How to write a Charles Simic poem: Go to a café. Wait for something weird to happen. Record mouse activity. Repeat as necessary. (For “mouse,” feel free to substitute “cat,” “roach,” “rat,” “chicken,” “donkey,” etc.) Born in Belgrade, Simic emigrated to the United States in 1954. He inherited the uncanny sensibility of Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Vasko Popa and other pale Quixotes whose chivalric romances were flyspecked bulbs illuminating empty cupboards. From the ’60s through, say, the late ’80s, Simic could summon a creepy malaise, made somehow creepier by his matter-of-fact tone, straightforward syntax and plain language. Consider these lines from “Help Wanted,” one of nearly 400 poems collected in his latest book, “New and Selected Poems — 1962-2012”:
They ask for a knife
I come running
They need a lamb
I introduce myself as the lamb
A thousand sincere apologies
It seems they require some rat poison
They require a shepherd
For their flock of black widows
Luckily I’ve brought my bloody
Letters of recommendation
I’ve brought my death certificate
Signed and notarized
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This has something of the dream-logic of fable, with its detached pronouns, its bureaucratic menace.
Simic is always referred to by critics as a surrealist, but it takes more than unreal goings-on and flocks of black widows to brew up surrealism. He removes the safety nets from the everyday, taking Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie) literally:
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,
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It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
That poem is called “Fork” (it’s followed by “Spoon,” “Knife,” “My Shoes” and “Stone”). It’s a great poem to teach. Forget about self-expression, kid: Learn to see the monster on the dinner table.
In his early poems, Simic is a carny barker, fast-talking up the grotesques with a snake-oilman’s pinstriped charm. He zips around telling jokes in a faux-biblical register, as in the exquisitely titled “Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites”:
Great are the Hittites.
Their ears have mice and mice have holes.
Their dogs bury themselves and leave the bones
To guard the house. A single weed holds all their storms
Until the spiderwebs spread over the heavens.
………………………………………………
They are also called you only live once,
They are called a small leak
Will sink a great ship, they are called
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, they are called
You can’t take it to the grave with you.
This has the quick spark of the best Monty Python sketches, but “Their ears have mice and mice have holes,” with its associational slippage, is great poetry.
“Selected Early Poems” (first published in 1985 with an updated edition appearing in 2000), from which the first 90 pages of “New and Selected Poems” are drawn, is full of such little astonishments. The poems strut with confidence and verve. “Unending Blues” (1986), the prose poems of “The World Doesn’t End” (1989) and some of the pieces in “The Book of Gods and Devils” (1990) are similarly charged.
But then Simic just stopped. I don’t mean he stopped writing — he stopped taking pains with his poems. “Many other strange things came to pass,” he writes in 1990’s “Factory.” I sat in the coffee shop. Many other strange things came to pass. Something about flies and ashtrays. You write the poem.
It’s not that he’s forgotten how to make poems — he retains a mechanical efficiency, with tidy stanzas leading to some tweaked lyrical summation. But the fire’s gone out of them. They’re comfortable, unassuming, the sort of thing an investment banker might discover in The New Yorker and send to his son at MIT. A typical poem ends:
In Los Angeles, one Sunday morning,
The photographer took a picture
Of a closed barbershop
And a black cat crossing an empty avenue,
A blind man outside a bus station
Playing the guitar and singing,
A little boy walking up the camera
Smiling and sticking his tongue out.
If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear. Most of the later poems are like this, banal snapshots bewildering in their literality. Here’s the last stanza of “The Melon”:
I remember a hornet, too, that flew in
Through the open window
Mad to taste the sweet fruit
While we ducked and screamed,
Covered our heads and faces,
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And sat laughing after it was gone.
If he wrote “Fork” today, it would end, “Its shiny tines reflect the light.”
There is, of course, a tradition of fine poetry that distrusts metaphor. But such poetry distinguishes itself by the artfulness of its selection and articulation. Simic no longer bothers to tweak a cliché until it seems sinister: “that Vietnam vet on crutches / … tries to bum a dime or a cigarette.” If I were commenting on a student’s draft, I’d jot, “A dime or a cigarette is what you expect to follow ‘bum’; what if he tried to bum something more startling?” But Charles Simic is a former poet laureate and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.
There are moments in late Simic when the old headless chicken rears its bloody hackle: “When you play chess alone it’s always your move.” But as long as “Selected Early Poems” — my favorite of which, “Psalm” (“I’m Joseph of the Joseph of the Joseph who rode on a donkey”), is not included in the new collection — and “The World Doesn’t End” are in print, this edition is superfluous. In the late ’90s an interviewer asked Simic where he finds inspiration. “Piece of cake,” he responded. Alas.
Michael Robbins is the author of “Alien vs. Predator.”
New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012
By Charles Simic, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 355 pages, $30