Charles Simic

This is the Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. I’m Grace Cavalieri. Our guest poet,, starting off this radio season is Charles Simic, the newly appointed Poet Laureate of the United States of America. I love the way that sounds.

Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia on May 9, 1938. His childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963. He earned his bachelor's degree from New York University in 1966. From 1966 to 1974 he wrote and translated poetry, and he also worked as an editorial assistant for Aperture, a photography magazine. He married fashion designer Helen Dubin in 1964. They have two children. He has been a U.S. citizen since 1971 and lives in Strafford, N.H. Our Poet Laureate Charles Simic says hello with an opening poem.

CS: It’s very nice to be here. A poem recently published in a magazine, called Driving Home.

GC: That is the voice of Charles Simic, Poet Laureate of the United States. I’m Grace Cavalieri. How like you to remember that I preferred that poem and actually requested it, because my husband, having been through the rigors on coming home alive from Viet Nam, was very touched by that poem. So thank you for remembering that I said that. Of the people that know your work, they are passionate. The thing I like about this office is, a whole new world is going to know you. How would you advise them to approach your work, if you had to give advice, how to get to know you?

CS: Well I mean, read the poems without and kind of preconceived notions. The biggest compliment that I’ve gotten over the years, giving public readings, after the reading, some fellow would come, or some woman would come and look at me kind of puzzled, and she’d say, “Mr. Simic, what you read, was that poetry?” And I’d say, “Yes”, and then they would say, “I was kind of astonished; but you know, I understood everything.”

GC: What a gift to the world!

CS: That pleased me to no end.

GC: I believe that your poems are folktales of a sort. Folktales from another planet, maybe, but they are certainly original but accessible. I agree with that. Well, we have you here for an hour, and we are going to go into your work a little bit. Let me tell the world who are. You were born in Belgrade Yugoslavia, and you had quite a childhood. I recommend that people read, actually before your poetry, I’d love people to read A Fly in the Soup. If they read your memoirs, your poems...all of the things are there; the irony, the absurdity, the tragedy, the humor. I would love that to be the bedrock of your poems. You started publishing in ‘59, when you were twenty one. You were drafted in the army in ‘61, and there are some hilarious episodes in your book about that. You got your undergraduate degree from NYU, working at night to cover tuition. So we’ll go into the list of books if you’ll give us another poem. What would you like to read from?

CS: Well, let’s see. Let me read...here is a poem; a very, very early poem. I was astonished the other day thinking about it, that this poem was written fifty years ago. And I lived in New York City, in seedy hotels, furnished rooms - a lonely kid. I didn’t have that many friends; I didn’t have any money. I mean, I made ends meet. I didn’t have a cat, or a dog, or a goldfish, but I had a lot of mice, and rats and cockroaches. This is a poem called Cockroach.

GC: That’s the voice of Charles Simic, and I do remember that poem. The false papers really hark back to - I find vibrations of everything in your poetry. When you were a child, the papers were very important, for getting freedom from Yugoslavia. The communists thought you were fascists; the right wing thought you were communists. You had a horrendous departure, and when I see “false papers,” I think images like that.

CS: Sure. We were displaced persons after the war ended. We left Yugoslavia, and we ended up in France. To get visas, to get a permit to remain in France, you had to go every three months to stand in huge lines to have it renewed, the residency permit. It was insane; because they would always request some additional document, like for example the high school graduation diploma or whatever, of my grandmother. So, it was total panic to try to get it from Yugoslavia, then to translate it. Then when you showed up with this document, they didn’t need it anymore.

GC: But here it comes up all fifty years later, and we’re still reading about false papers, but now it’s attributed to a cockroach. So nothing is lost. And we’d love another poem. Here we are at the Library of Congress. I’m Grace Cavalieri. And we’re plumbing – plundering, the former life of Charles Simic.

CS: Well, okay, this is now something totally different. This would be - it’s a poem that takes place in New Hampshire, where I have lived now for thirty five years. And it’s a small mill town - the year probably 1970. All the businesses are going out of business. All the mills are closing. Bleak place. And I don’t think I need to explain the poem more. The Partial Explanation.

