, bao nhiêu người được đưa đi gặp cái chết của họ,
vẫn luôn luôn
làm tôi ngạc nhiên. Cái sự sử dụng sát nhân để làm cho thế giới tốt đẹp
hơn, thí
dụ, là phổ thông ở trong giới trí thức Mẽo, như thể chưa từng có tiền
lệ lịch sử. Tôi luôn nghĩ về những điều này.
Charles
Simic, The Art of Poetry No. 90 Interviewed
by Mark Ford Charles
Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. His early
childhood
was, inevitably, dominated by the Nazi invasion, and some of his most
powerful
poems derive from memories of this period. In “Two Dogs,” for instance,
he
recalls watching the Germans march past his house in 1944: The earth
trembling, death going by . . . A little white dog ran into the street And got
entangled with the soldiers’ feet. A kick made him fly as if he had
wings.
That’s what I keep seeing! Night coming
down. A dog with wings. Simic’s
father was arrested a number of times, and eventually fled Yugoslavia
in 1944
for Italy, where he was again thrown into jail. On his release at the
war’s
end, George Simic spent five years in Trieste, and then moved to
America; he
was not to be reunited with his wife and two sons until 1954. Simic
attended primary school in Belgrade. His mother, Helen, made various
attempts
to escape postwar Yugoslavia, and was herself briefly incarcerated,
along with
her sons, by the Communist authorities. Eventually they were granted
passports
in 1953. Afraid the passports might be revoked, Helen hastily packed,
and the
family boarded a train that very evening for Paris. After a series of
delays
they were finally granted American visas, and set sail for New York in
August
of 1954. The family
lived in New York for a year, and then settled in Chicago. There was no
money
for Simic to attend college, so he worked as an office boy on the
Chicago
Sun-Times and attended night classes. In 1958 he moved back to New
York, where
he worked at a variety of jobs—parcel-packer, salesman, housepainter,
payroll
clerk—and studied and wrote poetry at night. In 1961
Simic was drafted into the army and was obliged to spend two years as a
military policeman in Germany and France. On his return to New York he
enrolled
at New York University, where he studied linguistics, and married the
fashion
designer Helen Dubin. His first collection, What the Grass Says, was
published
in 1967. In 1973, the University of New Hampshire offered him an
associate
professorship, and he has remained there ever since. Simic, who
has acquired a large and faithful following, has been astonishingly
prolific,
publishing collections of his poetry and of his reviews and essays at
the rate
of one, and sometimes two, a year. He has also translated the work of
such
writers as Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalić, Aleksandar Ristovic, and Tomaž
Šalamun, and
has been instrumental in bringing their writings to the attention of
the
English-speaking world. His own poetry has, in turn, been translated
into most
major European languages. The following interview was conducted in November 2004, at my flat in Highbury, London. Simic was over to promote the publication of his Selected Poems: 1963–2001, and to read at Poetry International. He knows London well, and has many friends here. A longtime admirer of his work, I was delighted to find myself with an opportunity to discuss with Simic his life, his art, his politics, and his strongly held views on all matters relating to food, in particular rillettes, on which he discoursed over a serving of them I offered at lunch, at great and enthusiastic length. INTERVIEWER I’d like,
initially, to talk a bit about your childhood in Belgrade. What were
your
parents like and how did they meet? CHARLES
SIMIC My father
came from a blue-collar background. He was the first child in that
family to go
to university. On the other side, my mother came from an old Belgrade
family
that had been living in the same spot for a couple of centuries. They
were
pretty wealthy in the late nineteenth century, but lost everything. My
grandfather on my mother’s side, who was a military man, gambled it all
away,
as I only found out years later. INTERVIEWER How did the
different branches of your family get on? SIMIC To tell the
truth, they despised each other. My mother showed her dislike for my
father’s
relations with sighs, the rolling of eyes, and meaningful asides, while
my
father’s side was more direct. They were a rowdy, hard-drinking bunch.
I
identified more with them. My mother’s family was fearful, paranoid,
and
secretive. They had lost their wealth and were worried about keeping up
appearances.
They had no sense of humor. Nothing was ever funny to them. My father’s
family,
when they got going at a dinner table, they were like a dadaist
cabaret, so you
can imagine how my poor mother felt in their company. INTERVIEWER How
conscious were you of the ideological positions of the combatants—of
what
Nazism or Communism meant? SIMIC Very
much—not in an intellectual way, but everyone around me argued politics
all the
time. My father had Royalist sympathies. My grandfather on my mother’s
side, the
one who gambled all the money away and spent it on floozies, was a
highly
decorated World War I officer who thought we should’ve stayed out of
the war
since our allies were going to screw us in the end—as they did at the
Yalta
Conference. My mother believed all her life—and said so openly—that
Serbs are
political morons who are bound to make the wrong choice no matter what.
