Metaphysician of Doubt

Like an image from one of Charles Simic’s own poems, the crowd wedged itself between the stacks: Architecture & Design on one side, Art Technique on another. Rainy weather had forced the reading (part of the Bryant Park Word on Word series, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets) to be moved into a nearby Barnes & Noble. It would be Simic’s first appearance since being named to the nation’s top poetry post.

Poet Kurt Brown introduced Simic as both a “metaphysician of doubt” and a “lapsed Platonist” who sees “shadows as oracles, messengers.” He spoke about Simic’s ability to infuse images with black comedy in order to comment on life, in all its absurdity and anguish. Brown concluded his encomium by using Simic’s new official title: Poet Laureate of the United States.

Simic said it would be tough to read after such an introduction, that perhaps he’d better tell jokes instead. “To read poems is going to be a disappointment,” he claimed, “not just to you but to me.”

In his Slavic accent, he read lines about bugs doing the splits and studying the Battle of Gettysburg, three-fingered waiters, bad haircuts, noir-like dreams, depressing Sunday papers, and the tense uselessness of mirrors at 4 a.m. He laughed a lot, and didn’t overtly mention politics present or past.

His first poems of the evening described the New York Simic experienced as a poor young man in the 1950s, walking the streets and reading in the huge public library. Next he launched into the crowd-pleasing “My Beloved,” a poem about the difficulties of finding fresh ways to describe the superior physical attributes of one’s lover. After tinkering with its similes and metaphors for 25 years, Simic decides:

Her eyes are two loopholes.
No, let me start again.
Her eyes are flies in milk,
Her eyes are baby Draculas.

To hell with her eyes.
Let me tell you about her mouth.

Many poems depict the vivid presence of the past. Simic prefaced “Ghosts” by stating that he does not believe in ghosts, but, he continued, “you know.” He folded his hands across the podium as he read, holding the pages down. A new poem, “That Little Something,” showed how, given enough time, insignificance sometimes begets significance: the speaker recollects, over the course of a half century, a seemingly chance encounter with a woman who has lost some pearls.

Before reading “Notes,” Simic mentioned that he simply couldn’t think of a better title. The poem describes a rat running across the stage during a Christmas pageant, stunning the actors and audience into silence. The only sound is someone, offstage, bludgeoning the rodent—twice. A few snorts of nervous laughter from the audience turned into the real thing.

This ability to mask despair with comical irreverence appeared as well in “My Turn to Confess,” Simic’s ars poetica. The poem’s speaker is a dog who growls and barks but also sighs and tries to articulate in verse the “something out there / I could not bring myself to name.” By the end, Simic and his canine doppelganger have confessed both a desire to versify experience and an inability—or unwillingness—to capture the dread that surrounds us. What makes him write might also make him unable to write. Still Simic perseveres, like a “dog trying to write a poem about why he barks.”