GC: Do you think that the cadence of your voice is ... it could not be otherwise if you had not had another language, and other languages, first? Because the imagery is from your soul; I’ve told you that. But the particular cadence I think is benefited by being screened through another language, the way you curl the words.

CS: I mean inevitably - I’m not conscious of this, but obviously, that would be inevitable.

GC: Inevitable. Here he is. He first produced a book called What the Grass Says, and that was his first collection. And then he’s published, since then, I think eighty books, and I think twenty of them are poems. There is - That Little Something is coming out from Harcourt in 2008. My Noiseless Entourage was the last one in 2005. Selected Poems before that. He has won the Pulitzer, the Macarthur - many awards - the International Griffin Poetry Prize, a finalist for the International Book Award. Numerous credentials, but it doesn’t seem to change the way he sees the world, which is just to be creative every day. And that what he’s always believed in, and that is what he teaches other people. I don’t think - I’m never comfortable when people talk about your poetry as “surreal”.

CS: Well I mean, people have to give you a label.

GC: Oh, that’s right.

CS: When you’re young, you get a label. We were surrealist. Mark Strand and Jim Tate, and a few others were called surrealists. Indeed we had some interesting surrealism forty five years ago, but...

GC: It’s not precise enough though.

CS: No, no. I’m also a hard realist. I’m not interested in... Surrealism always implies something irrational. Even then, we liked reading the French, and South American and Spanish surrealists, but we knew this was a movement that, by then in 1960, was forty years old, so we’re not going to be something forty years later. It’s like somebody deciding to be a cubist today. But the label stuck, which means they can’t quite classify me, because I have – you heard that poem about that mailman’s son who came in the coffin. I mean, that’s just grim realism.

GC: And beer cans on the end of a hearse, which is otherwise not a wedding. I can – but there is always an intrinsic logic in your poems, because it is always grammatically perfect. The syntax is always perfect. So no matter what happens that is other worldly inside, it holds together. But I never can figure out your last line. I can never guess what you’re going to do. That last line of yours, you will always, always, always go the opposite direction.

CS: I think it surprises me too. You don’t, as you’re working on a poem, you don’t know what the last line is going to be. And probably there are many, many other last lines that were there before, and you realize it just doesn’t work, and suddenly….

GC: You only like what surprises you, and by god, it takes a lot to surprise you!

CS: Well, you know, it’s nice when you’re surprised. You say, my God, how good!

GC: Well, you’re mother said you’re going to get everything new in America, and so did we. Let’s have a poem. This is the Library of Congress. We’re talking to Charles Simic, new Poet Laureate of the United States. And I’m Grace Cavalieri.

CS: A poem that I wrote after watching the History Channel, and seeing - it was a part of some WWII documentary - just maybe fifty seconds, of the bombing of Belgrade in April of 1941. I was there. I was three years old and I remember the bombs. And I had seen this little segment before, but to my great surprise, there was some additional footage. There was a little bit more than what I had seen before, and what it shows, it shows a crowd of people on a street corner. It turned out, I realized, this was a street corner not to far from where I lived. So this is where the poem begins. Cameo Appearance.

GC: That’s what we call “collateral damage,” right?

CS: That’s what we call “collateral damage.”

GC: And you were right there. And from there, your adventures, as horrifying, become hilarious; the child who finds the German body, and gets the helmet full of lice, head lice.

CS: I didn’t get it for the lice.

GC: You did get the helmet. The child who gets in a jail cell; the child up on the mountain at night alone – is this the proper beginning for a proper beginning for a Poet Laureate? Would you recommend this upbringing?

CS: Well, I mean no, certainly not.

GC: Selling gunpowder?

CS: You know how it is. You only have one life. You don’t choose it. When things happen that way, I didn’t complain. Kids in a big city in war time actually have a good time, because the parents are busy worrying about those sorts of things, and you are playing on the streets, and the streets are incredibly interesting. Parental supervision is minimal. So, everyone I knew from those days, later, who remember those days, all had a terrific time.

