Conversation With a Literary Giant
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The Sun Interviews Charles Simic, Former U.S. Poet Laureate
October 6, 2008 - 11:00pmWhat with the ghosts of Nabokov, Vonnegut and Pynchon haunting its corridors, Goldwin Smith Hall must have felt quite comfortable to former Poet Laureate Charles Simic, who stopped by Ithaca on Thursday, October 2nd as part of the Creative Writing Program’s Writers at Cornell reading series. The poet, a native of Belgrade who moved to the United States at the age of 15, has won numerous accolades for his terse and often dark poetry, including the Wallace Stevens Award, a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pultizer Prize. Decked out in a brown leather jacket and his trademark tinted glasses, the 70-year-old poet sat down with The Sun a few hours before the reading in the office of English professor J. Robert Lennon:
The Sun: So I guess we’ve only got about ten minutes … You’ve commented in the past on the special role of the American experience in the development of the lyric poem. I was wondering if you could comment a little on what makes the United States so suitable for the lyric and if you see this kind of exceptionalism continuing.
Waxing Poetic: Former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic spoke before a packed H.E.C. Auditorium in Goldwyn Smith last Thursday.
Charles Simic: Well I mean, I think the sort of personal lyric, you know the I — the individual, solitary I — is sort of an ideal type of poem for a huge country of vast spaces and mostly sparsely populated country of loners, of people who know about solitude and who live lives that are … you know, they lack a kind of a community where they can change certain emotions, certain ideas, where the people who they feel close to usually live hundreds and hundreds of miles if not thousands of miles away, who are condemned to that strange American solitude. It’s not a poetry … it’s not a situation that corresponds to perhaps any other place except Russia. Russia in a way is sort of like that. But it’s not the poetry of France, or Italy or England. I mean, lyric poetry’s always poetry of people who are loners, but not to that degree as in this country. Personal lyric is what everybody writes.
Sun: So you see it more as a function of kind of geographic distance rather than institutions or a democratic spirit?
C.S.: Yeah, I think it’s more sort of the predicaments of the people. I mean you would not write that kind of poem if you were sort of living in proximity with, you know, urban situation where, you know, you had friends and family and relatives and you felt a community. I think it’s that sort of lack of community. If you look at these poems, I mean they always speak to nature, they speak about, you know to God, they speak to, you know, the moment in which the solitary I exists. Something like that.
Sun: Ok, so sticking with this issue of nationality and the way poets write: you’re a poet who writes in a second language and you’ve translated lots of other work, and I know you’ve mentioned that the Latin American poets had a big influence on your early writing. I was wondering what your thoughts were on how a poet or any writer’s social and linguistic background kind of determine the form or the voice of their poetry.
C.S.: Um … I don’t know. I mean, I cannot imagine, you know, not having the kind of life that I had. In other words, if I didn’t have this Serbo-Croatian in my background, having spoken another language, what that would be like, I can’t compare to any other state. I’m sure that there was some sort of influence that I at one time, now I don’t think much anymore…but my experience of speaking another language, clearly my experience of growing up during the Second World War in Eastern Europe … But how all these things precisely contributed and made me what I am and what one can generalize from that I find very difficult to answer.
Sun: Ok. More on the level of specific images in your own poetry, there’s lots of things that recur that I’ve noticed. There’s dogs, I see lots of wind-rustled trees, barber shops, bloody sunsets, things like that. After so many years of writing and obviously reconsidering the same material, when you sit down to start a poem now do you find yourself constricted at all by the images that you’ve chosen to write about in the past?
C.S.: No, I mean if I have to use an image again — bloody sunset, that’s a proverb I’ve used too many times…I mean dogs, there’ve been more dogs in my poems for the simple reason that I always had dogs. I live in a village full of dogs. I know every pooch around because they kind of roam free, and so it’s inevitable they would appear in poems. I don’t feel constricted. I mean it’s always if you can write a poem, so you feel constricted because you have to start from scratch every time. It isn’t that it’s made easier, poetry’s made easier by having written before. And certainly you don’t want to repeat yourself, but at the same time I know from reading other poets, I mean poets from the past, that every one repeats themselves because we’re limited, we have certain things that interest us, certain things that obsess us, certain images, certain ideas, so you know if it creeps in I’m not worried.
Sun: So you don’t feel the weight of your past work when you’re trying to create new things?
C.S.: No.
Sun: Ok. Another little phrase I’ve noticed you repeat is a “greasy thumbprint.” In your poem “Cockroach” you talk about a little bug that has false papers bearing your greasy thumbprint, and in an interview with Michael Hulse you talked about leaving your greasy thumbprint on a seal for new poets at an imaginary academy. I was wondering: what would you want your greasy thumbprint to be on American poetry or American letters?
