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Charles Simic developed the reputation, along with Russell Edson, of being one of the foremost surrealist poets of his era. Surrealism in any medium always has to struggle to overcome a certain staginess, a sense that the artist has assembled apparently dissonant objects or images just to show that he can do it. But Simic created an organic surrealism in which the real melded almost seamlessly with the strange, just as he evolved a persona in which the America of blues, jazz, highways and cities blended with the Eastern Europe of dark folk tales. Perhaps the only other writers who combine these strains are Vladimir Nabokov and Andrei Codrescu. But Nabokov, who first came to America at the age of 40, writes about America from the point of view of a European cosmopolite. Codrescu was only a few years older than Simic (20 to Simic’s 16) when he emigrated, but that seems to have been enough to make a difference. Codrescu, who has become a radio personality, retains his Romanian accent, and views America as a bemused and deeply fascinated outsider. Only Simic brings such a complete blend of American and old world sensibility to his work. Even his speaking voice seems to naturally combine flat American vowels with a Balkan lilt. Charles Simic was born 9 May 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. His earliest memories are or World War II, and the destruction that rained around him. He remembers being hurled from his bed by an exploding German bomb at age 3. He has said that “my travel agents were Hitler and Stalin”: his father, an engineer, emigrated to Italy in search of work right after the war, and later to America. The rest of the family was unable to leave Yugoslavia then, but America, specifically American music, became a part of his life early. He describes first hearing jazz, and falling in love with it, over Armed Forces radio in 1944-5, and then having jazz outlawed under Communist rule. Simic, along with his mother and brother, finally left Yugoslavia for Paris in 1953. They remained in Paris, where he studied English, for a year, and then the family was finally reunited in Chicago. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961, then upon his discharge attended New York University, where he received his BA in 1966. Since 1973, he has taught at the University of New Hampshire in Hanover, NH. He received the PEN International Award for Translation (1970, 80). He has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation (1971-72), the National Endowment for the Arts (1974-75), the Fulbright Foundation (1982), the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1983-84) and McArthur Foundation (1984-89). He received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets (1975), awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1976). He was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. Simic has published extensively—by 2004 he was credited with more than 60 books, including Charon’s Cosmology (nominated for the National Book Award, 1977). Classic Ballroom Dances (Harriet Monroe Award from the University of Chicago and di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, 1980), The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 1990), Walking the Black Cat (National Book Award finalist, 1996), and Jackstraws (New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 1999). Other books include his first poetry collection, What the Grass Says (1967), Dismantling the Silence(1971), Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (1974), Austerities (1982), Unending Blues (1986), The Book of Gods and Devils (1990), Hotel Insomnia (1992), A Wedding in Hell (1994), Night Picnic (2001). The Voice at 3 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (2003). He has also published translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry, and several books of essays and autobiography, including Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (1990), Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992), A Fly in the Soup (2000), Unemployed Fortune Teller (1994), and Orphan Factory (1998). He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992. Simic began writing poetry in high school, for a not unusual reason. There was another kid in his school who wrote sappy poems as a way to impress girls, and Simic decided he would try it too. Two interesting things about this story: first, that Simic, even as a recent immigrant, was drawn to American-style sappy poetry rather than exotic European sophistication as a mechanism to get girls. Second, many poets or musicians with similar stories follow it up with a variant of “soon, I became more interest in the poetry (or the guitar) than the girl,” but Simic, looking back, still remembers the girls with as much pleasure as the poems (“I still tremble at the memory of a certain Linda listening breathlessly to my doggerel on her front steps”), and characteristically, also remembers his early indoctrination in poetry with as much passion as his sexual awakening (“The way Don Juan adored different kind of women I adored different kind of poets. I went to bed, so to speak, with ancient Chinese, old Romans, French Symbolists, and American Modernists individually and in groups. I was so promiscuous. I'd be lying if I pretended that I had just one great love.)” Unlike Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad, who stated that he could never have become a writer had he not learned English, Simic has stated that he really does not know the effect of the English language on his creative output, or whether his work would have been substantially different if he had written in Serbian. This is not meant as a dismissal of the pull and power of languages, but as an acknowledgement of how deeply rooted both cultures are within him. He is much more emphatic about the