GC: Climbing the ruins, falling off the ruins.

CS: It’s a terrible thing. But I was six, seven years old.

GC: But you said you were filled with guilt and anxiety at every moment. That’s good for a poet. And also you became an expert liar.

CS: Yes.

GC: That’s good for a poet.

CS: That’s very good for a poet. Anxiety, yes! Not so much - yes guilt, in a sense that I was always doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.

GC: Here he is. He’s doing something he should be doing today. And he has served at the University of New Hampshire for - what is it, thirty five years?

CS:
Something like that.

GC:
And you’re Emeritus now. Do you teach a course at all?

CS: I teach one course, one semester.

GC: What is that?

CS: Just a workshop; a poetry workshop.

GC: It’s nice to stay in, isn’t it?

CS: It is.

GC: Keep your finger in it.

CS: Yes. I like teaching.

GC: Here’s Charles. He’s got a book open; and what is the title of this book?

CS: This is The Voice at Three A.M. This is selected late, and new poems.

GC: In case you want to go get it. They’ll probably all be reissued by tomorrow. Here he is.

CS: This is a poem called Ghosts.

GC: I love it. Charles Simic. He has been through a life that was not subtle. If anything else, I can say, it was never a subtle life. But yet, it appears as if even in your poetry, you were sort of a hapless bystander of this absurd existence, and you say in the army that you’re idea of happiness was nothingness; that your idea of bliss was boredom; that you wanted nothing to happen.

CS: Well, I didn’t have (COULDN’T UNDERSTAND), everybody else (COULDN’T UNDERSTAND) forgotten. It would happen occasionally. I was stationed in France. This was 1962, and we used to have these sort of maneuvers because they were expecting the war to start; the Warsaw Pact armies to invade and the next world war is starting. So every couple of months they would have a big maneuver, where we’d have to leave our base and get in trucks and jeeps and go off to various positions, and I was a military policeman, so I used to direct traffic. And occasionally your little unit would be sent someplace, and then they forget about you.

GC: And you never made your bed like you were supposed to do in the army.

CS: Well, no, I know, but this was place we would just sit there, and nobody’s calling us, nobody’s telling us anything to do. Perfect. Paradise.

GC: I love it. But then, the funniest idea is that somebody said that you’d be perfect for the NYPD when you get got out of the army. Can you imagine yourself in the New York Police Department?

CS: You know, actually I have imagined that. I have imagined it. I had a couple of friends in the army who, their parents were army and their fathers were cops, and they just told me, “Charlie, you’d love it.” So, you know.

GC: I have many questions, but I’m afraid if I ask all of them at once, I won’t hear another poem. So we will steer you back to the book.

CS: Okay. Let me read the title poem from this book that’s going to come out in February.

GC: These poems have never been on the air before. This is a premier for this poem, right, on the radio?

CS: I’m not sure. I don’t know.

GC: I might get some kind of award for that. A prize, maybe.

CS: That Little Something.

GC: Okay, that little something.

CS: The poem is That Little Something.

GC: Where has everything gone? Charles Simic. Harking back to what is gone, I was very touched by the story about Richard Hugo, who was, we should tell our audience, a very fine poet.

CS: Yes.

GC: And when he became your friend, we found that he had been one of the airplanes strafing your village.

CS: Bombing the city.

GC: Yes.

CS: This was 1944. The allies were bombing Belgrade. They were supposed to be bombing the Nazis in Belgrade. They flew from Italy, and their first targets were the oil fields in Romania, which were the last oil fields that the Nazis held. Greatly defended, and very dangerous, so they would lose a couple planes. So on the way back, they were supposed to drop what they had left in Belgrade. They flew high; they were in a rush to get back to Bari and go to the beach. And so, they didn’t hit too many strategically important objects. Some, but mostly what happens usually with bombs, is they will hit a slum. So, I met - bumped into Hugo in San Francisco in a restaurant, and we were talking, and he said, “What did you do this summer?” And this is 1972, and this is the first time I went back to Belgrade, and I said, “Well, I went back to Belgrade.” “Ah,” he says, “Belgrade!” And he started describing Belgrade. He says, “Here’s the Danube; here’s the Sava River, here’s the main train station, here’s this bridge, that bridge.” So I had no idea how he knew.