On my
father’s side, the young ones were all leftists and thus Communist
sympathizers. They looked forward to the Russians coming to liberate us
and
shooting people like my mother’s family. So, as you can imagine, there
was a
lot of shouting, a lot of tears and slamming of doors. How
difficult were those years for you? SIMIC There’s a
story they used to tell in my family. The war ended the day before May
9, 1945,
which happened to be my birthday. I was playing in the street. Anyway,
I went
up to the apartment to get a drink of water where my mother and our
neighbors
were listening to the radio. They said, “War is over,” and apparently I
looked
at them puzzled and said, “Now there won’t be any more fun!” In
wartime,
there’s no parental supervision; the grown-ups are so busy with their
lives,
the kids can run free. A few years ago I reviewed two huge books of
photographs
of the war in Bosnia. Every face looked unhappy, except for some kids
in
Sarajevo who were smiling as if saying: Isn’t this great, isn’t this
terrific!
When I saw those faces, I thought, That’s me and my friends. Then,
after the
war, the fun continued. Yes, we had poverty, Communist indoctrination,
but also
a few American movies, jazz music on the American Armed Forces Radio,
and gangs
of kids fighting in the streets. I lived in the very center of Belgrade
in a bustling,
crowded neighborhood, so it was never dull. In school, there were
pictures of
Tito, Stalin, and Lenin over every blackboard, watching us do our
schoolwork.
Our teachers told us daily that these were three wise men who were
bringing
happiness to children like us all over the world. I, myself, didn’t
know what
to believe. At home, I was told they were bad men who were responsible
for my
father being away. INTERVIEWER When you arrived in France, you were classified by the French authorities as a “displaced person.” Displacement, deracination, exile, not belonging are persistent themes in your poetry. Was it in Paris that you most acutely felt that you didn’t belong? SIMIC Yes, I think
it was. I like the French, but they did enjoy humiliating us. Every few
months
we had to renew our permits, and would have to wait in line for hours
only to
be told that some document was missing, such as the birth certificate
of my
great- grandmother, which we had instantly to obtain from Yugoslavia,
and then
when we did, they’d say we didn’t need it after all. We spent a year in
Paris
living in a small hotel room, surviving on money that my father sent
from the
United States. We had no idea how long it would take to get our visas.
In the
meantime, we roamed the city on foot, went to movies and studied
English. My
mother bought us LIFE, LOOK, and other American magazines where my
brother and
I studied women in bathing suits, new model cars, and refrigerators
packed with
food. It was while at school in Paris, however, that I first got
interested in
poetry. We had to memorize poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud
and
recite them in front of the class. You can imagine what a nightmare
that was
for me with my accent. Still, those poems brought tears to my eyes. INTERVIEWER You’ve often
said New York is your favorite city: Was it love at first sight? SIMIC It was. It
was an astonishing sight in 1954. Europe was so gray and New York was
so
bright; there were so many colors, the advertisements, the yellow
taxicabs.
America was only five days away by ship, but it felt as distant as
China does
today. European cities are like operatic stage sets. New York looked
like
painted sets in a sideshow at a carnival where the bearded lady, sword-
swallowers, snake charmers, and magicians make their appearances. INTERVIEWER How did you
get on with your father after not seeing him for, what, ten years? SIMIC Fabulously.
Of course, I had no idea what to expect. My father didn’t want us to
have a
typical father-son relationship, which
wouldn’t have been possible in any case. He loved going out to jazz
clubs,
bars, restaurants—in fact, he took me out to a jazz club my first night
in New
York. Talking to him was always fun since he had a lot of good stories.
Plus,
he read everything: history, literature, political studies, Eastern
religions,
mysticism, philosophy, mysteries, sports pages, and even gossip columns
in
newspapers. He was one of those people who are always trying to figure
out the
big ques- tions. The nice thing about him was that he also had an
ability to
listen. He was interested in what anyone said, so it was easy being
with him.
Many years later, he met my poet friends James Tate and Mark Strand and
they
confirmed that he was excellent company. INTERVIEWER But he and
your mother didn’t get along so well? SIMIC No. They
divorced more or less amicably, two years after being reunited. It was
the
ten-year separation, of course, and the simple fact—which
I grasped at an early
age—that they had absolutely nothing in
common. My mother
was a woman of incredible personal courage and integrity whose
political views
proved to be much more lucid and prophetic than my father’s, but from
day to
day she was no fun to be with. She expected only the worst. If she sent
me to
the corner grocery for a bottle of milk she would fret and imagine
every awful
thing happening to me and was astonished to see me return safe and
sound. The
horrors of war left a much bigger impact on her than on the rest of us.
She
would say often that my father was not a serious person, that he did
not
understand what had happened to us. She felt defeated and he wouldn’t
admit
defeat; she felt that their lives had been made meaningless by
historical
events. INTERVIEWER And you? Did
you ever feel oppressed by history? SIMIC Not when I
was younger. Now, I’m not so sure. The same type of lunatics who made
the world
what it was when I was a kid are still around. They want more wars,
more
prisons, more killing. It’s all horribly familiar, very tiresome and
frightening, of course. INTERVIEWER How did you like Chicago? SIMIC Chicago was
like a coffee-table edition of the Communist Manifesto, with glossy
pictures of
lakefront mansions and inner-city slums. On one side you had Michigan
Avenue
with its swanky hotels and luxury stores and, a few blocks away, the
rest of
the city wrapped up in smoke where factory workers, their faces covered
with
grime, waited for buses. An immigrant’s paradise, you might say.