C.S. [Laughs.] Uh … well probably my greasy thumbprint from my poems, in my poems … It’s interesting, I think the reason it came, I had that recurring image, being you know sort of fingerprinted when we left Yugoslavia, we were sort of displaced persons and we didn’t have any kind of proper documents, but just typical immigrants worrying about documents, and you get fingerprinted from time to time. I don’t know if you’ve ever been fingerprinted. It’s a kind of strange, humiliating experience.
J. Robert Lennon: You’re a child again, you know, someone’s manipulating your hand for you.
C.S.: They always say like, “Relax, relax,” and, you know, for immigration for this and that, you know, everything, I was fingerprinted several times. And then there’s the other kind of experience, where when I was a kid I would, my hands would get greasy, I was eating something greasy and you know you put it against the wall and, “Oh, oops…oh my god, if my mother sees this.” But my print…I don’t think I articulate it to myself, I just … you hope that your way of looking at things, your irreverence, your something, some point introduces a new note, my own print. But what that is precisely — I wouldn’t know how to name that.
Sun: Ok. I know you’ve also mentioned how there’s a great plurality of poetic styles in America today and especially in the world — there’s no one sense of what an American poet should write. And from some of your poetry I also get a feeling of discontinuity between this century and the past, especially in a poem like “Medieval Miniature”, where old depictions of hell are like nothing when you look at a dog walking through a bombed city. I wonder if you could comment a little bit on this relationship between what’s so new about this century and how that relates to the plethora of new styles.
C.S.: Well I mean the ability to destroy is much greater than in the past. It was hard work, you know, chopping off, you know, heads. I mean those guys, you read in the history books, Chinese, ancient Chinese or Indian history, you know king so-and-so, emperor so-and-so single-handedly chopped off a hundred heads off of his hundred top generals. And that arm must have really ached after. It was slow, how fast can you do it? But he had help, you know, he probably said, “Hey you guys, give me a hand.”
Sun: Now it’s more mechanical.
C.S.: Yeah, I mean the kind of destructive power we have and the killing, the slaughter. The other thing about this century, or the last century, and more and more recent wars: more civilians died than ever before in the past wars. In the past wars in the nineteenth century, armies would line up one against the other, they would charge, and you know slaughter, carnage, but then they would retreat and sit down in some village and recover. Nowadays with mass bombing and the kind of weapons we use, innocent bystanders, what they call “collateral damage”, people die, innocents, complete innocents.
Sun: So how do you think … I mean this must have an effect on the human psyche I imagine, so what do you think this does to art?
C.S.: Well, I think what is has on human psyche, maybe has an effect it has on those who notice it, but what is also very strange is how we got used to it, we don’t really kind have the moral imagination and indignation to complain. And during the Vietnam War people went out on the streets and screamed. All those bombs falling: we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped in the entire Second World War, so people there said, “Hey wait a minute, that’s killing a lot of people.” Which it did, depending who is counting, but it’s either two, three million. Now, I mean there are figures of in Iraq and in Afghanistan and so forth but no one seems to be terribly excited about it or outraged, and that really is strange, it’s very upsetting.
Sun: Ok, I think we have time for probably one last question. You’ve mentioned several times your trouble with insomnia and I know you’ve called yourself “the metaphysician at 3 a.m.”, and you have a poem, “The Voice at 3 a.m.” And I know you say you don’t like to work when you wake up during the night, but what has this sleeplessness done to affect your life and your work?
C.S.: Well I mean, it has made me what I am. I think my character, my identity was formed between three and four o’clock in the morning. But everyone’s a philosopher at three o’clock in the morning, and four o’clock in the morning is much harder because you realize this has gone on too long, you know, “I better get a shut-eye, fifteen minute sleep otherwise I’ll gonna be pretty in trouble the next day.” But I’ve grown to like insomnia.
Sun: Really?
C.S.: Oh yeah. Because these are times when I do my thinking, or when I remember. And when the thinking is done, the remembering is done, you know, lie there in the dark in that astonishment that I exist. And for reasons that are totally mysterious to me I can’t fall asleep. I mean it isn’t that I … it hasn’t been like anxiety and I can’t fall asleep. I’m very often sleepless after a long, lazy day, when there’s no reason whatsoever to be awake, there’s nothing the next day, and there’s no source of anxiety and yet I lie there. And as my father used to say, and he was an insomniac, too, not as bad as I was, or am, he says, “Well, we’ll all sleep plenty when we’re dead, so appreciate these moments.” And now that I’m over seventy, you know I think he was right.
Sun: You’re one of the few appreciative insomniacs I’ve ever met. Ok, well I think that’s time, so thank you very much.
C.S.: Thanks.