GC: How he knew.

CS: So I said, “You’ve been there. You’ve visited Belgrade.” And he said, “No, never in my life. I used to bomb it two, three times a week.” So then I just exclaimed - blurted out, I said, “I was down there!” And he was very upset. He was very, very upset.

GC: Of course.

CS: I wasn’t. I kind of....

GC: It’s one of those amazing little things. And you became friends.

CS: Yeah. I mean, I understood it was wartime; bombs fall on your head.

GC: But there he is looking at you.

CS: But he really... he wrote me a poem, he was apologetic. It troubled him a great deal.

GC: Well, I would recommend that you buy A Fly in the Soup. I think that came out in 2000, and it’s been out like, every year since then; 2002, 2003. But also, the poems that are prose poems that won the Pulitzer, The World Doesn’t End, I insist that would be the next book I would buy. And of course the new book, which is coming out, That Little Something. But, those prose poems - they’re so good you wonder how people noticed it. They’re so good, you think no committee had the sense to know they should win the Pulitzer Prize, they are so astonishingly original.

CS: Yeah, it was a shocking surprise the day that they actually did. I first wanted to publish these poems with a smaller publisher, but I’m obliged to show it to Harcourt to before I do. I thought they were going to pass on it, but they said no, we like it, we’ll publish it. Then to get a Pulitzer was really...

GC: You know, those are the poems written when you think nobody’s watching, and nothing’s at stake, and you’re not trying to win a prize. Because, they are going to be next to my bed for a long time. I just love entering that world where you just don’t give a damn.

CS: That book keeps selling. It’s a kind of a fun book to read.

GC: It is fun. And there is so much humor in all of your work, and I laugh and cry at the same time. I think that’s good. You’ve published numerous translations; French, Serbian, Croation, Slovinian. Are you able to converse in those languages, or do you take the literal, and then transform them to poetry? Or do you really know Masedonean?

CS: Masedonian I can read. The only language of those languages I cannot read is Slovinian; I had help. But Serbian and Croatian are very similar. It used to be one language, Serbian and Croation.

GC: The root.

CS: All that is easy to understand.

GC: And your book of essays includes Orphan Factory. I bet you’ve written every day of your life.

CS: I don’t think so, but I do write quite a few essays and prose pieces; but all sorts of things.

GC: Charles Simic is our new Poet Laureate of the United States. I’m Grace Cavalieri. This is the Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. Stay with us; we’ll be right back.

GC: We’re back with Charles Simic. We’re at the Library of Congress. I’m Grace Cavailieri. Some of his remarks about poetry are so extraordinary because they’re so absolutely sensible. He talks about – he says, “But what if poets are not crazy?” What if?! I never thought of that. He said poets convey the historical period better than anyone else. You say lyric poets perpetuate the oldest values on earth, but I would say all poets do, because we’re all classicists of one sort or another. And you say everything in the world profane or sacred needs to be reexamined repeatedly in the light of ones own experiences. Just your own opinion.

CS: That’s kind of a radical view.

GC: It is?

CS: Well, I mean it is. If you look at poems of Emily Dickenson; the one about hearing a fly buzz just as she was about to die – the speaker in the poem. Old Allen Tate, a great American poet; Tate wrote about Emily Dickenson, and he said, if her puritan ancestors had read that poem and other poems, they would have burnt her at the stake, because in the poem somebody is dying, and instead of seeing God, she sees a fly – a fly comes and starts annoying her and buzzing around the dying person. It’s a very blasphemous poem. Tate was very clear about that, that Cotton Mather and the other devines of the puritan church wouldn’t think this is so funny.