Everyone was
employed. There were huge factories humming twenty-four hours a day
short
distances from beautiful beaches where beautiful young couples sat
reading
Camus and Sartre. I had Swedes, Poles, Germans, Italians, Jews, and
blacks for
friends, who all took turns trying to explain America to me. Chicago,
where I
only spent three years, gave me my first American identity. Everything
that
happened to me there made a huge impression on me. INTERVIEWER Like what? SIMIC It was all
new. Looking for a job, going to work every day, meeting all kinds of
people at
work who were mostly older than me, going to bars every night with some
of them
and hearing them talk about their various lives. INTERVIEWER Was it there
you began writing poetry? SIMIC Well, at
first my secret ambition was to be a painter. INTERVIEWER What kind of
painter were you? SIMIC I started
out when I was fifteen as a kind of Postimpressionist. Later on, I
imitated
Soutine, Vlaminck, and the German Expressionists. When I stopped
painting
around the age of thirty, I was an Abstract Expressionist, at times
aping de
Kooning, at times aping Guston. The truth is, I had little talent. INTERVIEWER When did you
start writing seriously? SIMIC I started
writing in my last year at Oak Park High School, but not
seriously—whatever
that means. I wrote a poem now and then, but was more interested in
what I was
painting. INTERVIEWER On
graduating from Oak Park you got a job as an office boy at the Chicago
Sun-Times; had there been talk of your going to college? SIMIC Sure, there
was a lot of talk. I was accepted at New York University and the
University of
Chicago, but there was no way for me to go. When it came to money, my
father
was completely irresponsible. He made a terrific salary and spent every
penny
immediately. INTERVIEWER When did you
leave home? SIMIC When I was
eighteen. I got a place near Lincoln Park in the same neighborhood as a
friend
who worked at the Sun-Times. He was finishing a degree in philosophy at
the
University of Chicago. He was the first serious reader of my poetry, an
ideal
one since he had every reasonable person’s
understandable suspicion of the imagination. Logic is what he valued
and not
metaphor. We’d sit on the beach on Lake Michigan and I’d try to explain
“Prufrock” to him and he’d say, “How can the evening be etherized like
a
patient upon a table?” By questioning everything I assumed to be
self-evident,
he forced me to think seriously about poetry.
He turned out to be a very important person
in my life. We’ve
stayed friends for over forty-five years. INTERVIEWER What kind of
poets were you reading? SIMIC The
modernists, European and American. Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens,
Apollinaire, Brecht, Rilke, et cetera. The novelist Nelson Algren, whom
I knew
a bit in Chicago, saw me with a volume of Robert Lowell one time and
said,
“Simic, don’t read that shit! You’re a kid off the boat. You ought to
read Carl
Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay!” In the Midwest, with its populist
tradition,
there was a suspicion and dislike of the East Coast intellectual
elites. They
preferred Robinson Jeffers to Robert Frost, Edgar
Lee Masters to Wallace Stevens. As for me, the
first poet I
remember really liking was Hart Crane. He appealed to me because he was
obscure. His impenetrable poems sounded like a higher form of poetry. I
had no
wish to find out if there was a meaning concealed by the obscurities. I
wrote a
number of Crane imitations, reaching frequently for the thesaurus to
seek out
the least familiar word and phrase until I had a poem no one, not even
I, could
understand. Luckily, they have all been destroyed. INTERVIEWER Many of your
poems throughout your career represent life on the margins—your
characters are
often loners, winos, bums, desperadoes, street mystics, long-term
residents of
fleapit hotels . . . Would it be true to say that the nearest you came
to
living such a life were the years you spent in New York in your early
twenties? SIMIC Yes. I came
to New York in the summer of 1958 and found myself alone. I had a lot
of
friends in Chicago, who wondered: What do you want to go to New York
for? But
New York had more of the things I liked—more movies, more jazz clubs,
more
bookstores. I attended university classes at night, and I worked during
the day
at various jobs. I sold shirts in a department store, worked in a bookstore, did a bit of house painting, was an accounting clerk, then a payroll clerk,
and a few more things like that. When I was not working or in class, I
went to
bars and movies. I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love
frequently. As I
recall, I was neither terribly happy nor terribly sad. One of the
distinct
advantages of growing up in a place where one is apt to find men hung
from
lampposts as one walks to school is that it cuts down on grumbling
about life
as one grows older. INTERVIEWER Did you
participate in the poetry scene at all? SIMIC Yes, I did.
