Confessions of a Poet Laureate Read online

  Charles Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He has published twenty collections of his own poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations. A recipient of many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship, he served as poet laureate of the United States from 2007 to 2008.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW E-BOOK ORIGINAL

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  CONFESSIONS OF A POET LAUREATE

  By Charles Simic

  Copyright © 2010 by Charles Simic

  Copyright © 2010 by NYREV, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This electronic edition first published in 2010

  in the United States of America by

  The New York Review of Books

  435 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  eISBN: 978-1-59017-478-4

  “Introduction” is published for the first time in this electronic edition. The other essays first appeared, in somewhat different form, on the NYRblog, an online supplement to The New York Review of Books. www.nybooks.com/blogs

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. Introduction

  2. Strangers on a Train

  3. I Like My Plato Dog-Eared

  4. Confessions of a Poet Laureate

  5. The Blustering Blast

  6. The Buster Keaton Cure

  7. On Losing

  8. Reminiscing About the Night Before

  INTRODUCTION

  I’ve never been a good sleeper. Even when I was very young, I remember tossing and turning for hours. My father was like that too. When I’d complain how badly I’d slept the night before, he’d joke that we’ll both get plenty of sleep when we’re dead. That may be true, I thought, but it didn’t solve the problem—if one could even call it a problem. The truth is, I grew to like lying awake in the dark for hours. For years, I would make up movies to pass the time. Nothing much happened in them. The camera followed a lone young man who roams a large city in search of a girl he once met briefly at a party, and who he overheard mention the neighborhood where she worked in an office. He never finds her, but he goes to all sorts of interesting places and meets all kinds of people who gradually make him forget the one he was hoping to find. I no longer make up movies when I can’t sleep. I lie with my eyes closed, thinking about the past or mulling over the events of the day, and composing pieces like the ones collected here.

  Autobiography, with its chronological unfolding of events, has always seemed to me a poor way of conveying what it feels like to live one’s life. That’s why I like poems, short prose essays, and fragments. They take it as their premise that the secret to our identity lies not in some grand narrative, but more often in parentheses between events, among minor incidents and details we have preserved vividly in our memory for no obvious reason. They are most satisfying to write when they come as a surprise, when what is described in them is something we have overlooked for years, or something that is right in front of our eyes but that we haven’t noticed till that moment. Other people tell their dreams; I tell about what keeps me awake and entertains me at night. The subjects vary, but the one telling the story doesn’t change. He has been propped on the same pillow and covered by the same old gray blanket for many years.

  Charles Simic

  Strafford, New Hampshire, November 6, 2010

  Strangers on a Train

  Everyone who walks the busy streets of a city takes imaginary snapshots. For all I know, my face glimpsed in a crowd years ago may live on in someone’s memory the same way that the face of some stranger lives on in mine. Of course, out of the hundreds of people we may happen to see in a day, we become fully aware of only a select few, and often not even that many if we have too much on our minds. Then it happens.

  All the poets who loved colorful street life, starting with Whitman and Baudelaire, knew that the unforeseen was one of the inherent qualities of the beautiful. We come face to face with someone, or we catch a glimpse of him from the corner of our eye and the camera in our head clicks, suspending the image. Here is a tall, well-dressed young woman with a look of utter despair in her eyes and an incongruous smile on her lips. In the next instant, she’s gone and we forget her as we busy ourselves with other things, except she may reappear later that day to haunt us, or in a month, or even years after, like some snapshot we found in the shoebox in the attic that we can’t stop looking at because we no longer remember who the person in it was or when or where it was taken.

  Why do we remember some faces and not others? One meets all sorts of interesting-looking people in the city: confident, bursting with health, sickly, preoccupied, seemingly lost or thoroughly defeated—so how come only a few stick in our memory? No doubt it’s because something about them cheers or troubles our spirit. At times, compassion and fear make us identify with them. We find ourselves in their shoes for a moment, living a life we have read in their faces. I recall seeing, for example, a pale, middle-aged man in an inconspicuous gray suit, sitting on the subway with his gray hat, gray moustache, collapsing cheeks, and empty, watery eyes as the uptown local rattled along.

  For some reason, the memory of his face is more vivid to me now than many far more momentous encounters and occasions in my life that I ought to remember with greater clarity. I keep his face in my secret photo album, the one I would not show to anyone, even if I could, because the pictures in it would most likely mean nothing to others. And yet for me, and I’m sure for others, this sort of collection of random images is a kind of unintended autobiography. When I hear people say that “every human being carries around a secret,” this is what I think they are talking about.