GC: So every poet is an anarchist, I guess.

CS: Yeah, I mean look at Walt Whitman.

GC: Well, every point of view is a pretty hairy thing. He is Charles Simic, I’m Grace Cavalieri. We’re at the Library of Congress together, and I have interviewed him once, twenty five years ago, and I just didn’t know if I’d get another chance, so thank you for this. Let’s have more poetry. Twenty five years doesn’t seem like a long time, does it? It seems to have snapped right by.

CS: It does.

GC: What is the title of that book in your hand?

CS: This is The Voice at Three A.M. again. Another New Hampshire poem called Country Fair.

GC: When you went to Chicago as a young man, and you started getting in with the literary crowd there, you were told to be careful of the eastern literary establishment. Were you? Are you careful?

CS: Well, now I’m probably part of that establishment.

GC: Now you own it!

CS: But it really helped to be sort of – to have that warning when I was young. Nelson Algren, the novelist, used to tell me, “Don’t read Robert Lowell, don’t read all these Harvard professors; Yale professors. You’re a kid off the boat. Read Carl Sandburg, Rachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman.”

GC: Good advice.

CS: It was good advise.

GC: It’s all good. You talk about a kid off the boat. When you look at that kid, from the perspective of the man you are now, do you love him?

CS: The kid?

GC: The Kid. You call him a bum. “A little bum,” you call him in the book.

CS: I don’t think about him.

GC: But you write the book about him.

CS: I did; I did.

GC: So therefore we have a different person writing about a different person. So there is a lot of love there. There’s a lot of poking.

CS: Well I felt compassion for him.

GC: Of course.

CS: Compassion for an earlier self; I mean, I realize how innocent I was; how shy.

GC: Anonymous, you said.

CS: Anonymous, and like a character in a book. And as I remembered myself, I always remember what this character did. Yes, there was an affection.

GC: It’s clear, because we couldn’t love him if you didn’t. And there is nothing that comes from that book, but you just want to hug that little kid. On the bus in Paris, going to the hospital with an ear infection – one of my favorite scenes – and the rouged ladies are looking down their noses at you, as if, and here’s the line, “As if they knew there was a little kid with an earful of pus.” I wish they could see you now.

CS: Well, it’s never fun to have an ear infection. We came from Communist Yugoslavia. There are photographs of us in Paris, and we really look just…like derelicts; like something from the Bowery, my mother and I, and my brother, and we thought, this is our best clothes that we were wearing. We didn’t think that we were poorly dressed, but now looking at us, it’s just…they see us and they know we are immigrants; we’re God knows where from.

GC: And then the doctors didn’t believe you had come there legitimately, and gave you a hard time.

CS: Well, it wasn’t so much that. The doctor was a leftist, and he was shocked that we would leave paradise.

GC: A beautiful place like Yugoslavia.

CS: Paradise! A country that’s going to glorious future, to come to the rotten west, and to go to capitalist America.

GC: From a lovely communist country. Well that is just one of the many memories I carry with me from that book; that little kid who found his way across the ocean and met up with his father. This is going to be a crazy question, but I know you’ll answer it. I have faith in craziness. If you had a choice of coming through your mother and father; say you really – humor me and say you chose them to come through. You chose that father and that mother, to come through them. Why did you do that? What qualities did they each have that you feel has furthered your – I call it your souls journey.

CS: My father was a very smart man; intellectually inquisitive. He read all sorts of books on all sorts of subjects. He was a gregarious, friendly man. He loved going out every night; jazz clubs, restaurants. He loved life. My mother was a professor of music. She taught singing, opera singing, so there was a culture that came with her – her students. I was listening to opera all my life. She was more timid, reserved; more frightened of the world. But she had very clear political judgments, surprisingly. My father occasionally would be carried away by some cause, some idea. And she never was. And we kind of were very upset with her because she would always seem to say, “Ah, forget it,” you know, the people behind it, and so forth. She would always reserve her judgment and annoy us. But in the long run, now over 80 years, she proved to be absolutely right in all her historical and political judgments. And that’s admirable. She was a courageous woman, despite this kind of timidity and reserve. She took me and my brother, and since we couldn’t get a passport in 1948, we crossed the border illegally into Austria. But we didn’t make it every day. The British took us back – brought us back.