I went to a lot of readings. In the 1950s and early 1960s poetry
readings were
modest affairs with five or six friends of the poet, two or three
retired
schoolteachers, and a few more who by their furtive or outright hostile
manner
were most likely aspiring poets. I heard Allen Tate, Lowell, Berryman,
James
Wright, O’Hara, Creeley, Levertov, and many others. Of course, I took a
critical view of just about everything I heard. I sat fuming. That’s
how I met
other aspiring poets. I’d blurt out something to someone on the way
out; we’d
start arguing about it and end up going out for a beer. Some of them
were
older, knew more than I did and did their best to enlighten me. INTERVIEWER Who were the
aspiring poets you were hanging out with? What did you argue about? SIMIC People
passionately interested in poetry, who occasionally published a poem in
one of
the little magazines and who afterwards were never heard from again. We
tried
to make sense of what was happening in poetry from the books and
magazines we
were reading. INTERVIEWER Were you
yourself sending the poems you wrote to magazines by this stage? SIMIC Yes. My
first poems were published in 1959 in an issue of the Chicago Review,
so they
must have been submitted the summer of 1958, four years after I came to
the
United States. INTERVIEWER Were you
writing in English? SIMIC I always
wrote in English since I wanted my friends and the girls I was in love
with to
understand my poems. INTERVIEWER I understand
you destroyed all of your unpublished
early work. Why? SIMIC That
happened during my military service—I was drafted into the army in
1961, and
sent overseas to France. After about a year there I had my brother send
me a
shoe box full of poems, and, when they arrived and I read through them,
they
all struck me as fraudulent. They were so derivative, so bad, so wrong;
I never
felt so ashamed in my life. I rushed out of the barracks into the
night, ripped
them all up, and threw them in the trash in a kind of ecstasy. INTERVIEWER I guess
everyone who lived through the cold war was a cold warrior in some way,
but
during standoffs such as the Cuban Missile Crisis you must have felt
pretty
close to the front line. SIMIC Yes, we were
permanently on the alert because we were expecting war to start any
minute,
perhaps even a nuclear war. I recall, during the height of the Cuban
crisis, a
seal on a safe being broken with great solemnity by our commanding
officer. It
read Not to be opened except in case of war, so this was clearly it.
Our
orders, as it turned out, were so stupid that even our officers and
sergeants
were at a loss for words. PFC Simic was supposed to proceed alone to an
intersection on the border of Germany and France and advise foreign
nationals
who were fleeing the Russian troops not to use that particular highway
because
by NATO agreement it was reserved solely for retreating families of
American
enlisted men. If they objected, I had my gun and presumably could use
it in
some fashion. The rest of the orders were equally unrealistic.
Fortunately, the
crisis was over in a few days so I didn’t have to make a fool of myself. INTERVIEWER Were you
writing poems during this time? Was it possible to write under those
conditions? SIMIC It was
possible, but I had no desire to write poems. I kept a journal for a
few months
and had a notebook where I jotted commentaries on books I was reading,
but all
in all I did very little writing during that time. INTERVIEWER Editions of
your selected poems always begin with “Butcher Shop.” Do you think of
this poem
as a kind of gateway to your oeuvre, as the first in which you found
your
voice? SIMIC It was the
first poem I wrote that I knew I wanted to keep. I wrote it in 1963,
when I was
living on East Thirteenth Street. In those days there were still Polish
and
Italian butcher shops in that part of town with wonderful displays of
sausages,
pig knuckles, slaughtered lambs and chickens. I never in my life went
past a
butcher shop like that without stopping to take a close look. Of
course, it
reminded me of Europe, of my childhood. I slaughtered chickens when I
was a
boy, saw pigs have their throats slit and then be butchered afterwards. INTERVIEWER Would I be right in suggesting its final lines posit some kind of connection between violence and creativity? There is a
wooden block where bones are broken, Scraped
clean—a river dried to its bed Where I am
fed, Where deep
in the night I hear a voice. SIMIC I think so,
but I have no idea how conscious I was of that when I wrote the poem.
Most
likely not. It took me many years and meetings with some of my
childhood
friends from Belgrade to realize that I grew up in a slaughterhouse. We
were
not only occupied, but there was a civil war going on with multiple
factions
fighting each other. Blood in the streets was not a figure of speech,
but
something I saw again and again. There’s no question that all that had
a lot to
do with my outlook on life. Innocent human beings get killed—that was
my
earliest lesson. Whenever I read about a “just war” in which thousands
of
innocents have died or will die, I want to jump out of my skin. INTERVIEWER From the
outset you were drawn to subjects many
people wouldn’t consider that poetic, like, say, cockroaches. SIMIC That was
another early poem. Cockroaches appear for the simple reason that the
places
where I lived in New York were infested with them. They were the only
visitors
I had all day. I was brought up to be polite to strangers and help old
ladies
across the street, so I’d stop whatever I was doing and inquire about
these
roaches’ health. INTERVIEWER Insects
feature a lot in your work. You seem to be pretty fond of ants, too,
particularly in Jackstraws. SIMIC I know—when
friends read that book they said, “Simic, are you drinking too much?
All these
bugs!” Actually, I’ve always been curious about these little creatures
going
their merry way, taking care of business—whatever that business is.
Flies are
neurotic, moths are crazy, but for serenity you can’t beat a butterfly.