  Fifty years ago, sitting in Washington Square Park one warm spring day, I overheard a story on this very subject. Two old men were chatting about different kinds of women they had known in their lives, and the various ways in which they drove both of them crazy, when one said that his father told him before he died that the most beautiful woman he ever saw in his life was getting off the Staten Island Ferry just as he was getting on. Their eyes met and that was it. His father even remembered the exact date and the time of day, which as I recall was in the month of May in 1910. Of course, after he fell silent, I turned around to sneak a better look at the man who was telling the story, but today, no matter how hard I try, I can only bring back his words and nothing else. Evidently, to remember a face, it helps if one’s mind is blank and not busy thinking about some story one has just heard.

  I Like My Plato Dog-Eared

  As a rule, I read and write poetry in bed; philosophy and serious essays sitting down at my desk; newspapers and magazines while I eat breakfast or lunch; and novels while lying on the couch. It’s toughest to find a good place to read history, since what one is reading is usually a story of injustices and atrocities, and wherever one does that, be it in the garden on a fine summer day or riding a bus in a city, one feels embarrassed to be so lucky. Perhaps the waiting room in a city morgue is the only suitable place to read about Stalin and Pol Pot?

  Oddly, the same is true of comedy. It’s not always easy to find the right spot and circumstances to allow oneself to laugh freely. I recall attracting attention years ago riding to work on the packed New York subway while reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and bursting into guffaws every few minutes. One or two passengers smiled back at me while others appeared annoyed by my behavior. On the other hand, cackling in the dead of night in an empty country house while reading a biography of W.C. Fi
elds may be thought pretty strange behavior too.

  Wherever and whatever I read, I have to have a pencil, not a pen—preferably the stub of a pencil so I can get close to the words, and underline well-turned sentences, brilliant or stupid ideas, interesting words and bits of information. I like to write short or elaborate comments in the margins, put question marks, check marks, and other private notations next to paragraphs that only I—and sometimes not even I—can later decipher. I would love to see an anthology of comments and underlined passages by readers of history books in public libraries, who despite the strict prohibition on such activity could not help themselves and had to register their complaints about the author of the book or about the direction in which humanity has been heading for the last few thousand years.

  Witold Gombrowicz says somewhere in his diaries that we write not in the name of some higher purpose, but to assert our very existence. This is true not only of poets and novelists, I think, but also of anyone who feels moved to deface pristine pages of books. With that in mind, for someone like me, the attraction some people have for the Kindle and other electronic reading devices is unfathomable. (I hope, dear reader, your own ebook is a badly battered one, its screen covered with old stains, powdered sugar, and thumbprints.) I prefer my Plato dog-eared, my Philip Roth with coffee stains, and can’t wait to get my hands on that new volume of poetry by Sharon Olds I saw in a bookstore window late last night.

  Confessions of a Poet Laureate

  It never crossed my mind that I would become the poet laureate of the United States. The day I received the call from the Library of Congress, I was carrying a bag of groceries from the car to the house when the phone rang. They didn’t beat around the bush, but told me straight out that this was an honor and not a job they were offering me. Of course, I was stunned, and without letting the groceries out of my hand, told them that I needed to think about it for a while and that I would call them back tomorrow. My first thought was, who needs this?

  I’d heard about the endless reading tours of previous laureates, the elaborate projects they had devised and administered to make poetry more popular in the United States, and none of it appealed to me very much. There’s a good reason why I have lived in a small village in New Hampshire for the last thirty-seven years. I like to hear roosters crow in the morning and dogs bark at night. “No way,” I told my wife. I was going to call them back and politely decline. But to my surprise, speaking to my children, I changed my mind. My son and daughter told me, separately, that if I refused this great honor I would come to regret my decision some day. I knew right away that they were right. I thought some more about it, but I kept going back to what they said. So, I accepted.

  The appointment was announced on August 2, 2007. For the next few weeks my phone didn’t stop ringing. I gave countless interviews over the phone or in person, appeared on TV and radio shows, had film crews and photographers at my house, and received hundreds of emails, letters, and packages containing poetry manuscripts whose authors wanted instant critique or endorsement. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I enjoyed the attention. It was very strange to be talking to so many different people about poetry every day: the big television networks whose reporters were astonished to hear that anyone in America reads or cares for poetry, and the better newspapers and radio stations where well-informed people asked probing questions.

  Still, the amount of attention was not only overwhelming but also full of surprises. I was asked, for instance, to read a poem to an annual convention of Kansas businessmen in Topeka, to be photographed in New York’s most popular ice cream parlor eating one of their huge concoctions, to have my picture taken in a butcher shop chopping meat with a cleaver, to read a poem at the unveiling of the new vintage of a famous California vineyard, and so on. Since I had an office at the Library of Congress and spent a few days there every month, I got a few invitations from official Washington, which I mostly turned down, including one from Laura Bush to the White House.

