Introduction
The essential experience: the body sensing itself existing; the mind going its own way.
[1]In an interview with Crazy Horse in 1972 the interviewer opened with a request. He asked the poet Charles Simic to offer a sketch of his life, to which his subject responded with an emphatic "No, I hate biographies. What matters ought to be in the poems. The rest is boredom..."
[2] This response is an apt introduction to the work of Charles Simic. The poetry produced from his experience of life and living in the world speaks for itself. The history of his life would, of course, make interesting reading, but in the study of poetry another space is opened up which is created with the poet, the poem and the reader. Reading poetry should be an experience within the context of the work. Any biographical information would become a burden upon the possibilities, and the freedom to produce such possibilities, which poetry has the power to create. Focusing upon the life and influences of a poet can produce a reading of the poem which is limited and a search for biographical information. To read in such a way closes off our place in the poem; and we as readers share an important place in Simic's poetry. He invites us in to share his way of seeing which will become evident as we progress through his work. If in the end we feel we know Charles Simic a little better it will be in the way he would prefer, through the words and language he has produced in his poetry.
Keeping the above in mind, Charles Simic is nevertheless a poet with an interesting and complex background. Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, his childhood was spent playing in the turmoil caused by the Second World War. He was to experience the effects this had upon his country, his neighborhood, his family and ultimately himself. He moved to America with his family as a young man and the experiences of being new in a new country and of being immersed in new cultural circumstances, offered the opportunity to see things with fresh eyes. To have the senses bombarded with new sights, sounds and smells combined with memories of the past are factors which help to produce poetic utterance; this has been particularly fruitful for Simic's poetic capabilities. He is a poet open to the play of words and language, inviting the inner self and the unconscious to speak from within and communicate outwards.
Poetry is capable of intimating all that lies hidden in the soul, sending the reader a gift of the possibility of shared experiences in a world where we are reminded of our ultimate solitude. This communication which is truly a communion of spirits can offer comfort and solace, pleasure and laughter and can offer peace to a soul in turmoil. The world of language contains the possibility of saying something new about the most ordinary of experiences; crafted from gifted hands, poetry has the power to awaken us from our accustomed view of things.
Charles Simic's poetic gift gives us the world and our experience of it from a new perspective. In his hands the most ordinary of objects we might encounter in our daily living are transformed into articles of wonder and we as readers are transformed by the experience. The world and our connection with it is given a new perspective. The world around us in its infinite variety and the people we encounter within it are the subjects which inhabit Simic's poetry. He takes the vast and the minute elements of our experience and encourages a more visionary way of looking at things. For Simic, everything is poetry waiting to become.
Life in large cities; living in the world; the star filled cosmos; the smallest, most bare of rooms; the practical tools we require for everyday living, all of these are subject matter producing poetry of enormous depths. We will encounter the world in a new light. We will experience riddles, laughter, mystery and solitude. A vision of our existence is opened up to reveal what comes from moments of seeing, taking time to watch as the world and our experience of it occurs. This is joined with a new way of using words, and their familiarity to us as a means of producing the hidden forces of language.
It has often been deemed fruitful and a worthwhile task to associate poets, and locate them within, certain poetic movements or categories. This ‘typing’ which is like poetic mapping which places poets within a set of boundaries for the purposes of producing an aid to reading can work against an authentic reading. It sets up expectations and limitations based upon prior knowledge of poetic style and a poet’s geographical place and place in time. As readers this places stress upon us to read outside the poetry itself. We ask questions which inevitably lead to answers of assimilation. There may appear to be a certain sense of safety in such an endeavor; closed within ideas of accepted practice perhaps we might feel that we are reading ‘properly’, giving the best fit to the words we read, placing the particular within the general. This operation, which is a closure, is a movement against the particularity of every poem as a single entity, every word as inhabiting in its own place within the whole and most importantly of all it encloses the reader within a set of propositions which will prove difficult to transgress. Indeed this enclosure presupposes reading poetry before reading poetry, as if it were impossible to know before one knows. In the case of poetry, which is an exemplary case of knowledge known before it is known, we are presented with the possibility of unraveling, uncovering and exposing the place which is beyond and yet within ourselves as readers. In poetry we have a gift capable of producing revelatory experience of that which is before revelation. This discovery is only possible through the faithful act of reception which is not predetermined. The act of reading, and reading poetry in particular, is a unique moment which is never repeated and cannot be shared. In the isolated and entirely singular act of meeting the work the reader answers with a response which should not be brought down to the level of intellectual category. We all have the capability and the power to make of the experience what we are called to make of it, what we must make of it.
Our human experience and our human existence within the cosmos, the universe, the world, society and culture is essentially what we have. Poets seek to express this mystery, are called to express this mystery. In the case of Charles Simic we have a poet who refuses categorization. There are inevitably poetic influences ( a subject we shall discuss in more depth later), every writer is also a reader, there exists a grateful nod to those others who have been called to the art of poetry, but in the process (if we can call it a process) of reading there must be a forgetting, a letting go which actively seeks to begin again. Simic tells us when questioned about the poetic movements he seems to have affinity with, ‘ Again, I don’t see myself as anything. There are obsessions, appetites, that’s all.’
[3] The subtlety of the poetry is striking. Grand themes are explored with a profound accessibility. It is grand poetry with the deception of simplicity in language. In layers, it takes you in, carries you with it until you find yourself, in the midst of a mystery which is the beginning and the end, which is the beginning. Considerations of being, existing, struggling as an individual in the world, as an individual in relation to humanity, a stranger in vastly populated cities, being at home and alone in the vast incomprehension of nature, with nature and the universe.
Our journey will begin with the early poems, but it is not intented to be a chronological excursion through Simic’s poetic works, but rather a teasing out of the striking themes and explorations his poetry participates in. There is much from this prolific poet’s
oeuvre which will inevitably be overlooked, it is hoped that from here, readers will make their own exploration of the poetry. The meaning of the word ‘
oeuvre’ has been suitably interpreted for our purposes by George Steiner:
It means more than the actual count of a writer’s work. It implies a logic of unfolding, of gradually revealed design. In an oeuvre, different genres - fiction, poetry, critical essays - take on a personal unity. The achievement argues as a whole, its sum greater and more coherent than any of its parts.
[4]We will read the ‘object’ poems and encounter Simic’s capability of taking both a step beyond and a step within the familiar. From here we shall take a close look at ‘White’ which was to become a fitting conclusion to the ‘object’ poems. In reading some of Simic’s more recent work it will become clear that it is simultaneously further removed and yet closer to the poetry which comes before. The fitting conclusion to the ‘object’ poems; another beginning, where each aspect is fittingly circular, escaping closure and yet embracing the origins. We will experience the large movement within the small and the small movement within the large; the individual poems are part of a sequence whilst remaining whole within themselves.
At the end we will also be at the beginning. Reading poetry, and this reading of Simic’s poetry, marks a moment of discovery which was always already known. There is an epiphany of pre-knowledge, the unknown remaining unknown, and embraced as such. That is the force which drives poetry forward and continues to embrace the humanity, and the mystery of what this might be, within us. Just as with the possibility of the world existing before we perceive it, we need a vantage point, a way and place of seeing which will open our vision. There is a place that makes this possible, a place we must go to; we are already there.
Mediating Poetics: Criticism and Philosophy
This reading reveals an inter-connective play of forces in word and thing and in word and Being. These forces establish a space in which the world of our experience, together with our experience of language, is revealed in a unique dimension of the imaginative and the real. Simic's poetry is informed by two realms: hermeneutics and poetics.
The hermeneutic realm may be defined as one in which our understanding of existence and of our humanity is bound up in terms of our perception and apprehension of the world in which we find ourselves. Language seeks to communicate this experience. The nature of poetry is its desire to seek clarity from within the indefinite universe of language in an endeavor to convey encounters with experience which are the essence of human existence. On one level, hermeneutics can be equated with poetics since the centrality of the human subject is pertinent to both. On a deeper level, a deviation exists since poetics is concerned with language as substance. This is an abstract notion in which literary phenomena are the objects of concern; this is the ground from where interpretation stems but is not equitable with interpretation. Tzvetan Todorov writes of this tenuous relation, 'Interpretation both precedes and follows poetics: the notions of poetics are produced according to the necessities of concrete analysis, which in its turn may advance only by using the instruments elaborated by doctrine. Neither of the two takes precedence over the other: both are "secondary"'.
[5] Specific features that are present in the literary work are effective in the perception of the literary text and affect the production of meaning; in other words, poetics is more specifically a concern for how language can be meaningful. Simic's poetry insists upon a reading which apprehends its creativity as a movement through language that can open up an experience of self-understanding together with the wonder of human existence and of poetic utterance. David Halliburton takes this one step further, 'For an audience, then, being poetic would mean deciding not merely to appreciate a work, in the sense of savoring its formal features, but deciding to let a work transform our way of living.'
[6] In this sense, the poetic has a cultural and social implication. These inseparable though discernible qualities are revealed as a unity which is a disunity as we shall see in reading the poem 'White'. To illuminate the locus of Simic's poetics which lingers on the threshold between being in the world and being in language, the critical theories of Maurice Blanchot, Harold Bloom, Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Derrida, among others, will be called upon from time to time.
The art of poetry is one of creative ambiguity, fraught with conflicting moments that encapsulate and uncover a place in a beyond that is a 'now'. Poetry is an experience which is created outside the linear concept of time. It both requires and facilitates a reading which is not an unfolding towards an end as when one reads narrative. David Halliburton explains it as ecstatic time and a pure sequence of 'nows'.
[7] The elements of time and space are contained in language. As words appear on the page, and are then read, a timelessness occurs; as the imagination unites within the space created in a process that is re-visionary. This re-visionary process causes a re-interpretation of one's perception of existence. This is of particular interest when we come to Simic's poetry where the self-reflexive re-visionary process concerned with intense personal experience has pertinence for humanity in general. In
The Art of Poetry, Peter Levi describes the visionary in poetry as that which contains qualities of transformative power, where there is 'a transformation of experience that draws on the deepest roots of poetry and remains real.'
[8] Inherent in this is a mediation with mythic language as a communicative power, an aspect of Simic's poetry which will be discussed later.
It is necessary before moving onto a detailed discussion of Simic's poetry to give an indication of various and often conflicting ideas on the subject of the acts of reading, writing and interpretation. This is necessary in order to ground the reading of Simic offered here. The imaginary place created by the poem is the place where the poet and the reader journey, where there are no boundaries or limitations, for it is an experiential movement towards the ungraspable essence of being. Poetry is the place of desire driven towards an indeterminate Other. The indeterminate is not arbitrary since there remains an interdependence in the triadic relationship between poet, poem and reader. The linking element in this is language, marks on the page contain a power waiting for release which has already - at least in part - been released. The special nature of poetic language is marked by the rigorous exertions placed upon it to facilitate the communication of that which is hidden in experience, revealing and creating an expression of this experience. Interpretation of a literary text should not be a closing off which seeks to hold once and for all the 'meaning' of the work. Finding meaning in poetry is not a quest for mastery but an experience of the transformative nature of poetic language which leads to transformative experience. As Michael Murray tells us, 'The measure of the hermeneutic response does not lie in some external criteria [sic] but in responsiveness to the saying of the saga.'
[9] In other words, when the reader apprehends the poem meaning comes from the language and the words, but this is not the whole story. In the reception of language the reader brings an additional context which is extrinsic to the language on the page; in addition to this, the 'saying of the saga' is created from a complex set of variable choices made by the poet which contain no guarantee of complete unity in the reading. Reading can reveal the power of language to be understood which transcends particular cultural usage. This paradox is central to the argument of hermeneutics. Since meaning is always historical and there is no possibility of knowing the literary work in itself an instability exists in the matter of interpretation and truth. There is always a new beginning in reading. In a hermeneutical reading the pre-judgements the reader brings to the text are not an obstacle to true understanding, they are the nature of understanding. There is a 'wholeness' in this idea which frustrates any possibility of incompletion due to the inherent implication of the writer's unity of intention. Yet often the work reveals upon closer reading contradictions which exist beyond the totality of meanings and produce an effect which frustrates textual unity.
Michael Murray notes the distinctive nature of poetic language and its ability to disclose reality; the hermeneutic response to this permits the presence and recognition of the Other:
Poetry, from the hermeneutic vantage, exhibits a distinctive type of heteroreferential as well as autoreferential meaning and emplaces the reader in a condition of potential respondent. thus it defines a truth of ontological reliance and response, of human dependence and interdependence.
[10]Maurice Blanchot writes in
The Space of Literature that writing is not a goal but a journey, a 'search from which everything begins';
[11] poetry cannot be apprehended as a fixed entity, since it is a moving fluidity which creates a sense of existence. From this place beyond temporality an essence of truth is unveiled; the moment is apprehended as it passes and it is here that the power of poetry is revealed: 'The experience of Being must be sayable; in fact it is in the language that it is preserved...then, the truth, which is the presence of the present, has entered the work that is language.'
[12] This 'sayable' language in which Being is preserved is enabled by the power to communicate the hidden unsayable aspects of experience intrinsic to poetic language.
Reading is not a task that should be taken lightly. Blanchot tells us that reading has an innocence which is an effortless liberty containing a tranquility and consent which produces nothing in its creativity.
[13] This consent exists in a receptiveness before the work which is itself a pleasurable acceptance for it to become what it is. The lightness of reading is an avowal and a disclosure; the act of articulating this consent, which produces nothing, moves away from this general economy. In an endeavor to express what happens at the moment of reception it is impossible to contain and encapsulate the effortless liberty Blanchot describes. Critical writing, by virtue of its purpose which is an articulation of the experience of reading, is a production which obstructs this general economy.
Before it is read the book has not yet come into existence: 'What is a book no one reads? Something that is not yet written.'
[14] The work, the poem, is a gift with a promise that is silent in which the poet, the poem and the reader linger. Poems are events, as Kevin Hart observes, 'with a burden, a recurring plea to be understood.'
[15] Charles Simic refers to the gift of poetry as a possibility: 'It requires attending to. It requires a patience in order to hear what the words are really saying. Always and everywhere they are telling us which way the poem has to go.'
[16] In the congregation of these elements poetry happens, but critical study lies outside this happening and must know itself as the desire to prove that it is in the right place, the place where the poem has gone.
From within our knowledge of experiences there lies something other which has become hidden and passed over. Poetic language has the possibility of a movement from the familiar to the strange; created from a desire to articulate the unsaid and to reveal or unveil that which lies hidden in everyday existence, 'There is no special lexicon set aside for poets, but in the intentional act which forms a poem language is both overdetermined and underdetermined: it responds to a variety of pressures, and solicits a range of contexts.'
[17] Simic's poetics consist in this unfamiliar view of the objects and the world of our experience. The joy and pleasure which comes from this communicated act cannot be explicated and transposed into some kind of sense-making code. The limits to understanding heighten the possibility of another kind of knowledge, one that has meaning and profound insights on human existence; something at once known and forgotten.
[18] Since the reading of the work and its meaningful comportment is a combination of the saying and the reading there is another realm in which Simic proposes the expression of these insights to be possible.
When reading Simic's work we encounter a realm of possibilities. This realm consists in a rich tapestry of complex and interweaving ideas. Transformative play is an essential and central element. The perception of familiar objects encountered in the world are pointed to. Through a process of de-familiarization a capability which elucidates our experience of existence emerges. Marjorie Perloff describes a new poetry emerging, 'that wants to open the field so as to make contact with the world as well as the word'.
[19] Simic's poetry combines this with a voice which is intensely self-reflexive, producing poetry which illuminates the world, the word, the self and human experience.
When the reader joins with the poems a unification occurs with the interchanging fields of thought and ways of seeing; they reveal a lucid and refreshingly new vision that always remains at home. The engagement with the world and objects through Simic's poetry is both esoteric yet transparently clear. Through an intimate view of things perceived in the everyday, a questioning view of existence arises. By a movement that goes beyond the simply referential or descriptive, and goes beyond the use of language in its familiar and customary sense, Simic's poetry illuminates the depths of language. It is not a quest for absolutes that we find but a continuing approach to presencing which may unveil a deeper but known truth, a flashing moment of connection with the self and the wonder of existence, 'In the end, all poetry is translation of an uncertain and often absent original.'
[20] What is apparent here is Simic's belief that poetry does not make what is not there, but reveals a hidden knowledge already in existence but waiting to be articulated. His use of mythic language is crucial from this point of view.
Simic has a deep connection with philosophy, especially with Martin Heidegger, which along with his love of the mythic informs his poetry. It is important to explain the particular meaning of 'myth' in this context since 'myth' carries with it a vast array of often conflicting meanings. Mythic language takes as its subject our experience of the world. Myths exist within language in a two-fold sense and function like riddles. The story or narrative contains within it a hidden quality or power which goes beyond the surface layer at first perceived. In myth there is a movement towards becoming a knowing subject which is deeply human. In this there is a transformation which goes beyond the particular towards the universal. This transformation is a possibility: 'So the mythic, then, occurs where something is transformed - the familiar is made strange, made miraculous, and it can generate a story line, a plot, a destiny.'
[21] Simic's use of mythic language is a factor which gives his poetry the nature of being both simple and complex, being profoundly self-reflexive and universal in its vision. This use of language is not static but dynamic. G. S. Kirk in
Myth tells us that, '...a myth is, after all, and unlike a religious feeling, a statement about action.'