Even
ants seem pretty cool. When I was little I used to step on them out of
sheer
nastiness or boredom. Now I can’t hurt a flea that’s biting me. INTERVIEWER Returning to
your early work, and poems like “Butcher Shop” and “Cockroach” and
“Fork”—what
kind of responses did they elicit from their first readers in the
midsixties? SIMIC A couple of
editors I showed the poems to were kind of irritated. They said I was
just
trying to be a smart aleck. More interestingly, they thought these were
not
worthy subjects. My pals, on the other hand, liked them. They wanted me
to
write epics about toothpicks and dripping faucets. INTERVIEWER Was there
anyone who particularly influenced them? SIMIC Well, maybe
Apollinaire is behind “Butcher Shop.” As for the object poems, there
were
William Carlos Williams and the French surrealists. It’s not that I
read their
poems and wanted to do some- thing like that immediately, but their
example was
certainly in the back of my mind. Still, it was a breakthrough. I felt,
This is
what I want to do from now on and I don’t care if so-and-so doesn’t
like it. INTERVIEWER A number of
critics have suggested your work achieves a kind of fusion between
European and
American influences. Do you see it at all in those terms? SIMIC I don’t
really know how to answer that. I did read a lot of European poets, but
so did
almost all my American contemporaries. No doubt my way of reading the
Europeans
was different because of my background. On the other hand, as Serbs
will tell
you, my poetry sounds mostly foreign to them. “He is no longer one of
us,” I
hear them say both in anger and disappointment. I realize I’m an odd
case,
difficult to classify, neither an exile nor an immigrant exactly, but
this is
not something I worry about. It’s not like I had a choice about the
life I was
going to have or the kind of poet I was going to be. It just happened
this way. INTERVIEWER You said
that your way of reading the Europeans was different because of your
background. How so? SIMIC For obvious
reasons. In addition to knowing some of the languages, I knew what
Europe
looked like and had a firsthand experience of its recent history.
INTERVIEWER Can you give
an example of a word or a poem that can’t be translated? SIMIC Chieftain
Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with
henna hackles, halt! The more a
poem depends on language to make its effect, the harder it is to
translate. I
mean, there are lyric poems where there’s almost no content, where the
gorgeousness of the vocabulary and the music are everything. As for
individual
words, I met a fellow once who insisted that the word for bread in any
language
cannot be translated. Sure, one can find an equivalent in a dictionary,
but can
that other bread really do justice to what one knows of bread?
You’ve also
talked of the enormous impact made on you by Dudley Fitts’s Anthology
of
Contemporary Latin-American Poetry, which was where you first came
across the
work of such poets as Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. SIMIC Yes, that is
still one of the most wonderful books I know. These poets
were nothing like
anything I’d ever
read. South American poetry is in some
ways closer
to American poetry than European poetry is. It’s the frontier, the
immense
space and the sense of always being a provincial. I cannot imagine a
French or
German Whitman or Dickinson, but have no trouble placing them in some
hick town
in Argentina or Brazil. Of course, there are also profound differences
between
us, but at the time I was reading them in 1959, they seemed close and
worth
emulating. INTERVIEWER What did you
study for the B. A. degree you took at New York University in the
midsixties? SIMIC Linguistics—mainly
Russian language and linguistics. I used to say that I wanted to read
Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov in the original—or something like that—but
that was
not really the reason. I thought that studying languages would be
beneficial to
my writing and also that it would be a breeze since I already knew some
Russian. I was completely wrong. I ended up having to memorize verb
endings in
Baltic languages and rules for the formation of nouns in Old Prussian
and
hating it. I stuck with it out of stubbornness and laziness, unwilling
to start
anything else. INTERVIEWER What would
you recommend a poet study? SIMIC There’s no
preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume
of
poetry or a book of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as
any
university. INTERVIEWER When did you
first discover the work of the New York school poets, and were they a
significant influence or inspiration? SIMIC I think I
first came across their poetry in an issue of that small magazine they
edited,
Locus Solus. When would that have been? 1961–1962. SIMIC And I once
went to a reading of Frank O’Hara’s on Second Avenue at a place that I
believe
was called Metro. I also recall reading his “In Memory of My Feelings”
thinking,
This is the greatest poem ever written. We had a kind of nodding
acquaintance
since I frequented the same bars he did. Aside from that, it’s hard to
be more
precise since there were so many little magazines, so many poets whom I
read.
Ashbery’s poetry I did not know well and Koch’s only a bit better. I
certainly
did not see them early on as a distinct group. All that became clear
much
later. INTERVIEWER What about
the poets who were seen as the era’s heavyweights,—Robert Lowell and
John
Berryman? SIMIC I looked
down my nose at them. Years later, I changed my mind, but at that time
I simply
had no use for their poetry, nor did any of my friends. INTERVIEWER Why not?
What didn’t you like in their work? What made you change your mind? SIMIC They were
too literary, too self-conscious, too intent on writing a “great” poem.
Later,
I began to appreciate Berryman’s fine lyric sense, his ear for
language, and
Lowell’s historical vision and verbal skill. INTERVIEWER What about
this era’s heavyweights? What is the state of contemporary poetry? SIMIC Ask me in a
hundred years. INTERVIEWER Your work
has always been admired by poets and critics on both sides of the
“great
divide”—I mean the divide between estab- lishment and avant-garde,
paleface and
redskin, cooked and raw, traditional and experimental. How conscious
were you
back then of “the poetry wars”? SIMIC That’s all
we talked about. There were the Beats, Charles Olson’s projective
verse, and
Robert Bly’s prescriptions for American poetry in his magazine The
Sixties to
argue over. I gravitated toward poets like W. S. Merwin, James Wright,
and Bly,
who had a bit of surrealism in their work, but found poems and ideas
about
poetry that appealed to me elsewhere. What makes a good poem never
seemed to me
a simple issue. If the literary history of the last hundred years
proves
anything, it proves that. I like Frost and Robert Creeley, Gertrude
Stein and
Donald Justice. Today, I guess there are the so-called Language Poets
and the
new generation of formalists to squabble over, but I consider it a
waste of
time. INTERVIEWER Your first
two books, What the Grass Says (1967) and Somewhere Among Us a Stone Is
Taking
Notes (1969), were published by a small press in San Francisco called
Kayak.