GC: The Americans got you through at some point.

CS: It’s a complicated story. Two nights…

GC: They have to read the book. They have to read A Fly in the Soup, believe me. So you feel that you can feel evidence from both of your parents in your life’s work?

CS: I think so. Definitely.

GC: You also say that you have certified number of lunatics in your family background, and they’re terrific to read about; Uncle Boris and all those people. I love the book because it has pictures in it; pictures of your family, and some of those people, and the outfits! You and your brother look alike, in the pictures.

CS: Ah, okay.

GC: Are you close?

CS: Yeah, we’re close.

GC: Because I think of your mother dragging you across mountains, and through countries, and God bless her, right? Let’s have a poem. This is Charles Simic, our new Poet Laureate, who brings a wealth of understanding and compassion, and wisdom and irony, along with him to Washington D.C. And who also said, “Wherever there are bureaucrats, the police state is an ideal.”

CS: Okay, let’s see. There’s a poem here. This is me talking about mother. Evening Walk.

GC: Heartbreaking announcements, that’s another thing you said about poetry. Heartbreaking announcements - those are two good words.

CS: I’m always surprised when I hear these things quoted. I mean, I write them, and then I forget about them.

GC: That’s what you’re supposed to do. And then we’re supposed to pick them up. How do you teach students? I know that you have always just, anyone who is the least bit creative, you have just nurtured.

CS: I mean, if you teach creative writing, it depends what level it is; if it’s a beginning level or advanced level. In the beginning level, they’ve selected, they already have written something, and then you make them read a lot of things, and you make them learn some things on prosody technique of poetry. You go over their poems together with them in class, and teach them how to revise, which is one of the hardest things to know, and to like, tinkering with poems, and revising poems. In the process, hopefully they get in touch with their imagination, or with that something in themselves that makes them want to write poetry, and sometimes you sort of see this. In fact, most often you see it over a period of a couple of semesters, how they’ve discovered a part of themselves that they don’t use ordinarily, or they’re not in touch with, from which imagination comes, poetry comes, and certain kinds of ideas.

GC: In your own, the declaration of your poems, and how they’re presented, in the beginning I could see very much the film noir influence in your work, which you loved.

CS: Yeah, I love those movies.

GC: But that’s oversimplifying. Yes I know. Laura; I do too. But today, are there films to love that way; that influence you?

CS: I think movies in general have influence me. I continue to see a lot of movies, old and new; images. I love movie imagery. Not so much, I would think, of plots, but…

GC: Are they as good as they used to be?

CS: Oh, they’re good movies.

GC: Good movies. When you moved – when you came into your first sight of New York – the skyline – and you said the first thing about Manhattan is it looked just like the movies you saw of it.

CS: It did! Well, we saw a lot of movies. I think the first American movies that I saw I was when I was maybe four or five years old. My grandmother used to take me to a theater where they showed silent comedies; Keeton and Chaplin, and Fatty Arbuckle. And we just watched American movies; westerns, and I remember seeing Wizard of Oz during the second war, sitting in the audience with Nazi soldiers. So, it was a very strange time. And when the noirs came after the second world war, a lot of them have the feel of big cities; New York and others. So, yes.

GC: And also, you have always said that poets can learn more from painters and musicians than other poets sometimes. What of your own paintings? Whatever happened to them? Are you still doing that?

CS: No. I stopped after I was about thirty years old.

GC: Where are they?

CS: A couple of them are in a show in New York right now. Someone got together paintings by writers and poets.

GC: Where is that show?

CS: It’s in a gallery in Manhattan, on 65th street.

GC: And it’s up now?