[22] In reading Simic's poetry, we shall see that it is informed by this dynamic quality which goes beyond any figurative dimension.
Simic's link with Heidegger makes an interesting association, but it would be wrong to read him purely as a 'philosophical poet.' Philosophy mediates the poetry, but as Simic himself states:
What is usually called philosophical poetry seems to be either a poetry of heightened eloquence or some variety of symbolism. In each case the assumption is that the poet knows beforehand what he or she wishes to say, and that the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up these ideas. If this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what has been thought and said before. There would be no poetic thinking in the way Heidegger conceives of it. There would be no hope for poetry having any relation to truth.
[23]The imagination is the possibility of moving beyond the ideas found in philosophy toward a reality which contains an element of the mysterious.
In Simic's poems we have a double movement. One site of this movement is in the world and the other is in language. Care should be taken not to view this as a cause and effect through which the communication of the poem is illuminated finally and with a sense of completeness. The doubling is a crystallization wherein the creative saying becomes both explored and elucidating, meaningful and poetically illuminating, gathering and shaping in a non-totalizing way.
Ultimately, language is historical; and the poetic tradition is a force which cannot be denied. According to Harold Bloom every poet has an 'anxiety of influence' and must make a stance towards the past and its influences in a desire for self-preservation, 'The poet's conception of himself necessarily is his poem's conception of itself, in my reading, and central to this conception is the matter of the sources of the powers of poetry.'
[24] Being held in the poetic tradition, the poet finds authority in the movement through a range of 'revisionary ratios', but not in a reductive way. The precursor is known, a renewal takes place through misprision, and in experience the poet expands upon this position: 'the sources of the power of poetry are in the poems already written.'
[25]For Bloom, the writer (who is necessarily and by virtue of being in the tradition also a reader), develops defensive mechanisms to create a space in which self-preservation may occur. The poetic self must protect itself against the awareness of belatedness in the tradition to ensure no wounding to its self-esteem; this creates a defensive measure of aggression and produces a drive towards immortality. Prior anxiety creates the 'strong' poet by developing awareness of place and a desire for a place of authority within the tradition, producing transformative movements and sequences through patterns of evasion, causing poets to pause upon the threshold of the void of mental space.
[26] Tradition is the defense against chaos for the critic, and the trope functions as a defense for the ego of the poet. For Bloom there is a stable continuity running through poetry which has an origin or centre. This centre is inescapable since all poetry and criticism work through re-visionary ratios within tradition. This sense of tradition is closely linked with hermeneutics since it has contained within it an inescapable yet enabling force for the writer and critic. This is a view which takes its stance from the past, the present exists by virtue of what has gone before and can be understood in these terms.
There can be no beginning again, only swerves. 'When the poetic father stands between the poet and the moment of his poetic origin as a block threatening to isolate the son from the sources of poetic vitality, the son must necessarily swerve to avoid the father.'
[27] This swerve may indeed occur in the poetic act, but ultimately the concern of criticism is neither to interpret nor to search for sources. In the act of poetic creation, and when reading poetry, an opening occurs which should illuminate the existence of the poem and the marvel of existence, regardless of the implications and the place this may hold in literary tradition. Tradition, as the inescapable and influential index which is behind or in the past and also the thrust forward, is a founding force where literature re-makes itself. The individual self, creating from within this tradition is of the highest value, is the capable imagination. Simic may swerve from Emily Dickinson (with her sense of the consciousness and inner selves), Theodore Roethke (his observation of detail and simplicity of language, not to mention his use of folklore), Wallace Stevens (observations on the appearance of things and absence) and Vasko Popa (his use of riddles and myth and metaphorical invention). The knowledge of this and the uncovering of this neither explains nor gives anything; it merely is. Mapping the source from where a treasure emerges is not so intangibly provoking as discovering the treasure's source. The spark from within lies covered, waits to be revealed. The misprision or creative misreading that lies within literary language comes from a literary context: 'For poetry lives always under the shadow of poetry.'
[28] The poem, the one faced, read and experienced, is essentially what greets us and is welcomed by us. In the reading of 'White' it will be seen that Schmidt's reading, informed and influenced by Bloom, closes off much of the poem's potential.
Another aspect in which this idea of influence is brought to bear on poetic creation has negative implications. The ‘struggle’ for the poet in Bloom’s analysis implies a certain negatively competitive element, an unconscious struggle which is the poet’s anxiety and by implication an idea of ‘hostility’ is introduced into the poetic act. There is an element of ‘struggle’ on the part of the poet in poetic creation, as indeed there is for the reader and the literary critic. There is a desire for clarity and for connection which is engaged in a unique space created in isolated moments which are irrepeatable. Mark Edmundson puts it this way:
So to use Bloom’s theory about influence anxiety, as much of the literary critical profession has (whether they claim to have invented it themselves or not), without reference to its mode of presentation, is not, I am sad to say, a distortion. Once you accept Bloom’s idea that the poets are in combat with each other, then one’s hostility towards poetry - a hostility that may owe in part to the philosophical origins of literary criticism - becomes natural and justifiable.
A good critic is always skeptical about literature: she must be, in some measure, a
philosopher of poetry. Yet to follow Bloom in The Anxiety into assuming that the agon is the way in the poetic world, and that a group of revisionary ratios defines all consequential poetry in a way that poets themselves cannot comprehend, brings one closer to a sense of calm control.
[29]For Heidegger, the inability to escape from tradition is the enabling factor in the poet's creativity. The inescapability of tradition is not a restrictive presence as in Bloom's view. As Paul Bové observes, 'Thus the writer in using language is already and always within the world and the tradition constituted by that very language. This explains why the modern impulse to be antitraditional is always defined by its position within the tradition.'
[30] The repeatabilty of language contains a potential for new possibilities as can be seen in the mythic qualities of Simic's poetics.
The hermeneutical situation in which the poet, the poem and the reader exist is not closed but is an open field of possibilities; this possibility is the potential which exists in poetic language, an 'Ever changing set of relationships in which neither the poem nor the critic can function as a determined or determinable center.'
[31] To seek truth one must first look inside, to know that this inside which is inescapable does in fact hold the key to true poetic utterance and the authentic interpretation of such. To know one is held within is the way to being able to begin again in an outward connection mediated by language.
Charles Simic's poetics greet this possibility head on. In the 'object' poems the 'hidden' is revealed and connections, passed over as ordinary, reveal another sense of consciousness in existence. Always there is wonder for the world, dealing with the essence of being from a deeply human experience of existence. And yet there is a flight from the firm roots of the earth towards a place of transformation: 'An object is the irreducible itself, a convenient place to begin it seemed to me.'
[32] This transformation is a change in perspective, a new perception and knowledge of existence in the world. From the 'irreducible itself' of the 'object' poems we travel towards the meditation and the austerity of 'White': a cathartic gathering together of presence and absence that can be viewed as the basis of language itself. The duality which exists in the essence his poetry is a play between image and essence and between seeing and naming. From within the circle of interpretation there is something hidden which is unveiled in the 'openness' of possibilities, a 'Perpetual openness to experience.'
[33] The destructive play which is an endless flight and yet is grounded in experience places Simic's poetry in a non-place which is without limits, speaking the unsayable and the pre-said, restoring a truth which lies hidden.
The close reading of the poems presented here is intended not to reach any conclusiveness or re-creation of Simic's poetry in different words, but to peruse the aspects of content, form and language used, leading to responses to his poetry. Poetry always starts from somewhere; without wishing to look for purpose one can nevertheless join with the work and hope to experience what poetry conveys. In the introduction to
Languages of the Unsayable Sanford Budick states, 'What allows the unsayable to speak is the undoing of the spoken through negativity. Since the spoken is doubled by what remains silent, undoing the spoken gives voice to the inherent silence which itself helps stabilize what the spoken is meant to mean.'
[34] If it is the unsayable that poetry strives to illuminate, a puzzle which we try to unravel and yet of which we are a part, 'White' may be seen as a quest which reveals nothing, a play of fictions which escapes the world and finds a presence in absence. This absence is also a dis-closure; within the poem we read a presence on the page which is also in the world, making silence speak. 'White' may seek to illuminate the unrealizable and yet the questions posed rather than the answers given are of its essence, leaving an empty space filled with creation, through which we may find Simic's poetic purpose. By exploring the poetics we may find the hermeneutic through that which we read and the undoubted experience it brings to bear upon the reader, we may find the spur.
The question which arises from this journey through Simic's work is one of duality. Does Simic in his connection with 'things' seek to find a resting place, a conclusive answer to the mystery of being or is the pleasure of the act positioned within the journey itself ? Can we read in his poetic an echo of Bonnefoy’s statement, '...a longing for the true place is the vow made by poetry'.
[35] Does Simic express any desire to find a place where the mystery of being will be elucidated, or is the mystery the essence of his poetics? Is there an objective in his poetry, a plan? Can there indeed be a place where poetry rests, a point of finality, a place in which it can be properly seen to have reached a goal ? These are some of the questions this work will try to answer.
The 'Object' Poems: Premonitions of the Absolute Other'
I'd like to show readers that the most familiar things that surround them are unintelligible'[36]'
the silent world is our only homeland.'
[37]The idea of presence and its inherent unaccountability are the underlying concerns of Simic's 'object' poems. There is a need for inverted commas around the word 'object' here since his poems are not singularly meditations on the appearance or apprehension of things, but are the representation of a creation of a gap. Simic carves or opens out this space in an attempt to reveal a connection and an otherness underlying our apprehension of the world. Together with this apprehension there is a word play of self-reflexivity which leaves the ambiguous nature of language intact by revealing its ambiguity. Words bring appearance in the disappearance of the thing, presence is also an absence; but for Simic there is a hopefulness in this meeting of object-language: his presence-absence is similar to Bonnefoy's hopefulness. John Naughton remarks upon Bonnefoy's poetics, 'The encounter with presence is the guarantee that this world has a meaning and coherence and that it can therefore be the proper home for man - a hearth even, providing light and warmth.'
[38]The 'object' poems are not ambiguously overlain with images. We need not doubt the sincerity of their titles since they are exploratory and investigative meditations on objects, upon which the poems muse and through which we experience a transformation and a new way of seeing. The title is a promise with an underlying ambiguity since the poems go beyond their initial apparent simplicity. The encounter with objects does not de-familiarize in order to give a vision of something ordinary in the everyday world we see and experience. The experience is more complex than this. The objects are the springboard for expression; a springboard from which we are never permitted to jump, keeping us firmly placed in the 'thingness' of the object. It is in the 'thingness' that the wonder of being can be revealed. Simic comments on the poetry of Vasko Popa as consisting in an effacement of the self, 'The usual drama of the Self is completely absent. The archetypal forms that emerge are employed for cognitive ends.'
[39] This is true also of Simic's contemplations on objects. Archetypes are of a symbolic nature. They have within them a capacity which goes beyond their obvious meaning. The exploration of the apprehended objects in words produces an intuitive experience in the imagination, since there can never be any possibility of full knowledge. This intuition is the means by which the mysterious qualities of those objects around us and in the world are communicated. In
The Absence of Myth[40] George Bataille closely considers aspects of sacrifice and the sacred in poetic creation which have important considerations for our study of Simic’s work and of the ‘object’ poems in particular:
…the object - completely different from what I am - transcended me (to transcend me means that it is completely different from me). The suppression of a transcendent object reveals immanence, a reality which is immanent to me, from which I am not distinctly separated. The awakening of the sensibility, the passage from the sphere of intelligible (and useable) objects to excessive intensity, is the destruction of the object as such.
[41]In the ‘object’ poems we will find this destruction to the possibility of immanence. There is an awakening and a reaching forth into the possibilities carved out in the presence which is the absence of the object. In this process we shall see that there is not a destruction of the object, there is a simultaneous disappearance and presence in Simic’s poetic movement which makes two moves at once.
In the poem entitled 'Stone'
[42] ,which consists of three stanzas, saying becomes knowing and it is through being a stone - though this may be a riddle which will never be answered - that the experience of being in the world consists. Indeed, riddles are an important axis upon which the doubleness of language and the doubleness present in Simic's poetry exists. Our expectations are played with, exposing a gap where we are invited to find origins. In 'Stone', by naming things and taking the side of things, the world is revealed and elucidated, following Heidegger's reformulation of the phenomenological project 'to let that which shows be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself'.
[43] The particularity of poetic language has two dimensions which Simic uses to full potential. In the space created for our entry alterity can be glimpsed. Together with this there is a mythic quality of the language with its quest for origins, which is not a resting place but yields a potential for harmony and unity in the world upon which we reflect. In his introduction to Popa's
Homage to the Lame Wolf,
[44] Simic discusses the riddle's idiomatic power of language and its ability to open up a space where a myth of origins can be heard. The origin is for Simic akin to the place of poetry discussed earlier. An origin is not a place but a source with qualities which do not permit location, Simic's imaginative play locates his place of poetry as an unlocatable but existing source. The first stanza of 'Stone' reads:
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
This first stanza frames the poet's belief in a stone as subject for a poem. Alchemy is the mystical belief in the power of transformation caused by a manipulation of naturally occurring elements. The elements found in the earth and their transformative capabilities can be equated with the relationship between man and the cosmos, and this idea of spiritual alchemy informs Simic's 'object' poems. In 'Stone' the transformative power of alchemy is not 'my way'. 'Let somebody else become a dove' is a line of particular interest here. A dove can be regarded as a symbol of the spirit of peace present as an essence within and capable of being released, but this is not the way that the poem intends nor is it to 'gnash with a tiger's tooth' which conjures images of violence. More than subject, the final line 'I am happy to be a stone' moves from watching to being. Becoming a stone, being happy to be a stone, doing it 'my way' leads towards the next two stanzas which do not abandon the particular transformative powers that being a stone facilitates. A connection occurs, 'I am happy to be a stone' frames the reading; a joining whereby the reading is not an observation on stone but in being a stone, and from here the riddle may perhaps be answered. The stone remains in its 'stoneness'.
There is an incantational tone which quietly conflicts with the words used. The certainty of their expression is underlain with an uncertainty that doubles over upon itself. A tension occurs which contrasts with what one might expect when observing an object as hard and seemingly impenetrable as a stone. The stone is objectively hard: it is hard to humans. From the 'outside' the stone is a riddle, from within it 'must be cool and quiet' ; the ambiguity of the word 'must' creates the sense of a knowledge that is not knowledge, since 'must' is both a word containing hopeful implications and yet a sense of certainty; neither an 'ought' nor an 'is'. Much hinges on the line 'No one knows how to answer it.' This more certain line casts the stone as a question, since it exists unconstrained by the effects of nature and humanity.
Believing one's eyes, seeing 'sparks fly out', in the third stanza allows for a play upon the imagination without recourse to the knowledge of logic or science. Sparks fly when two stones are rubbed, inside it is not dark as one may imagine. The light which is not the light of day but the moon, which is the light of night gives enough illumination to reveal the hidden depths of the stone, 'The strange writings, the star-charts/On the inner walls.'
There are two aspects which deserve consideration when reading this poem. The first is that the interactive forces of humanity and nature which play upon the stone leave it intact, 'unperturbed'. Elements of gravity and water have no impact, animals and children cause no disturbances. Yet when two stones are rubbed together an illumination from within occurs, creating sparks and revealing the possibility of a light present within, which is enough to read the 'inner walls' by. The poem does not anthropomorphise the stone, change its appearance or texture; the stone remains as stone with all of its characteristics. This resonates with Heidegger's perception of earth, the stone cannot be used up but only investigated from different perspectives. In becoming stone the ability to create sparks is transposed to a power giving source (the power of fire and the myth of Prometheus are resonant here). The world, the earth and the work come together in concern, bringing forth an origin and a timelessness, much like mythological time which is in time but also contains a timeless quality.
Another aspect of the poem to be considered is the likeness and equality of substance of stone to stone which has the power to illuminate. This is a hidden quality which is only revealed when two similar elements interact. This mysterious event has an outward and inward perspective. The sparks on the outside only hint at the illumination which makes visible that which is inscribed within; the star-charts of the universe hinting at a knowledge only imagined but there to be revealed. Francis Ponge writes about the imaginative possibility '... the function of poetry. It is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle. Hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes speechless, and later reinvents language.'
[45] This function of poetry is one which is in agreement with Simic's view and is evident in the poems we will read presently.
Through the substance of stone the poem mediates the potential, hidden spark that can reveal unknown secrets which are nevertheless present as a capability, secrets that transcend time and history, with full knowledge and illumination, as was mentioned in the introduction: 'It is only because the sayable emerges that we come to recognize the unsayable.'
[46] Through the interaction of stone on stone the sparks become apparent as a power giving source which although unstated is implicit in the work; we experience the strange and the familiar aspects of stone through the workings of imagination.
In 'Poem Without a Title'
[47] we read a sparse naming. The title is a frame which is not a frame; not having a title is the title of the poem. The play with words is pertinent since the poem is a play on naming and becoming. There is an illusion of human absence here by virtue of a title which as opposed to the poem is almost anonymous. The lead has let itself become bullet and not gold, which refers to an associative play in words. The theme of alchemy returns here with the power to alter and convert, associated with the quest for the power to transform the elements. We are reading the words as names bound within historical reference. The poem is playing meanings and associations and expressing a power of capability which is capable of any possibility. This capability is contained within the words as words and not their usage reflecting the anonymous nature of the title.