How did that come about, and how were they received? SIMIC Kayak was a
poetry magazine in Santa Cruz, California, that published poets who
more or
less wrote like the surrealists. Its editor, George Hitchcock, was a
theater
actor and a poet influenced by Breton and Péret. After publishing many
poems in
the magazine over two or three years, he asked me to do a book. I was,
of
course, delighted. Even though it was cheaply produced, Kayak was
widely read
and respected. What the Grass Says came out in 1967 and was the second
book the
magazine published. The day it arrived, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I
was happy
to have a book and at the same time astonished by how ugly it was. It
embarrassed me to show it to anyone. The joke is that book made me
known. It
was distributed by City Lights, the same publisher that distributed
Ginsberg’s
best-seller Howl, so it got around. I had a number of reviews, most of
them
favorable. Every other poet in the country seemed to have read it, so I
did
another book with Hitchcock, Somewhere Among Us a Stone Is Taking
Notes. It was
a bit better looking, though still
amateurishly
produced, but, as I said, my name became known. INTERVIEWER The new
Faber edition of your Selected Poems doesn’t include your longest poem,
“White,” which has been published in a number of different versions. I
hope
that’s not because you now repudiate it? SIMIC No, no, I
wanted this book to be made up of shorter poems. I like “White” very
much,
though there are still a couple of small things I want to change. INTERVIEWER Is “White”
your only attempt at a long poem? SIMIC There were
other longer poems I wrote when I was very young—for
instance, a long narrative poem I wrote back
in 1957–1958 about the Spanish Inquisition with veiled allusions to the
McCarthy era. It’s one of the poems I threw out. There were other
attempts
early on, best forgotten. I’ve grown to favor conciseness and
pithiness. Less
is more in my book. I’m always paring down—perhaps too much. INTERVIEWER What kind of
part does revision play in the way you write—do you often get a poem in
one go,
so to speak, or do you work on draft after draft? SIMIC Even when
I’m stretched out in my coffin they may find me tinkering with some
poem. Even
published poems I won’t leave alone. I very rarely get it right in one
go.
Mostly I revise endlessly. I don’t keep old drafts, but I imagine in
some cases
they must number into the hundreds. There’s a danger in endlessly
tinkering
like that. I’ve ruined many poems, took all the life out of them by not
letting
them remain a bit awkward, nonsensical, and inept. At times, such
“weaknesses”
give the poem whatever charm it has, but it’s not easy to know until
one tries
to improve it. INTERVIEWER One of the
most distinctive features of your poetry is the way it combines wildly
unpredictable imagery with a narrative style that is terse, clipped, at
times
elliptical. How did that tension evolve? SIMIC William
Carlos Williams made a big impression on me. I think my style was
formed partly
in reaction to my early Crane and Stevens imitations. I wanted
something
seemingly artless and pedestrian to surprise the reader by conveying so
much
more. In other words, I wanted a poem a dog can understand. Still, I
love odd
words, strange images, startling metaphors, and rich diction, so I’m
like a
monk in a whorehouse, gnawing on a chunk of dry bread while watching
the ladies
drink champagne and parade in their lacy undergarments. INTERVIEWER I guess if I
were trying to locate you on a map of postwar American poetry, the
writers in
whose vicinity I’d place you would be Charles Wright and James Tate.
Would that
be right? SIMIC Sure. I’ve
known them forever. I met Charles Wright in 1963 in Nancy, France, when
I was
in the army. We’ve stayed friends ever since. At one time, thirty years
ago, we
were all labeled neosurrealists and attacked for writing
self-indulgent,
meaningless, and supposedly anti-intellectual poems, but that label
really
meant nothing to us. Surrealism was lots of fun while it lasted, but it
was
long dead and gone. Of course, we used lots of images in our poems and
made
unpredictable leaps and juxtapositions, but that was no big deal. To
prove that
it was no big deal I made a little study of American folklore in the
New York
Public Library in 1963–1964. I was interested in magical sayings,
jump-rope
rhymes, superstitions, riddles, and proverbs. I would zero in on some
little
phrase like “extracting sunbeams out of a cucumber,” and write it down
in a
little notebook with the intention of publishing a collection of the native surrealist imagination
and making
all these know-nothings in the literary world shut up and leave us
alone. Well,
it never happened. When the notebook was full, I lost it on the subway.
I could
prove it to no one else, but I proved it to myself. INTERVIEWER I am
somewhat puzzled by the way you and Tate were seen by so many as heirs
to the
so-called Deep Image Poets—Merwin, Bly, Mark Strand, and James Wright.
The most
obvious difference is, your poetry makes much more use of humor than
theirs
does. SIMIC Strand can
be funny, but yes, we don’t belong in that group. The goofiness, the
playfulness in our poems makes us much closer to the New York school.