  I don’t know if you are aware of this, but our poet laureates are not called upon to write occasional poems. The position is privately endowed—originally from a fund set up by the industrialist scion Arthur M. Huntington in 1936—since it is unimaginable that the Congress of the United States would ever agree to part with a penny for the purpose of promoting poetry.* The Republicans, especially, are always worried that someone in the arts is undermining the religious and family values of our country. They suspect poets of being subversives, freethinkers, sex-fiends, and drug addicts. Their fears are not entirely without foundation. There have not been many American poets, living or dead, you’d want to bring home to meet your grandmother or have speak to your Bible study group. I figured all the hoopla would end after a couple of months, but it continued during the entire year I served. The position of the laureate has become very well known to the press and the public thanks to my fourteen predecessors, so sooner or later every small town newspaper, regional magazine, and radio station across the country would get around to asking me for an interview. I almost never said no.

  Over the years, I had read too many essays by literary critics and even poets that proclaimed confidently that poetry is universally despised and read by practically no one in the United States. I recall my literature students rolling their eyes when I asked them if they liked poetry, or my old high school friends becoming genuinely alarmed upon learning that I still did. Patriotic, sentimental, and greeting card verse has always been tolerated, but the kind of stuff modern poets write allegedly offends every one of those “real Americans” Sarah Palin kept praising in the last election.

  During the time I served as the poet laureate, however, I found this not to be true. In a country in which schools seem to teach less literature every year, where fewer people read books and ignorance reigns supreme regarding most issues, poetry seems to be an exception. Anyone who doesn’t believe me ought to take a peek at what’s available on the Web. Who are these people who seem determined to copy out almost every poem ever written in the English language? Where do they find the time to do it? No wonder we have such a large divorce rate in this country. I won’t even describe the thousands of blogs, online poetry magazines, both the serious ones and those where anyone can post a poem their eight-year-old daughter wrote about the death of her goldfish. People who kept after me with their constant emails and letters were part of that world. They wanted me to announce what I proposed to do to make poetry even more popular in the United States. Unlike my predecessors who had a lot of clever ideas, like having a poetry anthology next to the Gideon Bible in every motel room in America (Joseph Brodsky), or urging daily newspapers to print poems (Robert Pinsky), I felt things were just fine. As far as I could see, there was more poetry being read and written than at any time in our history.

  The obvious next question is how much of it is any good? More than one would imagine. America may be going to hell in every other way, but fine poems continue to be written now and then. Still, if poetry is being written and being read now more than ever, it must be because it fulfills a profound need. Where else but in poems would these Americans, who unlike their neighbors seem unwilling to seek salvation in church, convey their human predicament? Where else would they find a community of likeminded souls who care about something Emily Dickinson or Billy Collins has written? If I were asked to sum up my experience as the poet laureate, I would say there’s nothing more interesting or more hopeful about America than its poetry.

  *For many years, the position was called “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress,” until an act of Congress in 1985 changed it to “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.”

  The Blustering Blast

  For someone like me who lives in New Hampshire, cold and snow are things I take in stride, the way I fancy the inhabitants of the tropics barely take notice of the hot, muggy days they have there. It’s the howling wind that discombobulates me, what a neighbor calls the “Labrador Express,” conjuring
up for me visions of the bleak landscape of that great peninsula in eastern Canada that once I surveyed in horror from a low-flying plane.

  My house sits above a large frozen lake open to the wind, except for a few bare trees waving their branches as if beseeching the gods on my behalf. During the day, the howling wind gets competition from all the sounds in the house, but when night falls it can display its nastiness to its heart’s content. If there’s a power failure, as there was for four days recently, and we are reduced to living by the wood stove in one room and depending on candles, oil lamps, and flashlights to find our way around the cold, dark house, there’s no other sound for us to hear.

  Since it’s hard to read for very long by an oil lamp and even harder on the eyes with the help of a candle or two, we rarely stay up past eight o’clock. A flashlight in bed is a possibility, but no book can compete with a wind blowing across hundreds of miles of snow and then honing its madness to a high pitch on the loose gutter outside my bedroom window. At such moments, it is impossible not to take its howling personally. Most certainly, this wind is mocking me. It’s telling me you are nothing, nothing, nothing …

  Just to show me what it means, it wants to tear my house down and carry me off out of bed for a whirl in the midnight sky before depositing me on our frozen lake, or perhaps further, somewhere closer to the North Pole where it has a rendezvous with some of its bedlamite pals. No wonder those who wax lyrical about the beauties of nature never mention this lunatic whom the ancients depicted on their maps with swollen cheeks and hair and a beard spiked with ice to warn travelers in the far north what to expect.