'Why did you let yourself / Be cast into a bullet?', implies that lead has the power to be cast as in a play of characters, and of course as the cast which gives the lead a change from essence to thing, a thing with implications of death, horror and - worse still - power and terrorism. The act of naming in the poetic work sets a mark upon the page where referentiality and obscurity dwell. Questioning the word realizes the peculiarities in language, as if the lead can have a choice about how it is shaped. The endless associative nature of words are not merely given over to human possibilities but are contained within the word itself.
The second stanza is short, terse compared with the first, with a tone of defeat. The call which questions the associative meanings receives no answer, 'Lead. Bullet./With names like that/ The sleep is deep and long.' In these three lines the full impact of sound and vision is gathered together. The historical nature of language brings with it associations in which we are embroiled; but this is a sleep, implying a possibility for change, that perhaps the alchemists of language, the poets, may awaken from and bring a new sense of connective forces in the power of naming and being. Charles Simic seems to follow Martin Heidegger in electing a phenomenology of language (naming, Saying) over a semiology of language. The double impact of language's force on humanity and the change possible by means of poetry to summon precious metals such as gold instead of bullets is the hope in Simic's poetics. Here too the magical qualities which are present as the power of humanity and of language are heightened; for Simic, the world and the potential of words are marvelous and mysterious.
Simic uses the slippery and transitory nature of language to bring a new bearing on his poetry by way of the world of objects which we encounter in existence. This bearing is one of transformative play in which is captured the full capacity of language and humanity. Halliburton states that '... things belong with mortals even as things and mortals belong with language. If language is fundamentally poetic, then all that it capacitates will be poetic too, whether jug or water or heaven or earth or the cosmos itself.'
[48]The power of alchemy and an endless transformative capability in language which we read in Simic has parallels in the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé, and also with Theodore Roethke. This significance will become more apparent when we come to 'White' since there is a similarity in Simic's vision with Mallarmé's preoccupation with the word as causing the appearance and disappearance of itself, and with the idea and play of riddles and folklore in Roethke. In 'Poem Without a Title' the words are the poem, there is no 'title as frame' in the title, but we do have a poem and we do have a title. With reference to Mallarmé's work Blanchot tells us:
the poem, understood as an independent object sufficing to itself alone, a monad of words where nothing is reflected but the nature of words - is perhaps in this respect a reality, a particular being, having exceptional dignity and importance; but it is a being, and for this reason it is by no means close to being, to that which escapes all determination and every form of existence.
[49]Simic's poetics acknowledge this, but there is also an awareness of humanity and usage of language which he refuses to forget, the poet's imagination is aware of this capability. As Yves Bonnefoy tells us, 'It is the destiny of every true work of art to create a ceremony from that which is obscure. But often poetry does not admit this to itself, does not know itself, does not consent to release and name the mysterious powers it celebrates.'
[50] In 'Knife' Simic does indeed celebrate the mysterious powers of poetry, the capacity to open up to wonders which have transformative capacities on our perception of the world.
'Knife'
[51], has three numbered sections, we encounter once again the object with possibility, a riddle and a performance which teases us. These expectations are known by Simic, which creates the possibility of a new sight of knowledge. The first two sections are in three stanzas with short cutting lines, but each contain one longer line. The final section has the tone of an arrival, reflected in the line form which lacks the briefness of the previous lines. In this poem there is a movement from death to life, and from darkness to light, which is a recurring spiritual and religious theme for Simic. A ground is opened up that permits the poem to be and is a ceremony for the creation of a poem. The poem reverses our expectations since it is only in the second last stanza we read, 'If it's a poem/You want,/Take a knife'
In the first section the word 'knife' does not appear, but the title of the poem guides the reading; as is the way with Simic's poetry we should take the title and use it in serious consideration of what comes next. There is a tone of ceremony overlaiden with sacrificial elements in the first line of the first stanza. 'Father-confessor' has resonances of an address to a religious leader, someone who knows our secrets, creating a relation with God or a priest. The knife is an implement used in sacrifice to the gods, on the 'red altar' (red being the color of blood produces an image resonant with blood-letting reflecting blood's life giving powers even in sacrifice) of the hen's throat. We are present in the temple of poetry. Bonnefoy puts it this way, 'For the temple, through the rules of proportion and number and the essential economy of form, seeks to establish in the dangerous region the security of the law. Here we escape from the shadowy and the indefinite into the crystal clarity of the timeless. But in the secret heart of the temple, on the altar or deep in the crypt, the unforseeable is present.'
[52] The ceremony performed in Simic's poetry is not as Bonnefoy implies, an escape from the shadows. Rather, the shadows are the necessary enabling factor in this symbolic blood letting. The temple of poetry is the object of possibility, from where Simic does not wish to escape. There is apparent here a sense of the 'dangerous region' to which Bonnefoy alerts us with the undercurrent of violence in sacrifice. The knife is the silencer of the tongue and causes the mouth to become darkness and lost. This silencing is also a death, but one with hope since sacrificial rites are inherently ceremonies of hope, return and continuation. Cutting and creating a silence leaves only a tearful one-eyed madman, and the question, 'If there's a tear in it,/Who is it for?', is rhetorical, left open but implying the lack of vision in the world. The madness of the late twentieth century and the singular, tunnel vision of humanity is a recurrent horror for Simic. There is a doubleness in the word 'tear', which could be inferring a tear as in a rip and dislocation which would be just as appropriate considering its connection with a knife, therefore opening up a space for the next section. A change has occurred leaving new possibilities; from silence emerges possibility.
The second section is a journey or a quest. The knife is a candle and a map, with a carved space lit by its capabilities we can go to an inner place, a deep interior already created by the knife and showing us the way to go. By cutting the space and opening up possibilities there is a place which is below the firm ground upon which we rest. Through the earth, through the graves and the water tables and the earth's core with embers of fire, perhaps the fire of hell, there is something else. This place cannot be seen; 'We are after a scent' ends the second section, alluding to the use of the sense of smell, an animal characteristic which in our civilization has been forgotten. The journey is into the inner self which changes our knowledge of perspective, and coming to fruition in the third stanza.
The third stanza moves the locus of thought from 'it' to 'we' and 'you'. We have come this far but remain in darkness, 'We are in a bag' we journey in an 'inner staircase' but remain caught up within the onward march of humanity, in two places at once. Writing on Emily Dickinson's poems Simic refers to her images of boxes in boxes as cosmology, 'Every universe is enclosed in some other universe' 53
] This is also present in Vasko Popa's 'The Little Box'.
[54] We can only know the universe within the universe, here the bag thrown over someone's shoulder, when we reach firm ground and fall with a thud back to earth. It is the knowledge of two perspectives at once; we cannot leave our outer existence, and cannot know our inner self without it.
We have been taken through the poem to two places at once and through the poem we know that we are already in two places. And the poem itself comes by taking a knife which does not cut apart, but creates and lights the way to "A star of solitude,/It will rise and set in your hand." The star of life, the sun, brings light and life. It is to this place of arrival, where we already are that the knife enables. The solitude of the star is Simic's enabling factor; it is in solitude and silence that poetry can be carved out, and solitude and silence enables a rich experience in life and in poetry, a transcendence like the dawning of the day after night's darkness. This is not in the mystical sense of escape; Simic doesn't deny our corporeality, but reveals the forgotten spirituality of humanity.
The particular voice present in the second last stanza contains a tone often found in Simic's poetry. It plays with the reader in a way that shows instead of tells, 'If it's a poem/You want,/Take a knife'; coming at the end of the poem turns back upon itself as a knowledge that was known all along. It also has a tone which is matter of fact, suggesting a simple solution which has always been there. The voice has a shrugging quality and playfulness without losing the sense of forceful self-knowledge.
In considering this poem the question of 'place' arises. For Simic, place is a movement of perspective. The place of the poem is where we are already, but requires a new way of perception. This place is for Bonnefoy an achievable goal, the place in this way holds an essence and is a foreseeable, quantitative element where the true poet aspires. There is a presence and enclosure within this formulation which is not quite true for Simic. With his poetics of transformation and possibility there is always an ungraspable entity, an otherness and alterity which exists in a no where but does exist. This possibility is a cutting through, an opening of space in a creative descent and resurrection. Blanchot talks of the 'place' as space, it is a place that is no-place but more of an approach:
Writing begins only when it is the approach to the point where nothing reveals itself, where, at the heart of dissimulation, speaking is still but the shadow of speech, a language which is still only its image, an imaginary language and a language of the imaginary, the one nobody speaks, the murmur of the incessant and interminable which one has to silence if one wants,
at last, to be heard.
[55]This is the place or approach evident in Simic's poetics, there is a search for the silence with a concern for 'locating the agent that fuels the poetic act.'
[56] This finds its voice in 'White' as we shall read later. Simic takes another cutting tool as a springboard for the poem 'Ax'.
[57] There is a quality to the language which suits the poem's unfolding. Simic tells us that the order in which images appear in his poems are exact
[58] which can inform the reading since, unlike the poems we have encountered so far, this poem exhibits a more linear quality of development. The general theme is time. Historical time and its iterability is developed in a circular movement, giving the poem a resigned tone. As happens in other poems, we are lead to the final stanza which is the cathartic summation of the poem's progression, and also where the poem begins.
In the final line we read, 'Lacking itself, in its essence, a future', which is for the poem a dark prophecy of twentieth-century existence. Unlike many of Simic's poems, this poem resonates with a sense of inescapable historicity with the clipped lines creating a tone of doom or an already known and inescapable tone as occurs in the voice of prophecy.
In the first line of the first stanza the poem speaks to all, to 'Whoever'. The addressee is whoever shall come upon the poem, everyone and anyone in an all encompassing inclusiveness which is humanity itself. The ax is the first tool of survival and barbarism, its dual use producing survival and death. The survival of the fittest is integral to animal and human life, something which the first stanza accepts as inevitable and necessary for human survival. 'He who cannot howl/Will not find his pack...' is the point left hanging upon which the poem turns. Connections with the pack, the family, the human race come in the voice, come by calling.
The second stanza of four lines moves from prophetic oration to a personal implication of what has gone before. There is a separation of mind and body, bodily survival as is pronounced in the first stanza is separated from spiritual survival in the second stanza. The body knows it lacks a future, is aware of death and decay which is unknown to another, to 'myself'. The pessimism is countered by an ignorance of this finite, futureless corporeality by a spirit which knows no such boundaries. The poem separates the totality of humanity from the singularity of 'myself' which is a movement implying an ethical call. Survival is a futureless endeavor upon which the 'dark prophecies' of 'Ax' turns. The ethical call is implicit, needs to be teased out in a response to the poem which Simic leaves in a non-didactic sense to the reader; the addressee is the one who hears the call and the one who answers.
[59] The self is the disembodied 'I' who knows beyond the totalizing of humanity an infinite hope which goes beyond mere survival and exists in relation to the Other. It is in this that the 'object' poems find their locus.
The exteriority of the objects which are the springboard for contemplation of the self and the relationship this engenders between the subject of the poem - the object, the poem's journey and our reception of it embody an intersubjectivity. Paul Celan describes this happening:
The poem becomes - under what conditions - the poem of a person who still perceives, still turns towards phenomena, addressing and questioning them. The poem becomes conversation - often desperate conversation. Only the space of this conversation can establish what is addressed, can gather it into a 'you' around the naming and speaking I. But this 'you', come about by dint of being named and addressed, brings its otherness into the present.
Even in the here and now of the poem - and the poem has only this one, unique, momentary present - even in this immediacy and nearness, the otherness gives voice to what is most its own: its time.
[60]The secrets which underlie the given in Simic's poetry are expressed in riddles which have an inviting lure for readers. The deceptively ambiguous titles of some of the ‘object’ poems take us from a sense of certainty to uncertainty, invite us in and draw us towards the imaginative play of possibilities. In this, there develops a new possibility of meanings which have unending potential, Simic describes this as '...the principle of uncertainty. Uncertainty is the description of the gap which consciousness proclaims: actuality versus contingency. A new and unofficial view of our human condition.'
[61] The imagination is the enabling factor upon which Simic dwells, providing a whole view of being in the world and the implications this has for the poet and the reader. Simic gathers from reality and through reality a meaningful and imaginative play of words which exhibit a sense of being in the world and being surrounded by the language we use. In this is produced a poetics laden with potential which goes beyond the immediate apprehension of the words on the page and the connective forces of sense and language. The mythic language contained in Simic's poetry has dual capabilities of sense and meaning; sense for the reader is that which is in our understanding in an immediate way and meaning which goes beyond this perception in an elsewhere that has a possibility to become explicit or may be beyond any exposition. It is in this ambiguity that language dwells. Words are possibilities for creating pleasure and profound experience and through this we are held in their spell. The images produced in the 'object' poems capture the sense of wonder and bewilderment in existence; they produce a consciousness that is an awakening of complexity and simplicity in the world and in language, nothing is quite what it seems. There is a link in this with George Oppen, as Paul Kenneth Naylor points out in his discussion of Oppen's 'Of Being Numerous': 'This experience and understanding, this knowledge of the act of "Being" in virtue of which "things" appear to us is not...unmediated...we must "see" things in order "to know ourselves" and the world in which we find ourselves.'
[62]The poem is a moment of time which is beyond time. The time of the poem is made when it is set down on the page; lines, sentences, stanzas, sections - each marks a movement which produces an interconnection of words and space. Reading poetry marks time in a way which plays upon the flow of words in an attempt to capture that which is beyond time. Our experiences are an accumulation of many things at once and it is this which the poem embraces. The 'object' poems we have encountered begin at their end, 'Form..., thinks. Its appetite is cosmological. It mirrors its origins and reflects on the act itself. Let's say that it thinks by provoking thought. This is its aim, intrinsically.'
[63]In a prose poem, written later than those we have been reading, ‘The Inanimate Object’
[64] continues to raise the ‘object’ question. In this poem there is a standing back and a generalization of the poetic considerations of possibility in objects. It develops and grows in a circularity which confirms by questioning. This questioning is faithful to the knowledge that we cannot become completely free to fully understand and achieve full knowledge of the objects of our consideration. These questions are long talks with ‘the jailers’. The jailers with whom the poet engages in ‘long night talks’ are ‘my jailers’. The poet confirms the inescapable truth of being within ‘another cell, another prison in an infinite series of prisons’. This is the condition of the questions regarding the ‘inanimate object’ which the poet strives to elucidate. The tool for this purpose is described not as a ‘knife’ but as ‘my piece of broken bottle’ which is in a ‘hiding place’ or is perhaps only ‘dreamed of’. The cutting edge of the glass has been produced from a broken bottle, a container which has now become useless as a container but is now capable of carving through poetic possibilities. The hope of leaving ‘a little something to make others stop and think’ is expressed. This hope is the imaginative play we have been reading in the poems we have considered thus far and as we have seen they do indeed make us ‘stop and think’. The possibility for this is shown to be a difficult task with the poet showing the dreamlike and transitory nature of the possibility of thinking the inanimate object. The three voices who offer an answer to the question posed are given the response of ‘nothing’ by the poet. Here Simic tells it his way, the ‘nothing’ that is said produces the possibility for everything. There is no clever information or careful philosophical consideration for us to dwell upon as readers, a space is opened up for the reader to dwell in the ‘nothing’ that is said. Writing on René Char Blanchot tells us ‘…the absence of the thing in the poetic image restores its foundation not in its form but the underside; what one penetrates. It is not the thing clothed by its use.’
[65]'White': Navigating Everything and Nothing.Simic's commitment to the unending possibilities of expression and meaning created from being in the world reaches a powerful, cumulative moment in the poem 'White'.
[66] The duality and doubleness contained in the 'object' poems, discussed previously, moves deeper and further in an attempt to etch out the creative space which makes the possibility of creative space. The objects which are the springboard from which the 'object' poems come are no longer centrally located as the locus of attention. The substance of 'White' is made from the leap that is necessary for the creation of poetry. The word 'substance' is both suitable and unsuitable when discussing 'White' since substance itself is the essence of the poem. It will be seen that this is a natural progression for a poetics so absorbed in the possibilities for the creation of meaning and for expressing those ambiguous almost ungraspable moments which are the substance of creating poetry. This does not imply that 'White' is a movement towards a poetry less grounded in the world; in fact, it will be seen that this poem may in fact be the source of the 'object' poems, though paradoxically it comes later.
Every poetry deserves a reader concerned with a communicative authenticity and responsibility towards the apprehended poem. It is accepted that meanings are not wholly determined and that for all poetry there is a relationship of mutual avowal. To speak meaningful utterance is to risk the unknowable essence into which the triad - poet, poem and reader - hopes to find a place. This element of risk is one which has at its locus the author's intention. Richard Rorty contends that the author is 'an' author of the text, from where there is no intrinsic meaning. This pragmatic view in which meaning and intention are not identical opens a space for numerous readings.
[67] Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels point out that the text is read 'as an expression of its author's intention'.
[68] From this perspective the marks on the page are the product of an intending author, a contention with which I agree. But the expression, the intentional act of the author containing some intending meaning, inevitably contains gaps and spaces which go beyond this intention. The authentic reader who joins with the text and proceeds along this journey will encounter these indefinite aspects. There can be no determined meaning, but neither is there a completely free and unrestrained one. As has been seen, the place in which the author, text and reader journey is more an approach than an apprehension or locatable aspiration. The poetic act communicates and expresses numerous meaningful possibilities which can be elucidated, and any reading should be faithful to and adherent of the underlying spark of illumination.