We don’t
have any lessons to teach; we don’t worship nature or tell the reader
how much
we suffered. As Tate says somewhere, “It’s a tragic story, but that’s
what’s so
funny.” I agree with that. We are a country of millions of fools, who
believe
the most imbecile things about ourselves and the world, but when it
comes to
poetry only solemnity counts and joking is un-American. What I like
about Tate
is his complete trust in imagination, that it can find poetry
everywhere and in
every conceivable human situation, not just on a mountaintop as the sun
is
about to go down some June evening. He is wisely irreverent and far
more daring
as a poet than I am. I can only emulate his example. INTERVIEWER You took up
a job teaching in California in 1970, then moved to the University of
New
Hampshire in 1973, where you’ve remained ever since. Did the business
of
teaching poetry affect your practice at all? SIMIC It enabled
me to read and reread a lot of literature, to formulate ideas in class
and have
smart students challenge me on the spot and force me to rethink
everything. I
imagine the vast amount of reading I’ve done over the years, more than
the
teaching itself, affected my practice as a poet. INTERVIEWER You’ve now
been a New Englander for over thirty years. What writers associated
with the
New England tradition have meant most to you? SIMIC Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Hawthorne, Frost. I didn’t care for Frost until I came to New England, but then I found myself living in the same landscape that he describes in his poetry. When I look out of my window, every tree, every bird has already been talked about by Frost. Then there’s a whole range of philosophical and aesthetic issues he and the other New England writers raise with which I am temperamentally in tune. If one lives where I live, it’s impossible not to have a dialogue with them. Even my dog as we walk in the woods gives me the impression that he is familiar with the writings of Henry David Thoreau and is curious to know how I feel about certain of his ideas. INTERVIEWER And how
about Wallace Stevens? SIMIC Stevens was
a very great poet and a very smart man. He understood what the
Romantics,
Emerson, Whitman, and William Carlos Williams were all about—that every
theory
of poetry in the end is a theory of reality. I like poems that have
interesting
philosophical ideas, and his poems do. What Dickinson, Frost, and
Stevens share
is an ability to construct a brief lyric poem about some ordinary
experience
that eventually ends up asking all kinds of metaphysical questions.
Poems like
Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of
light,” and
Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” I love that stuff. INTERVIEWER I’d like to
ask also about the impact on you of the work of Joseph Cornell; you
wrote a
kind of homage to him, Dime-Store Alchemy, which was published in 1992.
When
did you discover him? SIMIC I imagine in
the late 1950s when I first looked at books on surrealist art. He was
the only
American, so he stood out. Once I understood how he went about
constructing his
boxes, I knew we were soul brothers. He roamed the city looking around
and
finding from time to time some odd, seemingly useless item, which he
saved and
then brought together with other, equally useless items. A Cornell box
is like
a poem, a place where unlikely things come together to give the viewer
a new
aesthetic experience. Beauty for Cornell is something one finds. I
never met
him, but knew people who did, and he’d say things like, On the
Twenty-eighth
Street IRT station, there’s a great gum machine with a broken mirror
that’s
really beautiful. That way of seeing New York City made a lot of sense
to me. INTERVIEWER Your urban
scenes often have a kind of noirish feel to them, in particular pieces
such as
“Hotel Insomnia” or “Hotel Starry Sky.” When did your love affair with
the
movies begin? SIMIC When I was
ten or eleven years old. I had seen many movies before, but not until I
saw my
first noirs did I feel the poetry of a city. Belgrade, where I grew up,
was
very dark, very dangerous in the war years and even after. These
American
movies were a link to my sleepless nights when I peeked out of the
window at
the streets wet with rain. I recall the pain I felt when I discovered
that some
of my closest friends did not like them as much I did. I couldn’t
understand
how that was possible. INTERVIEWER SIMIC The Asphalt
Jungle, The Naked City, The Blue Dahlia, Out of the Past, Laura, et
cetera. INTERVIEWER Another
nonpoetic influence I’d like to touch on is American music—in
particular jazz
and the blues. SIMIC Well, in
Belgrade I heard a lot of jazz on the radio—Glenn Miller and big-band
jazz were
very popular in Yugoslavia. Then when I got to Paris I discovered
Charlie
Parker, Monk, Davis, and Bud Powell. Once in the United States, I heard
live
jazz with my father, but more importantly listened to it on the radio
for hours
every day. I have a fanatic collector side. Once I get interested in a
subject,
I have to know everything. I daresay I’ve heard almost every jazz
record made
between 1920 and 1960. The same goes for the blues. How many people
have heard
of Paul Howard’s Quality Serenaders, Jabbo Smith, or Cripple Clarence
Lofton?
Not many, I imagine. Did some of it influence my poetry? I don’t know
in what
way. In America, if you want to know where the heart is you listen to
the blues
and country music. The most astonishing thing about the blues is the
economy of
the lyrics, which can convey a complex human drama in a few lines. Here’s an
example: I said, good morning, Mr. Pawnshop man As I walked
through his door. I feel bad this morning And I really
want my .44. I was at a party last night. I was there till about past 2. I’m going back there tonight. I might have
some shooting to do. That comes
from a 1929 recording by one Roosevelt Sykes, who plays the piano and
sings.
