Poet Charles Simic attempts to offer meaning.
By:Hank Kalet
Charles Simic believes that words tell only part of any story.
The 67-year-old poet says that words can only approximate the world, are only an "attempt" at offering meaning.
In his poetry, Mr. Simic offers snippets of reality arranged against a comic backdrop of desire and darkness. His subject, as the critic Elizabeth Knapp wrote in Pif magazine, is "humanity as seen through the pinhole camera of verse, the house of mirrors that distorts rather than reflects our common human experience."
Mr. Simic, who won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his book of prose poems, World Without End, will bring his unique sensibility to the Lawrenceville School Feb. 14.
"What one does as a writer, as you know, is so private, so isolated," he says. "This is a way of being before real human beings. And you get to see what happens when you open your mouth and read what you’ve written."
His book, The Voice at 3 a.m.: Selected Late and New Poems (Harvest Books, $14), will be released in paperback April 3.
Mr. Simic, who was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and emigrated to Chicago in 1953, spoke with TIMEOFF via telephone from his home in New Hampshire.
TIMEOFF: There is a quote from a 1993 interview that I find interesting: "I always feel that language does not quite equal the intensity of experience that words are approximations." I thought that you could elaborate on that as a way of getting started.
Charles Simic: Deep, complex experiences leave us at a loss of words. People will say, "I don’t know what to say," and I think that is sort of the nature of certain kinds of experiences. This is what happens in poems, and not just poems but in other kinds of writing though with poetry it is especially acute. Because poems are short you have to say everything in a dozen lines, maybe 20 lines of poetry. The feeling is that "I have not been able to say quite what it was." For example, when lovers quarrel, they will spend hours and hours saying to each other, "That’s not what I meant." So, it’s like that with poems.
TO: In terms of the poem, then, how do you accommodate something like that, how do you account for that disjunction?
CS: It’s an attempt. What happens with the poem is that you may begin with one particular experience but then in writing the poem something else emerges, which is totally different from your experience. So, it’s not that you have you don’t have a rule. In the end, what works stays and the original model you leave behind.
TO: English is not your first language, you write in it, you’ve done it for 52 years I think at some point you said it gives you a "valuable self-consciousness"?
CS: I think it did more at one time than now. For the first, say, 10 years, I was very much aware that there were two words for the particular thing I wanted to describe. And my first tongue, Serbo-Croatian, was in the back of my mind. But that has ceased to be the case for a long, long time. I can’t tell you exactly when but it’s been too long.
TO: Does that first language have any impact on the rhythm or the syntax or the diction of the writing that you do?
CS: I don’t think so, not anymore. Poetry is a kind of shorthand. You really have to immerse yourself in the poetry of a certain language. I mean I read so much poetry in English, so it was in my mind, especially when you are young you imitate a lot, you are constantly influenced and you try to copy.
TO: You tend to write shorter things, you’ve said you prefer shorter forms, shorter poems what about shorter poems and shorter poetic forms interests you and works for you?
CS: I think the fascination that so much can be said in so little, brevity once you write a short poem that works you think, "Well, I have to do it again," but it’s not easy to do to write shorter things. It is much easier to write longer things because little things, if they work, they pack a lot of meaning. You can’t say to yourself, "I’m going to write a five-line poem or a 10-line poem and here is long one." That’s impossible.
TO: So you don’t think about this when you sit down. You don’t say "I’m going to write in this form." That actually imposes itself later?
CS: I think one has a vague idea when one gets going that it’s going to be of a certain length. It also depends on if there are any complicated narrative elements or whether there are any out-of-the-ordinary elements. But I think all that for me, though I shouldn’t generalize from my case, all that for me merges in the process of writing, revising, you know, tinkering endlessly with it and the larger implications of it which way I want to go, if the lines are going to be longer or shorter, the stanza breaks. It’s something that comes out in the process of writing. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you do it more or less in one sitting, maybe not the whole finished version, but you just get it right. Most times, though, it is a sort of groping and then there it is.
TO: How often do you write? Is it something you do everyday?
CS: Everyday, I sort of do a little of it and I have endless notebooks and poems that I’m working on. I’ll open one and I’ll see if I can tinker with it. I’m always tinkering. It’s not some sort of a discipline where I say… "This is my time everyday and I have to go and work." If I remember I’ll go to my desk and I’ll just pull out a file of things that I’m tinkering with and I’ll see. If I get really interested in it then I’ll stay with it a while. If not, I won’t. I’ll do something else.
TO: So you might be in the supermarket and something may strike you?
CS: It can strike me anywhere, even driving. One time (while) I was driving to Boston I really had a terrific idea. So, I pulled off the road and I started writing in my little notebook and the next thing I knew, someone knocked on the window and there was a police officer. He said to me, "Can I help you sir?" I just wanted to make a joke, you know. "What’s the rhyme for…." But, no, I just said "No, I’m fine," and I drove off. I couldn’t say I’m writing a poem. God forbid.
Charles Simic will read in the McGraw Reading Room of Bunn Library at the Lawrenceville School, 2500 Main St., Lawrence, Feb. 14, 7 p.m. A question-and-answer session will follow. Free admission. For information, call (609) 896-0400.