Peter Schmidt in 'White: Charles Simic's Thumbnail Epic'
[69] has given an account of the poem informed by the Whitman quotation Simic gives us on the title page, 'What is this little black thing I see there/in the white?'. It is not so much this quotation from Whitman but Whitman's poetry in general and 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking' in particular which Schmidt uses as the root of his critique, together with quotations from Emerson and Rimbaud. Simic has acknowledged Whitman and Emerson as influences on American poetry in many of his writings,
[70] but it would be unwise to maintain a closed view of these influences as a basis for reading Simic, since the diversity of his work has its influence beyond any totalizing system of thought or discipline. Since Schmidt has framed his critique with three quotations the reading of 'White' will inevitably be informed by these. It also becomes clear at the end of his essay that he is influenced by Bloom's theory of influence which will be discussed later. Every reading comes from somewhere and is influenced by the assumptions and expectations we bring to the text, some of which are explicit, some implicit. But it is not the intention here to fix closed parameters upon such a rich and varied poem. 'White' deserves to be read in a spirit of openness to its varied possibilities.
The quotation from Whitman is a frame for 'White' which is also a question. In reading it we can assume many standpoints. Does the poem 'White' intend to answer Whitman's question or continue the question? Is 'White' going to investigate the black thing in the white or remain within its own frame as a poem about white? Perhaps these are not the correct questions to ask at this time, or at any time; it may be sufficient to consider the word 'white' in itself.
White is a tone consisting of all the colours of the lightwave spectrum, white is light, spectrum, frequencies, particle and wave, but without revealing the multi-colours of the universe of which it is constructed. This hidden essence of white becomes apparent only in investigation through refraction, which is the fragmentation and separation of the components of light by wavelengths, the constituents of its being. White is the colour of the page and the colour of daylight, and it is important to point out Simic's close connection with painting in relation to 'White'. He comments, 'I started as a painter, so one of my influences, on my notion of poetry, is the notion of color. I had a sense I was arranging colors. '
[71] When the poet writes on the page, the black marks the white, and it is in this spirit that we should take the Whitman quotation. In a poem entitled 'White' it is necessary not to forget the presence of the black on the white page. This would be in keeping with Simic's grounding of words and language as an important part of another knowledge which poetry brings forth. David Wood tells us in Writing the Future that 'The sublime of nothingness as the lack of representation points to a bare space, which nevertheless allows for the erection of a beautiful fiction in its place.'
[72] The bare space hollowed out in 'White' reveals an illumination which has been encountered in the 'object' poems as a capability this is an integral part of 'White'. This poem learns from Mallarmé the double presence that marks the 'white' as 'white' as can be observed in his 'Several Sonnets'.
[73]'White' is a lyric poem in two main parts. The first is of a strict form. There are two sections of ten stanzas each, with each stanza containing five couplets. The term 'lyric' is used here as that which contains powerful overflowing language composed in terms of imaginative thought processes and connective forces.
[74] The poem has a rigid and arithmetical framework where each part is a multipliable and a divisible part of the other producing an equality of space on the page. The second part entitled 'What The White Had To Say' is in contrast to this with its densely packed gathering of words in one stanza in which the sense of space has disappeared. This section is framed by another question, this time a quotation from Meister Eckhart, 'For how could anything white be distinct/from or divided from whiteness?'
[75] When we come to this it will be important to consider whether it is a question in answer to what has gone before, or whether it is there to maintain the force of the unanswerable even though the white is given voice to respond to the first part of the poem. Considering this may take a little further the question of whether Simic's poetry seeks a goal or is a quest for answers. 'White' is a poem of connected pieces, not separate poems gathered under one title or frame. This connection is not one in the narrative sense but more one of capacitating the free-play of images presented and linked with the sense of time as a sequence of 'nows' as discussed in the introduction.
The poem begins with a couplet punctuated with a colon signifying that it is in distinction to what comes next. The poem starts 'Out of poverty/To begin again:'.
[76] This is a hallmark of Simic's poetry where the act of poetry begins as an emptying out revealing a depletion and spiritual lack. The word 'poverty' signifies this, and it is interesting from the context of the 'object' poems which have come before. Simic states that 'White' heralded the end of the 'object' poems which also creates the possibility and space to bring forth a new beginning, 'I also consider it to be a kind of an end to my object poems. A final statement of that impulse. That whole need, to find that, to express that, all that was gathered up and came together in this poem.'
[77]It is pertinent to see as much as possible in the first stanza for it is from this beginning that the rest of the poem comes. As discussed earlier, each word in Simic's poems has its rightful order and each word carries its own weight within this ordering. As opposed to Schmidt's account of 'White' it will become evident that Simic does not make use of masks nor that he 'envisions White appearing in many forms, from bestial to celestial.
' [78] The movements contained within 'White' are interconnective forces which do not entail the putting on or shedding of masks and forms; this is precisely what has been cast off. In the beginning there is nothing; from the loss or lack comes another force beyond and also before the act of naming. There is the possibility that contained within there is a luminous spark, an inspirational essence which is to be uncovered and unleashed with aspects both spiritually uplifting and terrifying.
In the next couplet there is a juxtaposition and connection with the color of the words 'bride' and 'blindness'; a bride is symbolic of purity and hope for the future, in blindness there is a lack of sight and an inability to foresee the future. These two seemingly opposite views are continually present throughout the poem both as dualling forces and as connective and enabling forces, containing similarities in their tones but not in their implications. Here Simic plays on the connective forces whereby the beginning again is a journey of hope though it is not discernible where or what the future will be.
Touch and vision are the enabling factors for beginning again, with a tone of anxiety dwelling within the 'As if' of the fourth couplet. The threshold, which is both a beginning and an entrance, has a 'light' lingering upon it and is synonymous with illumination. This light may be the white that is the subject of the poem, or it may be the illumination of the poem's existence; it is most likely to be both. Being both aspects together reflects the power of the spark from where creation comes and towards which it aspires. There are two options here, one which is a reflection on the act of poetry as an utterance which enacts the 'as if' of continual presence and another which hesitates on the border of illumination but doubtful of the facilitation for this moment to continue. Paul Valéry writes in
The Art of Poetry, 'A poet's function - do not be startled by this remark - is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.'
[79] Simic causes both since in writing this poem, the moments of inspiration and the apparition of illumination are presented as the poem itself. The threshold is the new beginning and connects with the use of the bride metaphor in the second couplet. The 'light' at this moment is ambiguous, since a fleshyness is ostensible in the third couplet 'Touch what I can/Of the quick', the quick being the living flesh or barest essence, touch being a physical possibility and also a minimal and non-encompassing investigative gesture. It is from a place of unfamiliarity, anxiety and doubt that we move to the next stanza coupled with desire and hopefulness. We have encountered the 'light' but we do not know its essence or its purpose. It has the potential for many things in one, as has the tone white. The first stanza is the threshold and tells of the threshold which is an illumination. Schmidt's analysis retains the word 'white', as it transforms through various 'masks'. In this reading the 'white' will be referred to as illumination since it is not a mask but a capability which carries with it all the imaginative movements which occur as the poem unfolds.
The second stanza is another beginning again, only it is now a beginning which comes from the opening which occurred in the first stanza. The opening here is two-fold, an opening for the poet and also through the same process for the reader. This connection is a vital element for the journey made through 'White'. The presence of the 'I' has already been established in the first stanza and continues with 'All that is near,/I no longer give it a name.' This short sentence prefigures that which follows and responds to the first stanza. The sparcity of language is endlessly enacted in the multitude of possibilities encountered within its sparcity.
A voice develops from no longer naming, one which is assured and accepts what is required for the undertaking of this journey. The objects and the imaginative play upon them are placed in the second couplet with an ambiguous ending of three dots signifying their loss. The power of naming has been willfully suspended. We have observed Simic's imaginative play in the 'object' poems which must be reflected in this; we are given an insight on what has occurred in the development of Simic's poetic simultaneously in the development of 'White'. This withdrawal from naming is a removal from words. Although the word still exists in the poem this removal is in the sense Crispin Sartwell gives, 'Words employed poetically not only refer to objects, they are objects, and hence are capable of a relation to the words they signify that I will call, for want of a better term, evocation'
[80]. Words are no longer evoked to name that which is near, which is indeed a poverty in poetry.
With the suspension of naming there is only sensation, 'Now only a chill/Slipping through.' The chill is a sensation which heightens awareness, echoing with eagerness and apprehension. The fourth couplet has prayerful tones where the 'I' is kneeling and asks of the 'it' to be tied to its tail. There absence of naming continues though the 'it' has appeared in the poem with the lines 'When it goes marrying/Its cousins, the stars', alluding to a cosmological connection. The tail could be the tail of a comet which is a different astrological essence but still related to the stars. The marriage of these two cosmological forces reflects the spark of illumination which the poet desires and of a cosmological transformation. The explosion of stars colliding produces a great light and also the birth of many other stars. There is a myth of origins here (as we read in 'Knife'); from the destruction of the two come the many, and all that has been asked is to be tied to the tail, and not essentially part of the scheme of things.
This occurrence brings forth meditations which are a continuation of the journey. Such an event is described by Blanchot: 'That the work is marks the explosive brilliance of a unique event which comprehension can then take over, to which it feels it owes itself as if this event were its beginning, but which it initially understands only as that which escapes it. The event is incomprehensible because it happens in that anterior region which we cannot designate except under the veil of no. Our question continues to be the search for this region.'
[81] 'White' is this search amidst the anterior region and a coming upon its threshold, while trying to comprehend the incomprehensible at this anterior region.
Facilitated by what has gone before, the stanzas which complete the first part of the poem are separate parts which have come from the same happening, each containing different tones and voices, a deepening of the notion concerning light refraction and white light's varying wavelength constituents. In the third stanza we encounter the gift:
Something seeks someone,
It bears him a gift
Of himself, a bit
Of snow to taste,
Glimpse of his own nakedness
By which to imagine the face.
There is an intangible quality to this gift which is given by a 'something' to an unknown 'someone'. This is poetry's occurrence, as Osip Mandelstam tells us, '...poetry as a whole is always directed to a more or less distant, unknown addressee, in whose existence the poet does not doubt, not doubting in himself.'
[82] This gift of white snow is a liquid become solid, its intangible nature temporarily transformed and capable of being passed on. The taste of this solid, frozen water capacitates a vision of the gift-giver, the poet's openness in the wake of the poem whose face can only be imagined. Once again, we encounter the ethical relationship that transpires between the poet, the poem and the reader, illuminating an anxiety on the part of the poet that care should be taken with a poem since it is a gift given of part of the poet himself, and a gift which is always at risk of dissolving, melting away and becoming ungraspable.
The 'it' of the second stanza is questioned, 'If it's a cloud it will move on./The true shape of this thought,/Migrant, waning.' The vaporous quality of cloud is connected with thought. Thoughts are transitory happenings which comport themselves as migrationary movements which lose their glimmer. The cathartic illumination from the second stanza cannot be sustained, but can sustain itself in the gift of the poem.
In stanza four there is a dramatic change of tone from what has come before. This is a story with narrative qualities, the telling of which reveals at the end that it is a past memory, 'Now only that shine, now/Only that lull abides.' This couplet is very cleverly shaped with a play on the sounds of 'lull abides' sounding like lullaby. This transportation through time is in stark relation to the futuristic reaching forth of the previous stanzas which is a movement recognizable in Simic since there is always a connection grounding poetic inspiration in the world, and the experience of the imagination. The child-memory related in the present tense is one of sound and smell or, rather, this is what has become of the event,'...shrill echo' and '...badly-aired' describe the scene in the grocery shop. The question of this stanza's appearance at this point causes some conflict. In the telling of this memory and in affirming that only the shine of the nickel abides, the final couplet denies the four previous. More than the shiny nickel have been inscribed and in the present tense, which ends in a 'now repudiating the sense of given time. This stanza uses a double inscription of time in an effort to edify the imaginative forces at play in the creation of poetry. Inspiration and imagination are important facilitating factors for Simic, 'What all good poetry has in common is the use of the imagination. Imagination, on the other hand, is like the universe of which only a small part has been explored.'
[83] Inspiration or the muse can be viewed here as an aspect of 'White' which underlies its capability to express the shifting movements of voice and tone while not causing a split in the overall poem, what begins the poem and facilitates its existence is also subject for the poem. The aspect of the muse should be regarded as a capability which emerges from within. While retaining this vision the reader becomes absorbed in the effects of each part and with the rich possibilities contained within them. The sense of loss and recuperation is the continuous echo which mirrors the first stanza.
The fifth stanza returns to the prayerful and incantational tones of the second. A new aspect of the bride in the name of 'Sister' appears, moving the connective force which was a joining of choice and request into one of blood relation, a connection which is not one of choice. The sister is also a 'Kind nurse', which continues the prayerful and religious theme since a sister is also a nurse pertaining to nuns as those who first cared for the sick. 'That your gaze/Be merciful,' opens an interesting dimension which moves within the inspirational movement, but 'gaze' also resounds with the aspect of the gift of the poem in the third stanza. The reader is embroiled within the continuation and movement of the poem. A new perspective reveals another aspect of the 'it' in the second stanza, the illumination which comes in sleeplessness, 'Sister, bride/Of my first hopeless insomnia.' In the hopelessness of the sleepless night, this illumination empowers in a caring way, guides and teaches the special song, one with a mythological undercurrent. The fourth and fifth couplets refer to the glass with the star dancing in it which was the muse for the ancient poets, in this we are reflected back to the second stanza where the connection with stars and the cosmos was introduced. Whilst reflecting upon this moment it should be noted that the poem's voice is calling for this event whilst not equating it with the ideas of the ancient poets.
In openness towards this new aspect of illumination a series of questions begins the following stanza. In the second couplet there is a reiteration of the opening lines of the poem, 'There are words I need./ They are not near men.' These two lines consisting of two sentences bring an assurance which is not reflected in the following lines of the stanza. In this search there is a sense of death, the song that is longed for could be a deathmarch, though the answer to this is not yet forthcoming. The lines, 'You bend me, bend me,/Oh toward what flower!' creates a hopefulness in the unknown, since a flower suggests creation and rejuvenation. In this development which is both connective and yet alienating since the question 'Are you anybody/A moonrock would recognize?' has an other-worldly, and once again, cosmological resonance. It would be inappropriate to overstate the sense of anxiety this stanza seems to create. In death there will be a return. The words speak of recreative forces, revealed in the willingness to approach this threshold. In the final couplet, 'Little-known vowel,/Noose big for us all' introduces a significant thread which runs through the poem, the recurrence of the letter 'o' and the number '0'. As is the case for this poem nothing is quite what it seems in immediacy and nothing is ever fully present, except the vast nothing that is everything gone through again and again. This is in keeping with Blanchot's idea of the space of literature; it is in the journey rather than in the desire to reach a place that poetry exists. Blanchot writes of the joyful torment alluded to in stanza six, 'This torment we call happiness, and this arid poverty becomes the bountifulness of inspiration. This laborious, this indefatigable despair is the sheer good fortune or the grace of a gift that requires no effort.'
[84]Place becomes an issue in the seventh stanza, and a new perspective comes with the presence of a 'he'. The allusion to nursery rhymes is played upon by the confusion of the characters. The male is someone like Bo-peep, but has a flute like the Pied Piper. This connection is not a literal one; it should be read in relation to the first couplet, ']As strange as a shepherd/In the Arctic Circle.' This is an out-of-place experience; there are no sheep in the Arctic Circle and therefore no necessity for a shepherd. The imaginative play here introduces a comic aspect: since sheep are white they are more than likely to be lost in the snows of the Arctic. The 'Arctic Circle' is the poem's movement within the whiteness of the title, and the child character, the 'he' is the keeper of the white animals on the white land. Care is needed to ensure the safety of the 'snow-sheep' because the environment is hostile for them. With the introduction of the third person the realm of this stanza is within an outside, from a watcher's view point. 'And he can't get any sleep/Over lost sheep' are lines which reflect the 'hopeless insomnia' of the fifth stanza, but there is a loss of connection with the introduction of the 'he'. This is the knowledge of the illumination not existing as an 'outside' but which comes from within. The omniscient 'he' facilitates our understanding of this.
From the stark whiteness and desolate landscape of the Arctic Circle the next stanza moves to settled areas of the United States. The omniscient perspective of the previous stanza remains, which reinforces a sense of distance in the voice of the poem. With the fourth couplet it would appear that this distancing is a necessary means of survival since, 'There's a trap on the ice/Laid there centuries ago.' There is also an all-knowing sense in which this can be read, stemming from a knowledge which is mythical, since it is through folklore that the happenings of centuries ago are carried down through myth narrative. Mythic language has come to mediate upon the poem, a knowledge from within and yet outside the previous perspectives. The first couplet reads 'Then all's well and white,/And no more than white', which is in opposition to the last 'The bait is still fresh./The metal glitters as the night 'rom the all's well and safety of white there is another aspect which is more sinister. The entrapment in the centuries' old bait is still fresh, negating the passage of time. Bait is the lure, the trap can be seen as it glitters even as the night descends. The night as we have seen is the place or the threshold of illumination towards which the poet is drawn, the 'metal glitters' in a light which is of another source than daylight. This trap is of a mysterious nature, alluding to the trap of civilization as opposed to the open desolation of the Arctic Circle and to the accepted pre-conceived notions which are in tradition.