CS: It’s up now. I haven’t seen the show. I’m going to see it in about two weeks.

GC: That will be fun. If people get the book, A Fly in the Soup – I’m going to make that a national bookseller award – there are some pictures actually of your paintings in the middle.

CS: Let me read you a poem about films.

GC: This is from the new book.

CS: No, it’s not.

GC: This is not?

CS: This is just from My Noiseless Entourage. And, I noticed a few years ago that when I dream about my childhood, and that’s not very often, but my dreams have the sort of the look of old film noirs; the imagery, the black and white grainy feel. It’s like those movies. So, this little poem is called To Dreams.

GC: Ray Milan could not have done that better, may I say. Yeah, I do hear? But how do you begin a poem? I mean you are an insomniac, I’m a famous insomniac. So you’re sitting there. I do feel the effect of silence and solitude in your work. Does the image come first? Do you daydream into it? I know you do capture your dreams, but – so it’s three o’clock in the morning, you even actually have poems about three o’clock in the morning. What comes first?

CS: It’s different. Sometimes it’s an image; it’s a mood. Like in this poem that I just read, the connection in dreams being like old movies – B movies from the 1940’s – and then you kind of seek some images in your head. There’s no way to really easily generalize how poems get started. Often they will develop out of drafts. I have folders and folders and notebooks full of drafts; poems that I’ve started, and I give up on. I look them over from time to time, and suddenly something interests me, or I notice that there are two drafts that I made of totally different poems, years apart, can be combined into something else.

GC: But they’re never really idea driven. I mean, you never say – one thing I can think, they’re imagery driven, they’re feelings; there’s are all kinds of cinematic devices, but I never get the feeling, this is an idea I’m going to convey.

CS: No, I think most poets are like that.

GC: Oh no. I think a lot start with - many of them; Anthony Hecht. I’m thinking of a lot of poets that have an idea; even James Dickey in the beginning.

CS: I mean, I don’t have that. If I had an idea, I would write down the idea, but I discover ideas in the process of thinking about an experience, thinking about some images. Ideas are what emerge in the process of writing the poem.

GC: That’s why you get commentaries like this, from the Harvard Review, “There are few poets writing in America today, who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures. Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse.” I think “our most enduring muse,” because, I think you give license to everyone who has a wish to express something. You absolutely are non-judgmental. I mean you have high standards for poetry, but I think you truly believe that there’s equity that we’re each allowed to express.

CS: I agree with that. I mean I believe that.

GC: That there’s no “they” in “us.”

CS: I believe that everything is worth looking at; everything deserves respect, even the little bug walking across the table. You look at it and you say, “Well, it’s obviously in a hurry. It’s going someplace; on an errand; very important.”

GC: You’ve given rats and cockroaches and pigs ears a new look.

CS: So, yes, I think that’s definitely…

GC: All God’s creatures.

CS: All God’s creatures.

GC: Let’s have more poetry.

CS: A poem called Unmade Beds. This is like checking out of motel or a hotel, and you go by, and you see all these rooms that have doors that are opened, and they’ve been vacated, and the beds are unmade. You kind of glimpse, and you have an idea. Unmade Beds.

CS: History

GC: How about the candy one, the sweetness of candy, in the candy store of death.

CS: Oh, that’s in that book. Yeah, okay.

GC: Let’s see if we can find that. I think that that’s a pretty important thing.

CS: Yeah, I know which one you want. The title is Sweetest.

CS: One more.

GC: One more we would love.

CS: A poem called Grey Headed School Children.

GC: Charles Simic. I hope the world gives you a big feast, and then a bowl of figs afterwards.

CS: Thank you very much.

GC: I do. This is the voice of Charles Simic, Poet Laureate of the United States, and this is the Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress.

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The program is produced by Forest Woods Media Productions. Post Production is by Mike Turpin, M.E.T. Studios. We wish thank the Library of Congress for its support and assistance. Our associate Producer is Kenneth Flynn. Our engineer is Mike Turpin. I’m Grace Cavalieri.

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