There are more lyrics, but this gives you an idea. INTERVIEWER I once
interviewed Allen Ginsberg, and asked him why he wrote the way he
did—to which
he replied, “Just because I do!” Is there much more to be said by poets
about
why they write the way they do? SIMIC Probably
not. I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can’t
get it
right. I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love
with me.
One can try to be clever like that, but in the end it comes down to
what
Ginsberg said. INTERVIEWER How would
you characterize the way your style has evolved over the forty years
you’ve
been writing poetry? SIMIC In the early
poems, the idea was to make poems entirely of images, not caring too
much
about sound, using
the simplest possible vocabulary. I
think my poems eventually got to be more careful about language and
music.
There are more autobiographical elements, more narratives. I became a
country
poet as much as a city poet. Naturally, I still have my obsessions, my
bad
habits, my blind spots. Like all poets who have written this long, I
repeat
myself. I wish I didn’t. Then again, like all insomniacs, I tend to
brood and
dwell over the same old things night after night. INTERVIEWER In recent
years politics must have figured largely in the things you brood over
at
night—in particular, events in what used to be Yugoslavia. Did you
anticipate
the various conflicts that erupted in the Balkans in the nineties? SIMIC It was odd.
I both saw it coming and didn’t see it coming. Nationalism was
everywhere on
the rise, and in Serbia, Milošević got elected. I knew that his
policies were
going to lead to a bloodbath, but you know how it is, one always
assumes people
are more reasonable than they really are. In every society there are
those who
can’t kill and those who can. I got the proportions wrong. Who could
have
anticipated Srebrenica? I lost many friends who became rabid haters. It
was an
awful time. Nationalism is collective madness, a form of narcissism
with
millions preening in front of an imaginary mirror, telling themselves
they are
God’s favorites. Their happiness can only come from the unhappiness of
others, so
they need to kill and make miserable a lot of people. At the same time
there’s
something suicidal, something self-defeating about the whole
enterprise. Sooner
or later they always come to a bad end. The story of nationalism in the
Balkans
is that everyone remembers what was done to them for the last thousand
years,
and no one remembers what they did to someone else. I kept reminding
them, and
they kept calling me a traitor. INTERVIEWER When was the
last time you visited Belgrade? SIMIC 1982 was the
last time I was there. I had a Fulbright
Fellowship and I spent a summer there traveling all over the place. It
was very
enjoyable, and yet I felt even more a stranger than I did in 1972. Many
of the
writers and intellectuals still pretended to be convinced Communists or
at
least Marxists, so there were subjects one had to avoid asking about or
criticizing. I could not talk the way I usually do and that got to be
tiresome
after a while. Later on, during the Milošević years, that was not the
case. The
opposition papers I wrote for were amazingly free and often gutsier
than their
counterparts in the West. INTERVIEWER You tend not
to write directly about particular historical crises or catastrophes,
but
surely the war in the Balkans underlies the bleak historical
perspectives of
poems such as “Reading History” or “Empires,” both from the early
nineties? SIMIC I’m sure it
was in the background. “Reading History” was written after going on a
binge and
reading a pile of books on Chinese and Indian history. Every few pages,
of
course, there was some atrocity, some massacre, or some battle in which
thousands died, so that got me thinking. “Empires” is a poem about my
grandmother on my mother’s side, who died in 1948, when I was ten. She
took
care of me from when I was very little while my parents were at work.
She used
to listen to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and other lunatics on the
radio. I
understood nothing, but she knew several languages. She got very upset.
She
could not get over the lies she heard. What’s wrong with the world?
she’d ask
everyone. Good question. I still haven’t figured it out myself. There
have been
so many wars in my lifetime, so much killing. I’m as uncomprehending as
she
was. The ease and arrogance with which so many are sent to their deaths
continues to astonish me. The use of murder to improve the world, for
instance,
is popular in American intellectual circles as if there had never been
any
historical precedents. I think about these things all the time. INTERVIEWER “All I have
is a voice,” Auden wrote in “September 1, 1939,” “To undo the folded
lie.” Of
course he then later disowned this poem . . . But it seems to me your
poems are
often motivated by the desire to “undo folded lies,” or at least to
expose the
various complexities that politicians and pundits attempt to disguise
from us. SIMIC Let’s hope
so. Poetry in my view is a defense of the individual against all the
forces
arrayed against him. Every religion, every ideology and orthodoxy of
thought
and manner wants to reeducate him and make him into something else. To
sing
from the same sheet is the ideal. A true patriot doesn’t think for
himself,
they’ll tell you. I realize that there’s a long tradition in poetry of
not
speaking truth to power and, in fact, of being its groveling apologist.
I just
don’t have it in me. INTERVIEWER On the other
hand, one of the main pleasures of your work, for me anyway, is the way
it
reminds us of all the ordinary pleasures of life, and urges us, or
rather invites us, to enjoy them while we
still
can—things such as fried shrimp, tomatoes, roast lamb, red wine . . . SIMIC Don’t forget
sausages sautéed with potatoes and onions! It’s also highly advisable
to have a
philosopher or two on hand. A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over
a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring
opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one
inside the
other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that
are so
necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached
and
purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view.
Every
grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the
kitchen—and
then in bed, of course.
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