This approach brings a closeness in which can be heard another religious incantation. There is a song of woe sung by an 'it' which is left unsaid, only hinted at with the line 'Our Lady, etc...' This reflects the previous lines that talk of the sister, bride and nurse. The response to this call is one of withdrawal from the religious theme worked out in this and the last stanza of the first section. This withdrawal is from the mindless incantations of prayer since the line ends in an 'etc...'. We have journeyed somewhere in an awareness that this religious call is a trap, 'You had me hoodwinked./I see your brand new claws' and one in which there are many casualties waiting 'At the spiked, wrought-iron gate/Of the Great Eye and Ear Infirmery'. The eyes and the ears are faculties of knowing; they are that which the poet, the 'I' wishes to transcend and go beyond. The established ritual incantations in religion are seen here as a 'patched-up' fix and not what is sought. The question of betrayal and the desire for purity is linked here with the injured 'old men and women', past poets who didn't go far enough, 'We haven't gone far.../Fear lives there too'. There is an impasse where 'holy nothing/Blindfolding itself' is heard. 'We' hear this through 'Fingertips/Against the white page'. There is a poetic contemplation that hears through the written word a nothing with the capability for opening up old wounds. We are to go by way of the religious call, but go beyond the inevitable injuries and pain of this opening out. Suffering is a necessary consequence in the act of creation. Through mythical experience that is entangled in religious presences there is an ambivalence which is not yet resolved, but a possibility exists for this resolution which becomes apparent near the end of the second section.
The second section begins with a complete change of voice. The first stanza takes the form of questions with a colloquial turn of phrase. The movement forward has stopped as the 'I' apprehends itself and is questioned by a 'you'. This self-reflexivity reveals the whole being of the 'I' as that which is embroiled in the activity of transformation on the threshold of illumination. This grounds the activities so far as more than mind play. The 'you' is part of the 'I', there is a split with the self-deprecting of the self, using names which move from friendly to affectionate to insulting; 'son of a gun', 'loverboy', 'smartass'. In the last couplet there is the 'knife', a hidden implement having the same faculties as encountered in 'Knife'. Throughout this questioning stanza of self-doubt there are answers which have an assurance in them which resonates with a sense of the poet's worthiness continuing into the second stanza. The perspective of self-reflection moves towards another sense of perception. The 'you' looks for a descriptive formulation whilst retaining an element of imprecision. No names are suitable when the creative act is apprehended as one in which the writer finds a power that is another aspect of the self. The writer wrestles but remains pinned down by gravity, tied to the earth. In this the illumination is absent, grounding the poet as a human being and not a character with extraordinary powers. The humanness of the poet is the vital element in the creation of Simic's poetic.'
Repetitiveness and the idea of striving and waiting for the moments of illumination so eloquently expressed in the first part of the poem are continued with the line, 'One has to manage as best one can' being repeated throughout the third stanza. The bafflement and quandary felt at these times is expressed in a voice which is amusingly aware of the human and practical aspects the poet lives with. The memory is not always a satisfactory and dependable capability, 'Who stole my blue thread, the one/I tied around my pinky to remember?'; 'I think my head went out for a walk.'
In these three stanzas everyday existence is foregrounded as opposed to the poverty expressed in the opening stanzas of the first part of the poem. This circularity serves as an enabling factor which drives the poem forth as we encounter again Simic's frustration of the reader's expectations. This is a powerful means of expressing the confusion that emanates from within poetry and its unending possibilities as a communicative entity and a mysterious enlightenment. This section takes us towards the poverty and the beginning again which starts in the fourth stanza when the voice begins to speak more explicitly of the essence of whiteness. In the first couplet, 'This is breath, only breath,/Think it over midnight!' there is an allusion to life and death. The breath is the source of life, and midnight is the in-between of day and night. This in-between is the space of life and death, the faltering between one state and another which must be known, 'It has to be cold/So the breath turns white'. The image of the struck match in its blackened altered state of being used up acknowledges the breath as it passes, in mortality there is the knowledge of immortality.
The question to the mother in the final couplet returns to the female images and particularly the 'Our Lady' discussed above. There is a birth in this space of midnight, but '...who's fast enough/To write his life on it?' Writing on the cold breath that forms a vapor is a transient moment, but the writing of black on white has a more permanent nature which comes through in the next stanza. The song of the poet is a secret which nobody can retain and yet it remains imprisoned. It comes from 'the condemned' and is 'hidden from the jailers'. Only in the freedom of open space can the communicative act be apprehended. Poetry is not entrapment of meaning and it is in the couplet, 'White - let me step aside/So that the future may see you' that the locus of Simic's poetics is brought forth. In the illumination and the threshold of inspiration the future is revealed; it is the movement towards this space which enables the poem. The ambiguity contained in the 'me' stepping aside is a desire to lose the self in this moment of illumination and creativity's dawn. Once again the poem reiterates the poet as human, when the work is done and the 'sheet is blown away,/What else is left/But to set the food on the table,/To cut oneself a slice of bread?' It is the work of the poem to illuminate a hopeful future whilst retaining an essential human and relevant vision.
From the future we travel into the memory again. The unmarked time that is the 'unknown year' is in contrast to the 'algebraic century' in which it is contained. The 'algebraic century' is a century in the time of quantitative analysis, part of the mathematical process in which there is a search for pure truths. This perspective is answered in the final couplet, 'In the hand so wizened/All the lines said: fate.' This is Simic's poetics of chance, where all things are subjected to the unknown quantity which remains beyond the path of reason. In this stanza there is also mention of an 'orphan'. The 'obscure widow' offers 'A tiny sugar cube'; the widow, dressed in black colors to signify the death of her partner is in contrast to the gift of the sweet, white, crystal sugar. The meeting of the two who have experienced loss, the parentless child and the widow share and have been touched by the inescapable which is fate and the unavoidable which is death. This is a sweet and ambiguous gift of knowledge.
The connection of birth, marriage and death which has been a theme throughout the poem, poverty and beginning again and the illumination which is expressed in the first part of 'White' is revisited in the seventh stanza of part two. The coupling is enacted as a marriage ceremony, in this it is also the creation of the poem itself. A cutting through of the '...line/Stretching to infinity' creates a circle, implicit here is a transformation from that which is given and creating something else from it. This coupling and transformation do not finally capture the illuminative spark, the nothingness which is the white of the poem still retains its illusive essence and remains ungraspable, 'Then you may kiss the spot/Where her bridal train last rustled'.
The last three stanzas of the second part of 'White contain a tone of resignation which is not combined with sadness but with a sense of increased knowledge and power. We are returned to earth with the season of Winter and snow taking on a reality in parenthesis to the experience of what has come previously. From this new perspective 'And the sky with its castles and stone lions/ Above the empty plains' we are returned to the a vision which sees with eyes rather than the mind. Echoing once again a relation with Oppen exhibited in the two dimensions of 'seeing'. This is not a permanent separation since continuance is assured by the 'prodigals' and 'explorers' who in their turning in the dark will plant everlasting and immortal 'perennials', though there is uncertainty in the particulars of this experience since the words are framed in the form of a question rather than a statement. The gathering of words encountered before is another aspect of these final stanzas. 'Woe' is reiterated referring to the corporeal barriers to the experience of illumination. The 'their' of the second couplet is a mysterious pluralism not exhibited previously, signifying the plentiful nature of that which is exposed in the approach to the illumination. More pertinently, the ants are the human masses, the anonymous others who do not heed the ethical call of the Other. The penetration of the white ants brings a corporeal quality which is in distinction from the spiritual aspects of the previous stanza. The white on white of the ants in the anthill is seen in a capacity which is not related to vision, since they would remain unseen, they are hidden but they are heard, described as both 'Gravedigger ants./Village-idiot ants'. This description is both mocking and sinister. The busy ants reflect humanity's blind and ignorant march through life to death, never experiencing the possibility of imagining the spiritual aspects of life. This prefigures the next stanza.
The last stanza begins, 'This is the last summoning./Solitude - as in the beginning'. The solitude is the emptiness, 'the last summoning' is also in the 'beginning'. This beginning can be the beginning of the poem or, more pertinently, it is the correct sequence in which the circularity of poetic experience is both beginning and end at once. The aspect of circularity is reinforced by the next line, 'A zero burped by a bigger zero-' it reflects the constancy of the interconnective forces which are the condition for the possibility of the experience and the creation of poetry and the poem. We revisit the 'o' encountered in the sixth stanza, a nothing which contains everything. There is nothing to be produced from nothing which contains an emptiness which causes pain with the line 'ts an awful licking I got'. But from this nothing has been created a poem and a space of another knowledge carved out. Fear where no 'letter' lives is an end and a death, differentiated from doubt which is 'Chinese shadow play'. This doubt is the capability of chance, uncertainty and of faith which leads on to the question, ''Does anyone still say a prayer/Before going to bed?'. This question hangs as the final couplet returns to the unknown quantity of white, 'White sleeplessness./No one knows its weight'. The 'anyone' is humanity in general, questioning whether there is any spiritual essence in this 'algebraic century'. This question hints at humanity's desire for knowledge and truth which can be answered by faith and goes beyond reason and scientific fact. In this question there is a culmination of the inherent religious theme present in 'White'. It is a desire which comes from the spiritual rather than ritual aspects of religion. Beyond the illumination and inspiration experienced in the poetic act there is a quantity which cannot be fully known, a creative power which the poet emulates but cannot capture.
The end of the first part is not the end, since the final section 'What The White Had To Say' is tantalizingly present as perhaps the answer to the numerous questions which have arisen in the experience of white's capability.
The doubleness of knowing and not knowing the 'presence' that is the threshold and light of illumination and inspiration are reminiscent of Theodore Roethke. His poetry contains the desire to approach the space of nothing that is everything. In the poem 'Waking'
[85] the dance of fate and sleep play upon the poet's capabilities, and 'In a Dark Time' there is the play of light and dark which seeks to give expression to the illuminative presence and the mystical visions from where poetry comes. This affinity might place Simic's poetics within a tradition of visionary poetry. Though this would be inappropriate. In Mythologies of Nothing Anthony Libby writes of mystic poetry, 'Nothing is the center, the presence of death is somehow the key, but does that really add up to mysticism?'.
[86] He goes on to argue with reference to contemporary poets:
Most of the modern poets also describe (in some cases experience) some sort of cosmic union which brings revelation, an impression of timelessness, and frequently something like a dark night, but each poet embodies the general experience in his own distinct particulars. Modern mystics tend to imagine descent, immersion, frequently immersion in dark water, as the sign of union.
[87]There is nothing in Simic's 'White' which assumes union in its complete sense. This is evident by virtue of the poem having a response in 'What The White Had To Say'. Giving the 'White' a right of reply offers a sense of its external properties. The illumination is the enabling factor which can be apprehended, but complete connection is not possible nor is it required as was read earlier 'Enough glow to kneel by and ask/To be tied to its tail'. There is a sense of being carried through the transformative power that can be apprehended in the moment of illumination, but that the poet as human, living within the inhabited regions of civilization, remains a person living in society. Simic does not encounter the 'psychic disintegration' of some visionary poets,
[88] since he refuses to ignore the apprehension of the consciousness of the human subject in the world. The mythical use of language in Simic's work is mediated by the use of riddles and the tone of nursery rhymes, together with a sense of the comic. Simic's poetics are sustained by the knowledge of being situated in the human condition and in language, with tones which mock the seriousness of the endeavor. The connection between the thinking subject and the world encountered produce in his poetry a genuine awe for creative capability. 'White' is the translation and mediation of the silence that is human consciousness, and the apprehension of the illuminative spark which comes with this. The mediation of myth in Simic's poetics is bound up with a desire to express the meaning of human existence.
In the second part the 'white' is given voice, and this implies that 'White' can respond in a less mediated way than has been shown in the first section. It becomes apparent through reading this section that all that is contained within the first part is re-visited. It is almost self-mocking since the quotation from Meister Eckhart, 'For how could anything white be distinct from or divided from whiteness?' places in question the impulse of the poem, which is, the expression through various means the nothingness and emptiness that exists before human consciousness in the world. The indistinguishable nature of this experience which is implied in the questioning quote insinuates that the first part has been unsuccessful and was an impossible task from the start. There is also a sense in which the encounter with 'white' has been foiled by the 'otherness' of its appearance. This appearance is an apparition which is indistinguishable but nevertheless known. From this it may be understood that the thing cannot be separated from its thingness, that there is an inseparable co-dependence in which from a different perspective it can be apprehended. Eckhart's quotation helps us understand this. The presence of the voice of 'White' creates an ambiguity and uncertainty in the poem as a whole because it has been given voice. The passage from certainty to uncertainty which enabled the poem's creation is lost in the endeavor to carve out what is and is not the essence of 'White'. We have encountered this poetic self-denial in the 'object' poems which serve to frustrate any idea of reaching a fixed and whole meaning in the poem. But in this particular poem the reading is not enabled by this frustration; something of the poem's essential character and thrust has been lost.
Eckhart's line should be read as a guide for reading this section since the language used creates presences and absences which are in continual conflict and undermine any firm grasp one would wish to place upon the 'I' that is speaking. There is a lack of openness and space in this section as opposed to the spacial form exhibited in the first. The lines are longer and densely packed in a continual movement from line to line without breaks. The tone here is one of authority with an orative voice which continues throughout the section. The 'I' of the second part is named as the bullet which has 'gone through everyone already'. This section is a riddle containing a labyrinth of statements which are unequivocally given in one line followed by opposing statements in the next. Through this maze of words it becomes clear that it will be an impossibility to reach a suitable name for the white. It is a bullet but has none of the solid characteristics of a bullet which can externally tie it down, the 'blood-stained handkerchief' which we keep stays empty, echoing with hints of violence encountered before in Simic's poetry. Though we may call for it and name it, it remains distant yet we read, '...I am nearer to you than your breath./One sun shines on us both through a crack in the roof'. The white is omniscient with a relation to the 'you' which is physical:
Steadily, patiently I lift your arms.
I arrange them in the posture of someone drowning
And yet the sea in which you are sinking,
And even this night above it, is myself.
The 'myself' in this context is interesting, and we may ask why not 'me'? It is in this 'myself' that authority is revealed, a sovereign knowing subject, aware of its creative powers. These powers are the inspiration of the poet, but give no answers to the riddles of the universe. The creative powers command, 'Take a letter' which has vaporous qualities and is like an onion which unfolds itself in layers to disappear. The voice moves from speaking to 'you' and becomes 'we'. The creative power is the 'shadowy mother', but this mother has abandoned us since 'The same old orphanage taught us loneliness'. The ambiguity heightens as we read 'I am the monkey dancing to your grinding -/And still you are afraid - and so'; the creative power is not sovereign, as seemed apparent earlier. Fear is the barrier of the beginning, the beginning that was expressed in the first stanza of the poem.
The voice of mockery encountered often in Simic's poetry returns again with the end, 'That milk tooth/You left under the pillow, it's grinning'. This ritual echoes of childhood when milk teeth are not discarded but placed under the pillow in the hope of a visit from the tooth-fairy, who comes in the night with a gift of a coin to replace the tooth. This implies a maturity and a change which ends the poem while not rejecting the childlike qualities of innocence and hope. The milk tooth is 'grinning', it has been discarded but is a token of childhood with all the hope and innocence it implies. Schmidt sees this end as the 'poet poised at the moment of transformation' and as a 'disfigured Self that White will give him'. The poem has been one of continual transformation, the milk tooth signifies this since a new tooth, a stronger tooth, will grow in its place. The self is not disfigured by the White, to use Schmidt's terms, but the self is the White. The knowledge of which is an enabling not disfiguring factor. Schmidt tells us that in 'What The White Had To Say': '...the 'White' muse representing the American oracular poetic tradition finally descends upon Simic and claims him, and White ends with the poet just about to receive the new self a new self for which he has prayed for so long.'
[89] This statement confuses Simic with the voice of the poem. Since Schmidt has not acknowledged the 'White' as something which comes from within, enabled by the poet, he has had to assume that the 'White' is the muse which descends. The most telling aspect of Schmidt's reading comes in the following sentence when Schmidt talks of Simic's Yugoslavian birth, and the European poetic influences upon him, 'But White shows the central role played by those ambiguous foster-parents Emerson and Whitman.' This implies that 'White' is a poem about the birth of the 'American oracular poetic tradition' in Simic as a poet. This is a misreading of the work's thrust in the service of a reading which favors Bloomian influences. Schmidt tells us it is worthwhile to look at the close relation between Walt Whitman's 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking' and 'White' and observes some very close parallels between them. But, this develops a reading which speaks of death and rebirth, neglecting the imaginative capability as the source of poetry and present as a transformative, re-visioning experience both in creating and in reading poetry. 'White' is a poem which expresses the gift of poetry as it emerges in the poet and is created upon the page. The dual aspect of the transformative nature of this are pre-figured in the quotations which precede each of the two parts. The quotation from Whitman is never answered; it continues the question and opens it up as an investigation of the black on white which is the materiality of the poem on the page and also the substance of poetry itself. The question, 'What is that little black thing I see there/in the white?' is framed in the first part of the poem, the answer remains a riddle as we read in the second part framed by Eckhart's question, 'For how could anything white be distinct/from or divided from whiteness?'. The nature of poetry, and Simic's poetry in particular, is a navigation around these two statements. There is a sense of resignation in the second part, when 'White' is given voice, that although the illumination has been experienced there can never be a complete evocation of this. The voice of 'White' brings an apparent stability which is immediately denied, there can be no unity and stability and no claim to full knowledge. Simic 'disrupt(s) the conceptual economy of language by showing how meaning can fail to coincide with itself; destroying the illusion of signifier and signified.'
