SPEAKER:
(MUSIC PLAYS) This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets Podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Charles Simic. Charles Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. His childhood was marked by the trauma of war. Simic's father fled Italy when Simic was a young boy, and the family spent 10 years trying to follow him out of the country. They weathered failed applications and a few trips to jail. But in 1954, the family was finally granted visas. They packed and left the same day. Simic's family reunited in America and settled in Chicago. In an interview with The Paris Review, Simic said of his experiences growing up, "It took me many years and meetings with some of my childhood friends from Belgrade to realize that I grew up in a slaughterhouse. There's no question that all that had a lot to do with my outlook on life."

Simic was a teenager when he landed in Chicago with no knowledge of English and very little money. He would spend the next 10 years alternating between classes and odd jobs, first in Chicago and then in New York, interrupted only by a brief stint in the Navy. Simic eventually graduated from New York University in 1966. His first book, 'What the Grass Says', was published the following year. Since then, Simic has published collections of his own poetry, translations of Eastern European poets and volumes of essays. Simic is recognized as one of American poetry's most unique practitioners. English as his second language, and his distinctive voice is marked by its dark humor, existential insight, and deceptive simplicity. His work often treats ordinary objects like insects, paperclips and shoes in wildly imaginative ways. Simic's poems are known for imagery that is as bizarre as it is accurate. His work often treats ordinary objects like insects, paperclips, and shoes in wildly imaginative ways.

Simic's work also reveals his voracious appetite for literature. The critic Adam Kirsch, noted of Simic, "He draws on the dark satire of Central Europe, the sensual Rhapsody of Latin America, and the fraught juxtapositions of French surrealism to create a style like nothing else in American literature. Yet, Mr. Simic's verse remains recognizably American, not just in its grainy, hardboiled textures straight out of 1940s film noir, but in the very confidence of its eclecticism." Simic has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Simic has also received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He's been a professor at the University of New Hampshire for more than 30 years and served as US Poet Laureate from 2007 until 2008. The following poems were recorded in 2003, in Key West as part of the Key West Literary Seminar. (RECORDING PLAYS)

CHARLES SIMIC: This is a poem called 'The White Room'. And I had just painted a room, a couple of rooms in our house many, many years ago, and there's nothing more beautiful than, you know, an empty room, beautifully painted. And you sort of hate to bring the furniture back. It's like a clear mind, you don't want all that clutter in it, when the mind is clear and serene, you know, you don't wanna bring your dry cleaning into it and you know, your lunch. So this is what happens, I mean, you sort of take your time bringing in the other furniture, the objects and you first bring a chair, maybe two chairs. You sit down and you look around. And so this is still at that stage. It's a large room with one or two chairs in it. And actually, Emily Dickinson makes a surprise appearance here, too. I didn't expect her, but I don't know, white and whiteness, you know, made association.

'The White Room'. "The obvious is difficult to prove. Many prefer the hidden. I did, too. I listened to the trees. They had a secret which they were about to make known to me, and then didn’t. Summer came. Each tree on my street had its own Scheherazade. My nights were a part of their wild storytelling. We were entering dark houses, more and more dark houses hushed and abandoned. There was someone with eyes closed on the upper floors. The thought of it, and the wonder, kept me sleepless. The truth is bald and cold, said the woman who always wore white. She didn’t leave her room much. The sun pointed to one or two things that had survived the long night intact, the simplest things, difficult in their obviousness. They made no noise. It was the kind of day people describe as “perfect.” Gods disguising themselves as black hairpins? A hand-mirror? A comb with a tooth missing? No! That wasn’t it. Just things as they are, unblinking, lying mute in that bright light, and the trees waiting for the night."

This next one here is… occurred to me, it's a New York City poem. I was returning late one night from The Village, kind of walking up Park Avenue South and going up, down and down about four in the morning. And it suddenly occurred to me how many mirrors there are in New York City unemployed at that hour. I mean I guess there's nobody in the mirror. You know, it doesn't work. So what did they do when they're not working? And how many are there? I mean, there, I had a friend, he's still a good friend of mine who was writing a book about film noir. And he had this moment, he said, "I wonder how many windows there are in New York City?" So he called some office in the city hall and they actually went, you know, didn't slam up the phone. I mean, they said, "That's an interesting question since we don't know. But very, very interesting." Likewise with mirrors at 4:00 am.

'Mirrors at 4 a.m.'. " You must come to them sideways in rooms webbed in shadow, sneak a view of their emptiness without them catching a glimpse of you in return. The secret is, even the empty bed is a burden to them, a pretense. They are more themselves keeping the company of a blank wall, the company of time and eternity which, begging your pardon, cast no image as they admire themselves in the mirror, while you stand to the side pulling a hanky out to wipe your brow surreptitiously."

And finally my poem about a very good friend who I used to walk the streets of New York City and discuss some of these issues, mystical issues, the issues of saying the unsayable and it's called 'The Friends of Heraclitus'. " Your friend has died, with whom you roamed the streets, at all hours, talking philosophy. So, today you went alone, stopping often to change places with your imaginary companion, and argue back against yourself on the subject of appearances: the world we see in our heads and the world we see daily, so difficult to tell apart when grief and sorrow bow us over. You two often got so carried away you found yourselves in strange neighborhoods lost among unfriendly folk, having to ask for directions while on the verge of a supreme insight, repeating your question to an old woman or a child both of whom may have been deaf and dumb. What was that fragment of Heraclitus you were trying to remember as you stepped on the butcher’s cat? Meantime, you yourself were lost between someone’s new black shoe left on the sidewalk and the sudden terror and exhilaration at the sight of a girl dressed up for a night of dancing speeding by on roller skates." I thank you. (CROWD CLAPS)

SPEAKER: That was Charles Simic, recorded in 2003 and used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Audio is courtesy of the Key West Literary Seminars. Listen to more recordings at kwls.org. You've been listening to the Essential American Poets Podcast, produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Simic and other essential American poets, and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.