influence of American music, which has been part of his experience since his first night in this country, when his father, also a music lover, took him out on a tour of late-night jazz clubs. Simic found in jazz an expression of artistic daring built on a foundation of craft: “It wasn't just that they were being reckless. Instead it was only a kind of seeming recklessness. Underneath there was a structure. But still, I think what appealed to me before I even learned about the structure was the sheer recklessness of it, the freedom, the wildness…I have been listening to [jazz] for more than forty years. And when you pay attention to something for a long period of time…you begin to…realize what mastery means in an art form.” From blues, Simic says that he came to understand “how much you can say with a minimum of moves. It doesn't take much…and an incredible context is established. That economy is something I always try to emulate.” At the same time, he acknowledges his deep debt to Eastern European folk tales, and he finds a connection between his two cultural godmothers: the minor key. He recalls his father as dividing the world into those who could hear the minor key and those who could not, and puts the Nazis, and other totalitarian consciousnesses, into the latter camp. Unlike other poets deeply influenced by jazz, such as Billy Collins, William Matthews, or Yusuf Komunyakaa, Simic rarely uses music as subject matter. His poems are more often about things, or about people set in relation to things and places. In his early work, he frequently fastened on objects, seen close up and in a focus so sharp as to be distorted, or surreal. There is an Eastern European ancestor here—the Rainer Maria Rilke of the “seeing poems,” inspired by Rodin’s advice that Rilke go to the zoo and look at an animal until he truly saw it. Simic looks at a fork, for example, until he sees it as a “strange thing [which] must have crept/Right out of hell./It resembles a bird’s foot/Worn around the cannibal’s neck.” Or he may focus even closer, on part of an object, like the fingers of his hand, from the “Thumb, loose tooth of a horse,” through the middle finger, “An old man at birth. It’s about something/That he had and lost…” through the smallest finger, “perpetually at the point/Of birth” (both from Somewhere Among Us a Stone Is Taking Notes). Simic’s near-microscopic precision of language, and his minor-key blending of two cultures, can be seen in a poem like “Mother Tongue” (from Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk), in which he conflates the tongue as physical object “Sold by a butcher” with the symbol for language, traveling in the bag of a stooped widow to a new place, a new environment, “a dark house/Where a cat will/Leap off the stove/Purring/At its entrance.” The stooped widow, the dark house, the cat on the stove are all Eastern European in reference, but they move, especially with the dark house and the cat, toward specifics that can as easily be jazz-centered America. He generally avoids specific details of place—he will put a poem on a street, or in a kitchen, but not in Chicago or Kukujevci—and this adds to the ever-present duality of his experience. Look at the details in “Brooms,” from the same collection. The poem begins “Only brooms/Know the devil/Still exists,” an almost perfect blend of the superstition-shrouded Eastern European cottage and the imagery of Robert Johnson. When Simic turns political, which he often does, his politics are humanist, and not locked into the current events of a specific country or series of incidents. A poem like "We All Have Our Hunches" (from Night Picnic) gives us “a rolled newspaper/With the smiling President's picture/Already speckled by the blood/Of warm-weather flies and mosquitoes.” The President could be from any country; the blood is home-grown, collected by flies and mosquitoes from the newspaper reader in her own kitchen. Although Simic has acknowledged the European roots of his surrealist vision, he makes a point of also rooting it in his American experience, “a country like ours where supposedly millions of Americans took joyrides in UFOs. Our cities are full of homeless and mad people going around talking to themselves. Not many people seem to notice them. I watch them and eavesdrop on them.” In ''Early Evening Algebra” (from The Voice at 3 A.M.), his eavesdropping gaze fixes on a madwoman who “went marking X's/With a piece of school chalk/On the backs of unsuspecting/Hand-holding, homebound couples.” The madwoman may be an angel of Death, but she could just as easily be real, part of the world that Simic notices and incorporates. The “certain Linda” of Simic’s adolescence is not forgotten in his mature poetry, where the erotic is celebrated in a variety of ways. “Body and Soul” (from Weather Forecast for Utopia and Vicinity: Poems 1967-82) plays with the double entendre of the blues: “He fiddled with her radiator,/Diddled with her radio./He even creamed her wheat/And threaded a needle.” The women are often glimpsed in vivid but uncertain memory, wearing a red bikini and waving from a train window. Like all else, Eros has its dark side in Simic’s work. A beautiful woman in a white dress is surrounded by masked men wearing black capes and carrying knives; a couple is seen , in wild sexual embrace on a television screen which has recently been showing war and the denial of accountability, Simic, who has written that the “scandal” of American poetic culture is its neglect of the poetry of other countries, has translated a number of poets from different languages, including the Yugloslav poets Ivan V. Lalic, Vasko Popa, Slavko Janevski, and Novica Tadic. He has also edited collections of poetry in translation, including Another Republic, an anthology of European and South American Poetry (1976, with Mark Strand), and The Horse Has Six Legs, An anthology of Serbian Poetry (1992). |