[90] The unknown remains unknown as we come towards it and experience the truth of its existence. The impossible approach towards that which will always remain beyond is Simic’s accomplishment in ‘White’.
We remain within the unveiling cosmos and larger picture of a universe created in ‘White’ which has been approached as an experience of knowing within the unknown. The reader feels a knowledge of the unknown which nevertheless remains unknown. There is a fulfillment in this experience which goes beyond knowledge and comes before knowledge. This is poetry’s space created for us to dwell within the sense of approach that borders with the enigmatic divine.
Humanity in the World: The Small in the Large, The Large in the Small.'…this decision which causes me to be outside of being (which illuminates the refusal to be by concentrating it in that unique flash of lightening, the point at which ‘I am’)…solitude may disclose the nothingness that founds "I am".' [91]The world for Charles Simic is a busy, bustling, place, densely populated and teaming with action. Both in the city and in the countryside there exists all manner of experiences, if only we had the sight to see and gave time enough to observe. There is a story in everything, from the simplest object as we have seen and there remains a possibility to express ‘everything’ as expressed in ‘White’. Place and people co-exist; just as the poem seeks a space for the co-existence of the poem and the reader.
In the later volume
Hotel Insomnia [92] we encounter a development of Simic’s poetic which embraces the place of the night. As the title of the volume suggests this is the place where sleep is impossible. In the night whilst others sleep there are those who stay in the place and space of sleeplessness; the visiting guests of insomnia. This ‘night’ and the darkness this conveys brings with it poems concerned with seeking light, the possibility of light and sight and blindness. This has echoes from ‘White’ where the ‘inside’ is explored, and as we have seen in the play of light and dark in seeking an illuminative presence; the transformative power of moments of illumination, the 'White Sleeplessness'. We shall see this theme is explored in various ways together with the idea of timelessness which is an enduring theme of Simic’s work. As we know from our reading so far, every poem’s title guides our reading.
‘The Congress of the Insomniacs’
[93] ends with ‘Sleeplessness is like metaphysics. /Be there.’ At the highest level of abstraction which transcends material reality but is ultimately still reality. This state of being grounded and yet not so is amply expressed in these two lines. It is an affirmation of the idea of sleeplessness which is welcomed as opposed to being a disturbing phenomenon of nocturnal life. ‘Being there’ as opposed to any type of activity is the pleasurable experience of the imaginary. This idea of insomnia is welcome, the activities of the night are embraced almost as if it were a choice of will, a wakefulness which is not an agitation. With this comes an alert response to the consciousness of the night. The wakefulness of the night is the place from where imaginative capability can find its expression.
The poem begins with an ambiguous line, ‘Mother of God, everyone is invited’. This beginning invokes the presence of the Mother of God, as in a prayerful moment before sleep, or perhaps more probably it can be read as an exclamation of surprise at the vast array of insomniacs assembled at a place which is beyond place. There is also a sense in which, at the place of insomnia, a multitude of characters and people can be apprehended. The word ‘invited’ alerts us to the special nature of those who are here, since they are invited. The invitation brings with it a sense of occasion, raising the experience to one which is beyond the everyday. The word ‘congress’ implies an official capacity, a membership, which encourages a reading where we know that this is not a moment of chance. We read this as an act of will and desire, not an uncalled for experience. The insomniacs are from all walks of life; the romantic image of ‘stargazing Peruvian shepherds,’ contrasts with the more harsh image of ‘Old men on sidewalks of New York.’ In these lines we visit those encountered in “White”, the stargazers and the city-dwellers all participate in the creative possibilities. The childhood fantasy of toys coming alive at night is invoked, the ‘doll with eyes open’ has the capacity to hear and listen to the rain by the sleeping child even if it does appear inanimate. In the congress of insomniacs all possibilities are conceivable, this is the open space of the imaginary. The image is one of any other gathering, unfolding with images as the poem progresses. In this ‘place’, with mirrors on every side, the insomniacs gather. The mirrors transform the sides of the room giving a surrounding with the capacity for reflection. All around this constantly reflecting place, a ‘ballroom’ there is the dance of the imaginary. This possibility is created as we are reminded and grounded in the original place with the line, ‘Think about it as you lie in the dark.’ This reinforces the idea of this being an act of will, a conscious effort to participate in the experience of sleeplessness.
The general feeling of well-being is brought to an abrupt end with ‘Someone will address this gathering yet/From his bed of nails’. Here we have Simic’s capacity for drawing the reader towards the ultimate fruition of his poetic utterance. The bed of nails as a figure for the pain of sleeplessness, but also the bed of nails as the place of highest meditation where the physical senses are overcome with meditation and concentration which can move beyond the physical. And so with the final line ‘Be there’ the poet invites an experience which remains unquestioningly within the experience. And here too we have another cleverly ambiguous moment. ‘Be there’ impels the reader in colloquial terms as an imperative; this is a place and an experience which affords great possibilities if one is willing to allow such an experience. Being there also contains the ‘unsayable’ elements of the experience of Being. We read on in the knowledge that the ‘unsayable’ which hears itself in the night of insomnia will be heard. Being there is a dual invocation; a place and an experience.
In ‘The Artist’
[94] we encounter the creative desire of an artist, but we can also equate this with anyone who endeavors to express the mysteries of life in a creative way. There is a tone which at first might seem to ridicule the artist. Theresa in the poem is said to refer to the artist’s use of candles to light the night in order to paint the sea as a ‘dumb idea’ received from a movie she saw, implying his lack of originality. As the movie has been seen by Theresa, the lack of originality remains as an idea from her, she has previous knowledge of such an activity we do not know if the artist is mimicking or following a personal artistic desire. From the next lines we can discern a tone in the poem which is not in agreement with the idea being ‘dumb’ or as the artist as mimic. The artist is unaware of being watched, engrossed in the activity of ‘Piling one murky color on top of another’ his behaviour cannot be regarded as merely performance. The artist alone on a beach painting wildly invokes ideas of the artists’ madness, ‘Like the devil himself’, desiring to go beyond the natural boundaries and restrictions in pursuit of artistic endeavor and a greater or higher knowledge. The poets ‘madness’ is the source of poetic impulse, a primitive gift for contemplation in ‘another world’. Theresa’s criticisms are swept aside with the words ‘Still, there he was’ Artists seek ways of defying nature, ways of bringing light to the night in order to see and to convey that which cannot under normal circumstances be seen; the hidden and yet always present. The inadequacies of this proposition, the transitory nature of candlelight, ‘The candles on his head flickering/Then going out one by one.’ Do not prevent or dissuade the artist. As we will see when we come to read ‘Matches’ even the most brief flickering transitory light is source enough for the creative imagination to pursue artistic achievement, regardless of those who stand by and watch what might seem to be an impossible endeavor. It is in such a struggle that the artist’s labor bears fruit, reaching its destination, achieving fruition, in the reader’s gaze. There must be a light from which the artist can perceive and have vision in the dark and the mocking tones of the woman in the poem are gently overcome by the tone of admiration which lets us see the artist, unaware of being seen. The struggle to capture the hidden in poetry is brought to our attention by the artist. The ‘murky colors’ are like the words used to create a poem from that which can be seen in the night, from another less easy light to write by. It is here that things can be seen differently and from which we can apprehend the world a new light. For Simic, this is the goal towards which every artist must strive.
As in ‘The Artist’ the theme of man-made light and the transitory nature of the flame is once again explored and developed in ‘Matches’.
[95] The darkness of the night, the dreams which come as scenes of the mind, inexplicable and mysterious are explored. Here we experience the dark and the light. The dreamlike qualities of the poem are expressed in the clipped language, together with the clipped images afforded when the darkness is broken with the brief light from a struck match. The brief light brings brief glimpses from within a recurrent dream where the poet can never have time enough for full vision. The one who holds the light; the struck match with the fire from which light emanates, is never seen. Power is one step removed and those things which can be seen are only afforded the most brief moments of vision. There are echoes here of themes we have seen explored in the ‘object poems’ and in ‘White’. The activities of the dreamer are unknown to himself, he lives in shadows in this dreamlike world but there remains the possibility for the most incongruous of things. The capabilities of the imagination are shown here to be brief possibilities over which we have limited power; this is the poetic imagination’s great possibility, journeying beyond moments of reason and possessing another power if we surrender control. In this state the possibilities are endless:
I could be dining
Making a snowball
Having my teeth pulled
By the pope in Rome
Or running naked
Over a battlefield.
The lines are cleverly placed to reveal the surprising and incongruous situations at their most effective. The unfolding of the events with perfect timing cause the meaning to be most powerfully conveyed and as always with Simic we are not disappointed. The street of dreams can only offer brief moments of vision, the poet can never fully grasp all the possibilities and yet there is something pleasurable conveyed in this excursion of the imagination, no anxiety is expressed by this nocturnal journey into places (which are not fixed places) of the mind. This is Simic’s comfort with the tools of the poet, he is at home with the unknown and at home with the sense of not being entirely in control of the imaginations activities. It is in this place that one meets oneself and in the reading of the poem we too encounter the imaginary place where we can ‘Be there’.
The night is the artist’s home. The nocturnal place beyond and outside time, ‘Whoever devotes himself to the work is drawn by it toward the point where it undergoes impossibility. This experience is purely nocturnal, it is the very experience of night’
[96]. In ‘Romantic Sonnet’
[97] we hear the poet give praise for nocturnal experiences, expressed in the beautifully evocative, ‘Evenings of sovereign clarity-’. It is expressed as a ritual of communion in remembrances of childhood happiness. The loose sonnet form conveys the incantational mode of address and supports the soft internal rhyming of a song of love for the past. As always with Simic this is not all; there lies within the poem a poignant address to happiness which reads like a riddle:
Happiness, you are the bright red lining
Of the dark winter coat
Grief wears inside out.
The other side of happiness, the underside, is grief. Happiness is the bright inner lining of a winter coat, worn with the inside out. The inseparable qualities of happiness and of grief in remembrances is beautifully expressed in these three lines. The under side, the inside of this happy, fond remembrance is a grief of which we learn more with the final tercet. It is the overcoat of grief, happiness covers grief and keeps it warm, as in a winter coat, wearing the bright lining on the outside and covering over grief with an inseparable quality and duality. As we have become accustomed to in reading Simic’s poetry, the final tercet opens up in a revealing moment. The poem reveals that it is the self who remembers with the qualities of grief and happiness; time possesses ‘long insomniac’s nails’ upon which the poet chews. The nails remain long whilst being chewed upon expressing the interminability of time and the capacity for remembering. The ‘insomniac nails’ return to the theme of sleeplessness, a productive sleeplessness with a capacity for production and the source of the poets work. Here we see it is not the poet himself who takes credit for the production, but time and past experiences. We know this from the doubting, questioning aspect of the lines:
Was I that skinny boy stretched out
In the field behind the house,
His heart cut out with a toy knife?
Was I the crow hovering above him?
The self has become two in the remembering. The poet no longer knows if he was the imaginative child or the crow hovering over him. In this questioning we hear the poet try to make sense of the past but showing no anxiety over the questions this produces. Mingling the happy domestic scene with the sinister aspect of the crow, the heart cut out with a knife (although this is shown to be an imaginative game), reflects once again the theme of grief and happiness. The duality of the poet strives to gather the child of the past and the crow who watches the child of the past in an evocation of imaginative memory, losing a sense of the ‘self’ in the process. The ‘heart cut out’ is the inevitability of remembering, even if it has been with a ‘toy knife’; the exposed heart is part of the essence of remembering and of poetry.
The conjunction of grief and happiness can be seen in poems which have a wider view. From the same volume we read poems which take humanity as their subject. The poet writes for us the consequences of our lack of humanity. In ‘War’ we have a poem which takes an individual action as its subject and yet includes a pleading for our shared liabilities and responsibilities as members of the human race. The title may seem ambiguous when we read the first line of the poem, but all is revealed in the unfolding of this short poem. The lines are clipped and the poem consists of only three sentences which gather together a multitude of images in each word expressed. The woman’s finger ‘trembles’, it is cold as winter sets in with the first snowfall. The apparently factual language, which reflects the sparse, factual experience of reading a list of names, conveys the heavy weight of death and with the final line ‘All our names are included’, the cold truth arrives in a harsh and shocking manner. Such a simple statement, heavy with impact, leaves the reader with the deeper implications of its deceptive simplicity. We are all casualties of war, all our names appear on the list. This poem shows Simic’s capacity for taking us into his world and showing how we are all part of human nature, we are all responsible, without ever saying so in explicit terms. The reader reads under the implications of the ‘we’ in the list of names in a moving and shocking end. The private action of the woman has become something we all share; Simic brings us towards the list as both victim and perpetrator. Having introduced this thought to the reader, we are left to ponder the consequences of this truth. The poem produces the possibility for this thought; opens up a space where we are unable to turn away from truth. The ambiguity insists upon a response which inevitably must once again become personal.
In ‘Street Scene’
[98] we have another aspect of inhumanity, though perhaps it would seem on a smaller scale it is in fact simply a less ‘official’ scale of human neglect. The poem shows us a development of the same theme in a different scene. We have moved from the large scale aspect of war to smaller scale inner city life where there are casualties of a different nature. Aspects of blindness are introduced by the blind boy in the first line. His appearance causes the poet to dwell upon humanity as he sees him blind, little and carrying a sign pinned to his chest. The great achievements of landing on the moon in ‘This strange century’ is set beside the horrific line ‘With its slaughter of the innocent’. Technological capabilities and the adventure of discovery pales beside the truth of history, conjuring thoughts of war which have been fought in this century at the cost of innocent lives.
The poet and the boy who cannot see him are strangers in a strange city. The poet is lost and the boy is helpless and yet the poet states that the boy is ‘…waiting for me’. The boy waiting points towards Simic’s poetic belief in all things being there, waiting for the poet to create and make of them a sense for existing within the world; a predestination which he answers. The idea of human responsibility has been enlarged from the previous poem together with the poet’s work as poet. Simic remains faithful to his grounding of human spirit, and the poet’s answer to this call. The poetry puts everything in question.
The innocence of the child alludes to something more sinister. The child is ‘too small to be out begging alone’ and yet in a world where we can journey to the moon, helpless children are begging on the streets. The image of the child removing the rubber doll’s head from out of his mouth and his lack of speech exemplify his helplessness and childishness. The child chews on a broken toy as a symbol of his lost childhood and the absence of the innocent play of child. The toy has become a source of comfort whilst being a symbol for the child’s lack of voice in an adult world.
As with ‘War’ the reader is left to ponder what the sign pinned to the blind boy’s chest might say, why it is there at all - a sales board perhaps for a local store, a religious tract or perhaps ‘feed me’. Being blind, the boy would have been unable to write the sign or read what it says, we share this with him and are drawn into his situation. The possibilities for communication are lost, the sign remains unread, the child does not speak and the eyes of the child and the poet cannot meet to convey a communication in silence. This adds to the helplessness of the child, but brings with it a helplessness, together with a power ,in the poet who writes with words and language to read a larger picture as opposed to the particularity of the child’s situation. Simic’s capacity for writing the unread, for speaking the unspoken is exemplified in this poem.
The reference to war in ‘Street Scene’ is much more stated but firmly linked to ‘War’. We are left with a view of lost humanity, we are implicated in the actions regardless of whether we are personally involved in any of the action. We are made to face the truth of lost childhood, the pain of suffering and neglect, the sorrow of loss from the smallest to the largest act. In the minute, we see the larger implications, in each situation. Simic shows that all things are connected; as people living and experiencing life in a singular way we are shown our forgetfulness of our connections and our responsibilities toward each other. By virtue of his ability to understate, to write the ambiguity and confusion of human existence, the reader is made to work as a reader of the poetry, we can never stand outside, but must be a full participant. The consequences of such are inescapable. The noncommunication of the sign which remains unread, is unreadable by the one who bears it, is the irrefutable truth of our participation in society and alludes to our blindness in the face of truths. The sign hanging upon the child who cannot read, who is incapable of reading, who has eyes but cannot see, creates an endless possibility for the reader. An absence occurs which loses us (as the poet is lost in the city) in its midst. There is a state of being lost within our loss which grounds us and takes us simultaneously.
The title of 'Hotel Insomnia' invites us to be wakeful in our sleeplessness. The public abode where those who visit may attend with a wakefulness in the night. It is in this space where we can escape a slumber and move towards seeing in the dark. Writing on Mallarmé, Blanchot writes, 'The commonplace, from whose usage Mallarmé desperately fled, has precisely this defect of not offering a strong enough barrier against facts, things, what we see, what we hear. It does not distance us enough; it does not create real absence'.
