Making the Odd From the Ordinary

Charles Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938, and has been publishing poetry in the US since 1961. In 1990 he received the Pulitzer for The World Doesn’t End, a book of prose poems. He has been called minimalist and surrealist. His poems detail everyday scenes in ways that make them seem inexplicably odd.

Most of the poems in his newest collection, Night Picnic, start by gradually revealing something plain and recognizable, like a fruit stand, a church or a restaurant. Once the scene is set, the poem will ask you to look at it in an odd way, with an effect that is sometimes fantastic in the clearest way. The payoff is the jolt you get from being forced into a new way of seeing that is somehow off—sometimes violently off.

The poem “Roadside Stand” begins: “In the watermelon and corn season, / The earth is a paradise”: just the set-up one might expect from a summer poem. However, further on we read: “It’s all there, the bell peppers, the radishes, / Local blueberries and blackberries / That will stain our lips and tongues / As if we were freezing to death in the snow.” Though they may seem out of place, the image of our purple-stained lips is too hauntingly accurate to dismiss. So we are forced to find a way of seeing summer berries that has to do with our own freezing to death. And we do.

We sat down with Charles Simic last Saturday at Wordsworth Books just before a reading for Night Picnic.

The Harvard Crimson: I really enjoyed these poems. I guess I’ll start by asking you how you’ve been affected by the events of the last couple of weeks.

Charles Simic: Of course, very much. I completely forgot I had a new book. When people say, “I like your new book,” I have to stop and think because I have given it no thought whatsoever. We’re all so consumed by these events.

THC: Who are some of your influences?

CS: Well, that’s a long question. Starting off with the early American modernists: Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams. I would say my great loves which I can read with infinite, infinite pleasure would be Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson.

THC: What’s on your bedside table right now?

CS: I’m usually reading three or four books at a time. I’m reading a Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, whose collected poems have just come out. Like everybody else, I’m reading a lot of newspapers and magazines about these events.

THC: Are there any young American poets that you feel are under-appreciated?

CS: There’s a long list. I don’t know who’s young anymore. There’s a wonderful poet I like very much called Mary Ruefle. There is always a lot of talent among young poets.

THC: I’m curious as to when, what time of day, you write.

CS: Well, that has changed at different points in my life. I used to write mostly late at night. Now I write in the morning, very early in the morning, like 6 am. Or I write in the afternoon, after lunch. Very rarely anymore at night.

THC: Is there any way for you to tell whether you’re going to be able to write on a particular day?

CS: No. You really have to start by putting pencil to paper. Every time I start something from scratch, I have so many things that I’m working on—files and files of half-finished and unfinished poems—so I look at them. And then that sets something else off. I very rarely sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and say, “What shall I write about?” It’s something ongoing.

THC: How many drafts does a poem go through?

CS: A lot. It’ll take about a year, a year and a half, for a poem. Sometimes the very simple poems you just can’t seem to get right.

THC: What attracts you to the English language?

CS: Well, I don’t know Serbo-Croatian very well anymore. [Laughs.] I developed a love of language by reading great literature in English. A poet, as Joseph Brodsky used to say, essentially works for the dictionary. I am an employee of the dictionary.

THC: In an ideal world, who would pick up your book?

CS: I don’t know if there’s an ideal world. Already, people out there seem to understand what goes on in the poems. I’m always stunned when somebody occasionally writes me a note about something, and I realize that there are really readers out there who can read between the lines, who have as much a gift for being readers as people have for being writers. And beyond that, there is, I suppose, some kind of ideal reader who understands you more than you do. I had a friend who used to say love poems are addressed to God, that God was the ultimate reader. But, yes, there’s a kind of ultimately alert sensitive reader that one begs for without quite knowing who that reader is.

Night picnic

by Charles Simic

Harcourt

86 pp., $23