[99]Simic’s poetry manages to create absence by taking us across the border of the everyday through the everyday. The language of the poetry we have just read creates this capability by transgressing the ‘everyday’ and moving towards an inexhaustible space of possibilities in the time of sleep. This sleep which is wakeful since it is a suspension of the time of action and moves towards the time of being. Having been dislocated from the safety of places we know we come to see in a place where we are lost.
In ‘My Quarrel With The Infinite’
[100] there is an expression of the poet’s experience of the experience we have found within the poems we have read, but not so overtly stated. In this poem we read of what might at first seem opposing moments. The title shows this endeavor has not been without its conflicts. We have been reading through this journey of insomnia and now we understand that we were going nowhere. There is no goal for this journey, no place to rest and no time in which it will end. The ‘infinite’ continues as the unencompassable moment which cannot be grasped. It is that to which we move towards as an impossible impossibility. The poet speaks of the pleasures of the journey, the ‘fleeting’ which is an experience of a memory. There is never a ‘first’ time since it has always already happened in a time beyond time. In the second stanza we move from this non-physicality towards an aspect of the infinite as ‘light’. The ‘light’ is addressed (we have encountered this before in our reading of ‘White’) as ‘unsayable in your splendor’ with a voice of humility from where we move to the next lines which read, in an entirely different tone, ‘A lot of good you did to me./You just made my insomnia last longer’. Having experienced the infinite which called upon the poet with a tap on the shoulder, the time of insomnia increases. This experience, though the poet might appear to be complaining, is shown to be one of wonder as we read the next stanza. We are reminded of ‘The Congress of the Insomniacs’ and the indeterminate nature of this experience. As the poet experiences ‘the Spectacle’ there is a sense in which the experience is not without discomfort. We read:
Secretly ruing the fugitive:
All its provisory, short-lived
Kisses and enchantments.
A sense of loss for the escaped moments which occur in poetic creation is evident, the not so substantial and yet attractive moments which facilitate and comfort the poet. The experience entails a wakefulness which doesn’t have the relaxed comfort experienced with previous poetic visitations. This wakefulness which lengthens insomnia makes a ‘new day’ break has an ‘unsayable’ quality which has been conveyed in its lack of being stated. The day is ‘breaking’, a word which holds within it uncomfortable overtones and reflects the lengthened insomnia which breaks the day.
The figure of the crow which we encountered in ‘Romantic Sonnet’ returns. The scarecrow is successful in ‘directing’ the traffic of crows, not frightening them, with their shadows being directed too. The bird which has wings to fly and go to places beyond human possibilities conveys a sense of release, the shadow reflects this imaginary possibility. The crow has a place in various mythologies. For the North American Eskimos the Crow Father is said to have been the creator of vegetation, animals and humans from clay.
[101], In Greek mythology the crow is an oracular bird and is symbolic of long life.
[102] The multi-layered meaning which develops from the figure of the crow creates many possibilities which would be fitting for this poem, without finding a definitive meaning or guessing at intention. The poem calls upon the hidden sources of what we might know, or have known, to receive from the figure of the crow something which has deeply mythical resonances. There is a breaking through which comes with the light’s invitation if one is willing to accept the loss of ‘short-lived’ enchantments. This is the source of a poetry which has removed the stability of the known, attractive for poets though it may be, for a more menacing journey.
Living In and Through NatureThe idea of place, as we have explored, is not a fixed space in Simic’s poetics. Place is not where we rest but is an expression of the mystery of our existence. The objects, cities, streets, landscapes all emerge in the poetry as the spring from which discoveries can become imaginative capability without closure. The world, and what we experience and see by virtue of our existence within the world are, as we have discovered, important to the Simic’s poetry. The double capability of at once causing the familiar to become unfamiliar and the expression of the wonder of existence are strongly present in many of the poems. The poems we will consider from the collection
A Wedding in Hell are related in their subject matter and contemplations to the ‘object’ poems. A consideration of natural phenomena provides another view not far removed from the objects we observe in the everyday. The imaginative capability takes as its subject aspects of the world, existing around and seen with fresh eyes, they are the source for poetic consideration.
In ‘Late Arrival’
[103] we read in the first lines ‘The world was already here,/ Serene in its otherness’. In this poem we experience the considerations of the poet regarding a ‘you’. This encourages a sense of being one step removed and reinforces a sense both of belonging and yet not belonging. This develops into an idea of strangeness and posits our existence in the world as transient; as if visitors to a strange place and only passing through. This duality of belonging and not belonging gives the poem a softly mysterious quality perfectly in tune with the considerations the poem takes as its subject. Describing the world as ‘serene’ offers a view of the world removed from utility, having an everlasting quality beyond our apprehension of it, a sense of aloofness and a sense of the divine.
The ‘you’ the poem addresses cleverly includes both the reader and the poet making the experience more universal and inviting the reader as an active participant in the events, something we are by now accustomed with in Simic’s work. The world ‘took you’ as a stranger arriving late. The poem creates the sense of being a stranger or an alien in the world. This experience is perfectly invoked; the singularity and aloneness of the stranger is teased out by expressing the condition of this aloneness in the line, ‘To where no one awaited you.’ To be alone is to know that no one waits for you, that no one knows you have arrived. This is a desolate idea and yet there is a comfortable sense of being in the world made more explicit in the lines which follow.
The next stanza gives the location of the ‘you’ a more specific place. ‘You’ lost in the maze of streets in a drab, not remembered town. There is nothing special or memorable about this location on the outside, but the poem imbues it with a special quality because of ‘you’ being there. In the search for a place to stay we find Simic adopting a now familiar theme of ‘place’. Our existence as strangers in an already existent world is something to feel comfortable with. There is a belonging in strangeness and a comfort in being with the self. The new experience is not completely new since there are already people in this town with the maze of streets. The place of the self, or watching the self being in a place is the thought this poem communicates bringing us with it. A space has been carved out where existence and the possibility of it as a stranger in the world is an enlightening experience.
With the third stanza the impact of the ‘aloneness’ is joined by the sense of ‘you’ being with oneself. Selfhood is understood ‘As if for the very first time’ caused by the physicality of the sound of footfalls in the street. To hear one’s footsteps confirms the reality of this experience. This is expressed with a sureness which unravels with the introduction of the church clock. The clock has stopped, and yet its appearance acknowledges the existence of time without, and also, within time. This place where ‘you’ find yourself is beyond time and yet it does not deny time’s existence.
This aspect of time is subtly developed by the introduction of ‘afternoon sunlight’. Man-made mechanical time has stopped but natural time continues. This goes further with the line ‘Two modest stretches of infinity’. Natural time stretches before ‘you’ as you stop beneath the clock that has stopped. There is another time where ‘you’ can ‘wonder’. This wondering is the poet’s place, it is the place of the poem, here time exists and stops simultaneously. ‘You’ cannot remain in this place forever, as Simic has shown us in the poetry we have been considering, we must return to real time, we must remain in and participate in the real world. And so, after the wondering, the last line reads ‘Before resuming your walk’. Awareness of this ‘late arrival’ awakens the possibilities of touching upon being beyond the regulated and interactive responsibilities of being in the world. Both are necessary truths, one hidden and the other revealed by remembering the ‘strangeness’ of being in the world. This known and yet forgotten truth is perfectly expressed whilst remaining fixed in a street, in a town, in the world.
The meditation of being a stranger in the world takes on a more personal note with the poem ‘What I Overheard’
[104]. The concept of time is one of ‘summer’s idle time’, the lazy time of growth where one can dwell in the product of nature. Becoming immersed in nature and the creative forces which continue in nature’s cycle takes the poet away from human interaction and into the natural world. We are eavesdroppers in the world of nature. The experience of idle time produces within it a knowledge of nature’s busy activities. The poet takes the opportunity to ‘overhear’ nature being busy, the poet has entered into another world or space which simultaneously exists with his own. This pleasurable experience causes him to stop before a kiss to listen ‘To a bee make its rounds lazily’. This is not in the form of a distraction but is a choice made by the poet and which develops into overhearing nature communing and communicating with itself. A connection between nature and humanity has been created only in the poet’s stopping to overhear. Once again Simic reminds us of the existence of things which we have become accustomed to or whose existence we have forgotten to remember. The mystery of the familiar has been exposed, we can go no further than this. As participants in the world we can also be excluded, by virtue of forgetting to watch and see and hear. The wonder of the natural world is conveyed in a complex simplicity, foregoing human pleasures for the sake of viewing another kind of existence, the poet experiences another kind of pleasure. The poem beautifully conveys both the joys of being human and being in the world.
In ‘Leaves’
[105] this knowledge finds perfect expression where the lovers and the leaves become intertwined as inseparable reflections of each other. There is a meandering tone to this poem which reflects the need to take time to watch, as the lovers do, the beauty of leaves and their reflection of nature. The words used deny any possibility of separating the activities of the leaves and those of the lovers. All are at home in nature and the poem makes a transportation beyond the merely visual. The leaves have movements which are ‘unaccountable’ and ‘unreasonable’ in their movements which are singular although they are attached to the tree and become in their gathering a ‘whole’, the possibility for shade. In the third stanza we catch the poet questioning himself which offers an enlightening insight into the mind of the poet. Catching himself questioning the leaves he abruptly comes back from the journey where nature and the leaves have taken him. He wonders at his thought which has individualized the leaves, given them each a human sense of being. ‘One leaf in a million more fearful,/More happy’ is a possibility both posed and questioned. No answer is given, the poet continues to rest, the oak tree continues to cast ‘deep shade’; in it’s possibility for producing thoughts of the great in the small the poem reaches its decisive moment. The pleasure comes from this possibility and creates a possibility for love where the individual and the one can join while continuing to be individual. We learn lessons from contemplating nature. In this poem there are echoes of poems we have previously considered; where we are invited to go ‘inside a stone’ for example. The imaginative play in language where we can journey beyond the thing in itself and contemplate its ‘thingness’ is developed further here. The poet decides to remain on the outside, can only dwell on the outside, dwelling within the shade of the tree and its changing appearance caused by the change in the light. The admonition, as the poet pulls back from the imaginative play upon the leaves, grounds the poem, whilst taking it beyond this grounding. All remains, having the appearance of being unchanged, regardless of the poet’s visionary contemplation upon them, but it is the reader and the one who views who can achieve the transformation and the sense of going further into the aspect of things.
The theme on the contemplation of nature and concepts of time find a resting place (for the moment) in ‘Romantic Landscape’
[106]. We find here the world of nature in its beauty and mystery. We find here also the expression of helplessness the poet feels in the vast cyclical infinite of life in its progression and our experience of it. This poem is a whisper in the void to the future and the possibility of a future. The other night is described by Blanchot, ‘It is what we sense when dreams replace sleep, when the dead pass into the deep of the night, when night’s deep appears in those who have disappeared…the forgetfulness which gets forgotten. In the heart of oblivion it is memory without rest.
[107]The thought of time passing has become real time, but also develops into another sense of time simultaneously, and causes a sense of grief. There is a suffering in the passage of time and we must read on to discover what might cause this grief and suffering with time. Here too we return to aspects of inside and outside considered in many of the ‘object’ poems. The solitude of the deepest self is as shadowy as our perception of the world and nature. There is a deep conviction expressed here which is a recurrent theme in Simic’s poetics. There is no escaping and yet no fathoming the deepest moments of thought, the deepest contemplations of being in the world.
Reflecting upon nature, the trees and the meadows, there is still the possibility of conveying something other in the world which is beyond words, beyond and yet capable of expressing itself. Images of natural beauty unfold with a tone which is more sublime than romantic; there is a sense of something sinister. This is in keeping with the opening lines with the grieving ‘…to suffer/At the thought of time passing’. The contemplation of natural beauty holds within it a sense of sorrow, melancholy and fearfulness. The appearance of the trees have a majestic quality in their stillness expressed as seeming to be ‘afraid of themselves’ which results in an idea of some other quality the trees possess. It is the ‘thought’ of time passing from which the poet suffers; trees have an ancient quality which can span many human lifetimes and so they have a mysterious capability which we cannot comprehend.
The second stanza is written with language which flows around the sounds of ‘s’ and ‘r’. This provides a tone filled with awe, something which can be felt in the sublime sight of a ‘radiant sunset’. We stand before a vision and outside of this vision which develops over two lines only to dramatically end with the first half of the third line, ‘And then it’s over’. From here the tone changes, in keeping with the ‘grief’ introduced with the first stanza. To the observer this vision of sunset has the qualities of ‘Tragic theater’. Time’s passing, expressed in the beauty of the sun going down and the day ending is tinged with beautiful sadness. The natural movement of our solar system, out with our control, which marks the passage of time. The ‘red’ of the sun is written as ‘blood’ and followed by the black of night in ‘mourning’ colors. The birds have respect for this event at which even they ‘fall silent’. This romantic landscape exemplifies life at its end, beautifully coming to a conclusion in the last stanza of the poem:
Spirit, you who are everywhere and nowhere,
Watch over the lost lamb
Now that the mouth of the Infinite
Opens over us
And its dumb tongue begins to move darkly.
There is a prayerful tone, a tone in humble recognition of something other, ‘Spirit’, existing beyond and before the sunset, or the end of the day. The night is the ‘mouth of the Infinite’ opening over us in the night in an ‘everywhere and nowhere’ that is the place of the night. The innocence of the lamb has echoes of Christianity with echoes of Jesus as the ‘lamb’ of God. A sense of freedom is created in this vision of the night with the mouth of the Infinite which ‘opens’ over us, it does not close. This is an experiential condition rather than a place where speech is silent and we experience the dark moments of the ‘Infinite’. This has an unending aspect in contrast to, and outside the mark of time. There are two places in this consideration of time, being both beyond and within it. This resonates with some of the ideas we explored regarding the poetic condition, sleeplessness and the night as the place of poetic creation. The idea of death and ending hinted at throughout the poem are in keeping with this experience of another night in which there is not sleep, but poetic vision and creation. This ‘other’ night is a place of silence, not easily encountered by the poet, the sublime and yet fearful tone at the beginning of the poem bears this out. Let us remember that poetry is an opening which we as readers encounter, this poem request an openness and not a closure to facilitate meaning. The possibilities of death, re-growth and poetic creation are all present here simultaneously for us to make of it what we will, not to close it up but to unite with it in an experience which contains (whilst not containing) and facilitates a future.
We visit once again the place and the space of insomnia in the poem ‘The Church of Insomnia’
[108]. This prose poem has, as we can read from the title, the familiar echoes of religion we have previously encountered. There is a strong element of riddle and play which refuses any fixed possibility of meaning, increasing the poem's power. The church is ‘of insomnia’. A church is a place of worship, a body of people who gather together under the same belief or doctrine. We are positioned as readers to understand the implications of this word ‘church’ before we read on. There is a huge congregation in the dark. The play on the word ‘dark’ reflects meanings of both ignorance; being ‘in the dark’, and the night; the place of insomnia since insomnia is only possible at night. There is a strong sense of unknowing, of being without knowledge. The altar, the place of worship in insomnia’s church is fittingly ‘a bed’. This confirms in a strong sense the ‘real’ sense in which this situation is grounded, something in Simic’s poetic we are by now familiar with. The works of Jonathon Edwards are read in the sermon. The particularity of naming points to the work of this colonial American theologian whose work embraced ‘the ineluctability of determinism’
[109]; it is impossible to struggle against the proposal that human action is not free, external forces act on the will, a force over which we have no control. There is an absolute inevitability that all events have cause of some kind, the mystery of the location of what the ultimate cause might be, remains close to the heart of much of Simic’s poetry. This quite explicit reference opens up a number of possibilities for our reading. We read in the next sentence, ‘If you listen hard you’ll hear the pages being turned, the ash of his cigarette fall into the abyss.’. The pages can be heard turning and the cigarette burns; as the reading of the pages occurs and they can be heard turning, the product of tobacco burning in a cigarette is ash, nothing is isolated but all is connected if one looks and listens carefully enough. Falling into the abyss, which is absence, is the product of this experience. Just as ash is the product of burning; the transformed nature of the tobacco in the cigarette. This occurrence is also our possibility as reader, there is cause and effect in all things. The insomnia is the condition in which the poet, the poem and the reader linger; being awake to the possibilities of and being transformed by the power of poetic creation. Those who are without sleep, or are awake to the night must hear from the altar that is their bed (once again grounding this imaginative play with the idea of a real experience, which is the space and place of sleep and of sleeplessness). The sense of sacrifice is introduced with the bed as an ‘altar’. This experience is not one from which our poet takes flight, the final sentence reinforces this with the words, ‘The cat with the mouse in its mouth is merely passing through’. The sacrificial and the transient combine here in a circular movement where the ‘passing through’ reflects the ash falling into the abyss. The insomniac must succumb to the inevitable, is caught within an inescapable situation, and this is conveyed in an accepting almost pleasurable tone. This poem is not simply considering the condition of sleeplessness but is striving to carve out the space of this experience which is almost like a game. This description can also convey the act of falling asleep, of dropping into the abyss, which is also an absence. The cat and mouse game which always has the same outcome, involves a certain predatory implication. The idea of sacrifice, in which one keeps what one gives up, is vital for understanding Simic’s poetic achievement. The cat and the mouse are the condition of this experience where there is a ‘giving up’ to the altar of poetry involving an element of death in life. The playful element of this cat and mouse game should not be lost in our reading. A double voice of playfulness and seriousness manages to convey the serious nature of this poem in an open and approachable way.
We meet uncertainty in this poem. This uncertainty is the condition in which we find the locus of poetic capability which resonates in the hints at determinism, free choice and pre-destination we find in ‘The Church of Insomnia’. There is no possibility of finding any fixed belief or certainty in this poem. What has been considered is the possibility of possibility. As is always the case, and one of the pleasures of Simic’s poetry, we are left with a sense of having touched upon some unknowable excursion which has no decidable beginning or end. There has been, in the opening up of possibility, the imaginative play of forces which leave us with an experience which is both unaccountable and close to our sense of self, existing in the world around us.
Contemplations of the Mystery
‘And because our languages have a future tense…a subversion of mortality…men in whom language is in a condition of extreme vitality, are able to look beyond, to make of the word a reaching out past death.’[110]The desire to unsilence that which is silent is not an endeavor to speak. Words are used by the poet to make speakable the unsayable as an emergence from silence. This paradoxical proposition is made possible by the conjunction of word, line and rhythm in language. All congregate on the page and produce the possibility to express without recourse to plain statement. The force and power behind poetic language is the constantly growing and unceasing capacity for speaking, communicating and conveying the full silence of the sublime. The sublime is unpresentable and yet knowable. It can be conveyed in words of poetry only by a capacity to move towards the edge of a ‘space’, to show this and be in this. The sublime is always outside possibilities, it is where the impossible speaks.
In the poem ‘Mystics’
[112] there is a call from the poet in search of something lost. The tone is quiet with a humble whisper offered to those who can help. The question of this lost something is ambiguous from the beginning of the poem; to have lost something assumes prior possession of it. The poet understands this and we read in the second line, ‘If it was ever, however briefly, mine’. The search begins by addressing what one might assume to be the most improbable of sources; this should not surprise us now that we have come some way in understanding Simic’s poetic force. The old man and the child are asked to help, the poem addresses them as ‘you who may have found it’. The old man is in possession of a spiritual knowledge, pointed to by his praying action. The child too seems to possess an inner knowledge ‘drawing a secret room/And in it a stopped clock.’ The child is a figure of innocence and the old man wisdom. (The ‘possession’ should be read as something which cannot be entirely ‘possessed’, it is beyond materiality, the substance of which is developed as we read.) The ‘stopped clock’ points to a concept of time in which time is not kept, it is beyond time in the sense of ‘after’ time and beyond the mechanical, human keeping of it. This adds to the poem’s mysterious tone and offers the old man and the child to us as those with another kind of knowledge.
The second stanza moves to a wider audience with the first two lines, reflecting the ‘mystics’ of the title. The ‘hints and ‘omens’ reveal the nature of this truth as a hidden and mystical knowledge, ancient, in the resonance of the words. The idea of ‘place’ is linked with this in an ambiguity of movement from the ‘place’ of truth and the ‘place’ of the poet. There is concern that the room, with its familiar appearance of a lived in room of the twentieth century, is not suitably sanctified. The silenced lovers on TV, together with the unattractive and rather run down aspect of the room figured by the cockroach on the wall, make it seem unsuitable for the ‘place’ of revelation. There is distraction for the poet too in, ‘I could hear the red faucet drip.’
The third stanza starts as a fresh breath, lifting the tone to a more loud and anxious voice:
Or else restore to plain view
What is eternally invisible
And speaks by being silent.
The oxymoronic aspect of these lines reflects the impossibility of the poets request. To view what is ‘eternally invisible’ and to ‘speak silence’ is the quest of the poets. A poet endeavors and desires to speak with words and language to reveal and speak what is beyond the everyday usage of these terms. The sublime moment of revelation and the idea of sacrifice emerge once more in the final lines of this stanza and the ‘true need’ of the poet expressed in the final stanza. There is an overt use of the figure of Christ as a symbol of sacrifice, described in detail in the last line of the third stanza, ‘With a long bloody nail in each palm.’ The pain suffered in the pursuit of truth is made plain here and with the words ‘panhandling/on the altar of the storefront church’ we have a wonderful assembly of meaning. ‘Panhandling’ is an adjective used as a verb in this context with an ambiguity of meaning - begging; vagrant or profuse; reckless. Both are suitable in the context of the excess of sacrifice ‘on the altar’. This altar is situated in a ‘storefront church’ as if an exhibit on display, for sale in a store. These lines convey a desire to restore the more true aspects of mystical experience to be found in the simplest of actions and people as we read in the first stanza. The contemplation becomes a moment beyond words which we understand in the silence which ends the first line of the fourth stanza, ‘In this moment of amazement…’. There is a special kind of knowledge in this statement which has been inscrutable, and yet with ‘…’ something has been spoken, something can be read.
The humble tone in the opening of the poem is now expressed as a condition of the poet. We have been at the moment which has ended, as does the poem, with the final two lines, ‘Oh divine lassitude, long drawn-out sigh/As the vision came and went.’ The words perfectly reflect the condition of the poem and the condition of the poet after the experience. The slow, languorous mood of the poet is drawn out in the ‘long drawn-out sigh’ which for us has been ‘drawn-out’ by the poet’s pen.
We know that the poet’s request has been answered and we are aware that this desire goes beyond the formal and familiar aspect of the religious and mystical experience. This has been a whole experience, physical and spiritual reflected in the ‘chattering teeth’ of the poet. There is an ambiguity in this; the ‘chattering teeth’ propose some other kind of speech has been achieved. There is a possibility for this proposal and as always with Simic’s poetry, room for both possibilities.
In ‘Psalm’
[112] we read a song addressed to the ‘Lord’ in a voice of respectful worship which, it becomes clear, falls incongruously with the content of the poem. Here we read again the ambiguous nature of Simic’s attitude to faith and the Christian religion in particular.
A Psalm is a poet’s song of praise to the divine. The book of Psalms within the Old Testament of the Christian bible contains songs written in the certainty and knowledge that they will be heard, that the addressee will receive the praises set down in song, sure of the existence God. Simic writes for everyone who has questioned the wisdom of a God who can permit the atrocities which occur habitually in the world. We suffer at the hands of ‘madmen/Running the world’. This God is one with a certain kind of cowardice expressed in the words ‘…their claws must have frightened you.’ There is also a sympathetic tone to this, as if the poet understands the Lord’s tardiness, as if the divine being is endowed with qualities of fear, a very human trait. This Lord is not omnipotent but has a fallibility to which we are alerted. This general opening is brought into sharp focus with the second stanza, a real and frightening experience is conveyed by the poet ‘In the darkest corner of my son’s bedroom’. A father’s anxieties for his son in a cruel and mad world are invoked here. There is also a sense in which the poet, in his moment of fear, calls upon God. As always with Simic we have moved from the general to the specific which make the first line of the third stanza. This very powerful line surprises us. Simic’s poetic gift for holding off until maximum impact can be achieved is amply proved by the line, ‘I sought with my eyes, You in whom I do not believe’. This long line is beautifully ambiguous. The ‘You’ is capitalized as in a proper noun, a naming of the divine in whom the poet professes no belief. The poet is seeking with ‘eyes’, looking for a presence and something firmly there. There is a hopefulness perhaps, on the possibility of God being called in the third stanza, denied in the words of disbelief. We read in the next lines, written in tones with a hint of anger, that there is evidence of this non-believed Lord’s existence in nature:
You’ve been busy making the flowers pretty,
The lambs run after their mother,
Or perhaps you haven’t been doing even that?
The last line here seems to question, reflecting the first stanza, what this Lord has been doing.
The final stanza continues to convey the ambiguities of life which are not answered by the existence of God. We also read here the questions which have emerged previously in ‘Mystics’. The outward expression of faith which does not reflect inward belief can be read in the final words, ‘…to make sure/Our final goodbyes were said properly.’ These words show a sense of anger in ‘your divines’ who do not prevent the ‘killer’s sport’ but will be there at the issuing of last rites, making a ‘proper goodbye’. The Psalm has a tone of familiarity but is not one of worship and faith, as we would expect from a poem with this title. There is a sense in which the poet adopts a tone of tolerance and understanding with the God addressed, removing any sense of divinity from the poem. The acceptance of the fallibility of this God leaves a question mark above the poem, leaving the reader with this unanswered question and unresolved issues regarding the benevolence of the God this poem addresses.
The recurrent theme of faith and belief is striking, remaining unresolved in Simic’s poetry. There is a sense in which we hear the poems' search for the answers in the disharmony of life, and question the possibility of a God existing in the midst of this. Simic engages with the prospect of a creator, doubting the possibility and yet striving to make sense of this. In ‘The Story of the Crucifixion’
[113] the imagination explores the story of Jesus’ crucifixion where ‘the roles are played/By our dearest friends.’ This imaginative play develops the story to bring the circumstances closer to experience, with the characters as people we know. The transformative power of myth is invoked by the movement of the characters from unknown quantities to the more particular and more knowable characters of known ‘dear friends’. This reverses the transformative power of myth discussed earlier. The movement from the particular to the universal has been returned to the particular again, denying the transformative play in an endeavor to achieve it. The title which calls the crucifixion a ‘story’ alerts us to the ambiguity of belief, bringing a fictional element, changing the condition of the first story which the poet invokes. There is an ambiguity here; the myth becomes a story where the poet asks us to imagine real people, people we love, as participants. The power of the story has been both increased and decreased in a swerve away from the power of myth. This swerve then permits a greater truth, since we imagine, through the poet’s command, the possibility of really knowing those who have participated in the crucifixion. There is also in this a calling, or an awakening to aspects of existence where there are those who live their lives in pain and trauma, akin to the crucifixion. This is a humanitarian call, a call to awaken us from the myth to the reality, which as we know is one of myth’s great powers. Interestingly, the landscape described in the second stanza is given as much attention as those who are playing the parts. Although it is a Spring day the desolate description, with the ‘bare hill’ and ‘windy day’, reflects the Easter story. There is something of Autumn in this Spring. In the third stanza we once again encounter a sense of dissatisfaction with the people of the Christian faith. There is a reminder of the separation called for in the first line of the poem, to reach for the real sense of this event in history. The ‘solitary figures’ who ‘all want the part/Of the long-suffering Saviour for themselves’ points to a Christian martyrdom in contradiction to the sacrificial element present in the first Easter story. This is reinforced by the ‘rushing clouds’ of the previous stanza, ‘As if to be there first.’ We read a dissatisfaction which is not a reflection of the imaginative play of friends being part of the story. There is no sense of the sacrifice amounting to an act of faith in those who desire the part of the ‘Saviour’, instead we are presented with an element of competition and struggle for the outward appearance of piety expresses the dual nature of Christian faith. The clipped language of the fourth stanza with its spare repetition of the second leaves a desolate and empty vision of the crucifixion.
We have read this struggle with faith in ‘White’. The deeply humanitarian poetry explores the Christian faith and finds it lacking, even when the imagination participates to bring a closer more familiar aspect of the story. One of the most fascinating directions of the poems we have been looking at here is the ambiguity of the presence of ‘God’ or as addressed as the being ‘Lord’. This ‘Lord’, in whom the poet professes no belief, is addressed, and in doing so existence and belief are separated. The proposition of God’s existence is accepted in the poems, but this ‘Lord’ is addressed with anger and cynicism. Here too the authority of God is accepted, but the judgment and acts (or lack of them) are criticized. Aspects of this are made more explicit in the poem ‘Prayer’
[114] where once again the ‘Lord’ is addressed. Issues relating to time, omniscience, omnipotence and belief are explored in a remarkable unraveling which marks Simic’s poetry. The poem consists of two sentences which flow smoothly in their reading, in stark contrast to what is said. The line endings of this poem constantly confuse and refuse an overall meaning; the feelings expressed are always dual:
You who remember nothing
Of what came before,
Who admire the beauty
Of a dead child,
In these four lines we read of a Lord who remembers nothing and sees beauty in a dead child. This is an horrific proposition, teased out and expressed in the final line of the poem. This ‘prayer’ is not one of worship, but questions the possibilities of such a being who is in possession of characteristics which are not admirable in a human being. In the second stanza continues the ambiguity, where games and human suffering are shown to be ‘equally interesting/And incomprehensible to You’. This is a God of indifference, a Lord of abandonment, without beauty or tenderness, a God of incomprehension but who is nevertheless interested in human activities and struggles in existence. This is powerfully conveyed. A God who knows ‘what it’s like to be a tiger,/A mouse in the instant of danger’, is shown to be capable of powerful possibilities and yet we read in the final three lines:
And know nothing of my regrets,
My solitudes,
And my infinite horror of You.
There is an immense sense of pain in these lines, together with undertones of anger which are punctuated by the finality and harshness of the final word, ‘You’ which reads almost as a shout of despair.
The struggle which the poetry displays is one between faith and theology. For Simic there must be a poetic recognition of both which will not end the struggle; this struggle is a persistent grappling with aspects of belief. David Jasper comments, 'Poetry is not theology, but it perceives the danger for theology of assuming a direct stance and a dogmatic assurance which is intolerant of hesitation, doubt or uncertainty.'
[115] In these poems we encounter a deep sense of loss and an incapacity to accept the God of ritual and doctrine. As always, Simic strives for a truth which is immediate, personal, conceivable and one which is capable of touching the soul. The kind of belief which is ‘for sale’ in the ‘storefronts’ will not do, there are too many inconsistencies with the proposition of a God who can be passive in the face of human horror. The presence of a Lord who participates kindly in the lives of humanity is sought and subsequently denied; not being seen to exist. The ‘infinite horror’ of the poet in ‘Prayer’ is one of outrage at a creator who has abandoned the human race and has abandoned each person individually. There is a deep expression of grief in this borne by the fact that this is a prayer. The prayer, like the psalm, is normally a vehicle for worship and thanks in the faithful, Simic uses these as verses of admonishment towards a cold God who is seen not to comprehend human pain. There is ambiguity too, as if humanity has pushed God away, we are left with a desolate prospect of a Godless society, where terror and tyranny reign.
We can recognise unresolved elements of ‘White’ in this. The questions posed in ‘White’ have been expanded in the poems we have been looking at here. There is a greater conviction in the position of the poet and the underlying dissatisfaction has been explored in a more overt manner, but one should be careful in reading these. As we have seen there is no denial of God, but a recognition of distance, not fully caused by the position of the poet. God’s distance is expressed in the dreadful march of human history and the suffering it has caused to humanity. We return to the culpability of humanity, to the idea of choice in which we read explorations for possibilities.
Epilogue
'The poet marks thus the major privilege of language, which is not to express a meaning but to create it.' [116]Simic's poetry makes use of circular and repetitive forces as structure and subject, showing that while we apprehend the universe there is no possibility of completion and unity. We see in his poetry a future which as an infinite possibility, worked through from the 'object' poems, finding a point of convergence in 'White' and then exploding in an exploration of faith, belief and existence in the late twentieth century. Dennis Schmidt explains this sense of the future, '...for every future, even futures past, contains a far more radical sense of being 'not yet', namely a richness, fullness, and legacy that far surpasses what can and does get actualized.'
[117] From the convergence of 'White' the poetry navigates aspects of being human, the mystery of being in a world full of conflict and beauty. There is a celebration and a regretful tone to the later poems, dancing around the possibilities of pleasure and ambiguity. There is a sense of optimism mixed with questions and a deep desire to remain faithful to the confusions and wonder of life.
In comprehending the imaginative capability of Simic's poetics we come to understand that his work seeks a place which is located in the journey of the poem, not as a resting place or in Bonnefoy's 'true place'. The poetry never rests or reaches a goal, it comes to us in a sense of the incomplete as an elucidation of the point that we are like poetry, never at rest and never complete, we are always in process. Our understanding is contained in understanding this. Simic creates poetry which opens up a gap in which we dwell, a gap that is a boundary without boundaries. The meditative play on the condition of God’s presence in the world is poignantly expressed in varying degrees of dissatisfaction, exposing the reader to aspects of faith and belief which are always open to the undecidibility and ungraspable qualities of the existence of an omniscient being.
There is a place where Simic's voyage has a resting place as we have seen in 'White'. There is an underlying motif of religion or faith which is connected with the illuminative experience. There is a hidden grounding or locus of return to this which both connects and separates him from being a visionary poet. There remains an underlying belief in another force which is beyond the poet's illuminative experience in creating a poem. Although his poetry contains this knowledge it is not contained by it.
The circumnavigation through the world of our experience, expressed and opened by Simic's poetry reveals a desire for knowledge and understanding which knows no limits. The reader is required to share this while reading Simic's poetry. In this there is a sharing of the gift which Daniel Schwarz expresses as an awareness, '...of the mysteries of language, the possibility of indeterminacy, disorder, and misunderstanding.'
[118] In 'White' we read a quest towards two places, this 'towards' is a reaching out from a beginning which never ends, the 'place' is on the page, everywhere and everything, though never going beyond the essential aspect which is shared by everyone, our humanity and the responsibility we share in this knowledge. If God’s presence will not provide for the possibilities of human grace, this poetry proposes another way forward. Simic’s poetry displays an everlasting faith in nature and in the goodness of humanity. The poetry is a call for this which the reader answers, faithful to the achievements of poetic language, expressed in a poetry faithful to the truth of existing in an ambiguous world full of uncertainty and ambiguity, seeing with eyes which go beyond what is merely seen.
Charles Simic with David Lehman in conversation March 14th 2007 http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/charles-simic/
FOOTNOTES
