Simic and Sudoku

Sometime in the mid 90s, my friend Al Hellus - God rest his soul - told me about Charles Simic. On Al's recommendation, I read Simic's Pulitzer Prize-winning (prose) poems in The World Doesn't End. I was blown away. I thought they were great. I'd never read poems that twisted logic to its own ends like that before.

Since then, I've talked to other poets who say of these poems that they "don't get them". I understand that because, the first time - at least the first time - I read the poems, I often didn't know what to make of them either. More than half of the poems are untitled. Clearly though, the poems feature recurring atmospheric elements such as life after wartime, barking dogs, poverty and an overhanging sense of a distant governing authority that may use force to obtain the cooperation of the governed. Occasionally a poem will allude somehow to art and/or literature.

More recently I read the 51 poems in Simic's book of poems (2005, Harcourt) titled my noiseless entourage. In these poems, Simic continues to twist logic according to the needs of his poems. Gone, however, are the atmospheric elements of life after wartime, barking dogs, poverty and the sense of a ruling stultifying political power. And each poem has a title.

To Simic's would-be readers who "don't get" his poems, I recommend reading my noiseless entourage before The World Doesn't End. Here is the initial poem of my noiseless entourage:

Description of a Lost Thing
by Charles Simic

It never had a name,
Nor do I remember how I found it.
I carried it in my pocket
Like a lost button
Except it wasn't a button.

Horror movies,
All-night cafeterias,
Dark barrooms
And poolhalls,
On rain-slicked streets.

It led a quiet, unremarkable existence
Like a shadow in a dream,
An angel on a pin,
And then it vanished.
The years passed with their row

Of nameless stations,
Till somebody told me this is it!
And fool that I was,
I got off on an empty platform
With no town in sight.

Now, what if, instead of going after the meaning of this poem with hammer and tongs, we use instead our powers of inference, conjecture and surmise? Our initial inference is likely to be that the lost thing is small enough to fit in his pocket. Because I've read enough poems by Simic, my conjecture at the end of the first stanza is that the poem is not going to tell me what the lost thing is. But I see at that point that three stanzas remain. As I continue reading, I keep an eye open for what else might be going on, since the lost thing is probably not going to matter much to this poem. Immediately (2nd stanza) the reader is given several places where the lost thing was taken as a matter of course, being part or parcel of the speaker. Then (3rd stanza) we learn that the lost thing did not draw attention to itself but was small and quiet. The poem ends (4th stanza) by telling how life has been for the one who lost the thing and does not mention any more the lost thing.

We can surmise a generosity on the part of the speaker of the poem. At some point, the speaker took the time to notice a seemingly insignificant thing which was then kept for some time in a pocket. Although the thing was small and quiet, the speaker remembers it and composes this poem on its behalf. We can also surmise a sense of humility on the part of the speaker. When "somebody" tells him "this is it!" he disembarks onto "an empty platform/With no town in sight." Because of this, he regards himself as foolish. But we know he isn't stupid by the way he talks about the years passing as a ride on a train. It is neither similie nor metaphor. We might call it surrealism. In Simic's poetry, there's a lot more where that came from.

If you enjoy solving Sudoku puzzles, I'm sure you've noticed that inference, conjecture and surmise are also useful for solving those puzzles. In my writing here, I haven't included any wrong inferences, conjectures or surmises I made while reading "Description of a Lost Thing". That doesn't mean I didn't make any. Part of the fun of reading Simic's poems is figuring out what's important and what isn't so important. As with Sudoku, sometimes one has to erase incorrect interpretations of Simic poems before arriving at a satisfying understanding.

Two Poems and Vision

Russian nesting dolls are hollow, usually hand-painted figures that fit one inside the other until they all appear to be just one figure. The figures are usually painted so that some of the features appear on all the figures but each figure also has unique features as well. I thought of Russian nesting dolls when I read Robert Graves' poem, "Warning to Children," recently.

Warning to Children
by Robert Graves

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives - he then unties the string.

From the Rice University poetry archive accessed 6/5/08.

Then I started to think of what can go on inside something else, and I remembered a poem called "Stone" by Charles Simic who is one of my favorite poets.

STONE

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill--
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

From The Writer's Almanac 7/24/95

Initially I thought these poems have a lot in common including the idea of interesting, unnoticed things inside larger things. They do have that in common. But there is a difference, and it seems to be the tone of voice the speaker has in each poem. In the Graves poem, the speaker is an adult giving, as the title indicates, a warning to children. The speaker is relaxed and speaking with authority. The speaker of the Simic poem could be a child talking to another child, an adult talking to another adult or an exchange between a child and an adult. Whatever the case may be, the speaker is full of wonder and is speaking in a relaxed way that includes imagination and conjecture. While the speaking voice of the Graves poem is speaking with imagination, it is imagination on the leash of "what's good for you." The imagination communicated in the Simic poem is of a free-ranging, speculative nature; that is, the speaker wants to sound like an authority (second stanza) but in the end we are left with the fine conjecturing that begins with "perhaps it is not dark inside after all."

The method Graves uses in writing his "Warning to Children" is apparently didactic: he had the idea for the poem and then used his skills as a writer to execute his vision. The method Simic uses we cannot be certain of but it strikes me as coming from the same sensibility that William Stafford, another favorite poet of mine, which is to sit quietly and take the words as they come instead of trying to compose according to devices conjured up deliberately. Perhaps the method of composition has implications for the "message," if you will, of the poem.

The perspicacious reader will note that it is possible to use both methods at once. Get an idea, then sit quietly and wait for the words to come. Be more concerned for getting it down than for getting it right. Write it, then set it aside until tomorrow or the next day. If it still looks good then, then there could be something there. I've often thought about Stafford's method for revising his poems. Surely he made some revisions.

I think that part of the attraction of the 'sit quietly' method lies in the compounding of method with message. This line of reasoning sees that, in order to benefit from the method, one must set aside one's ego and one's conscious preferences and simply be a vessel if you will of the verse. It is a way of accomplishing something by participating in something larger than oneself. And it is a way to do things without violence or aggression. In that sense, the method is something like Buddhism.

The method of writing didactically runs the risk of producing propaganda and little else. Such poets, when they write for adults, are not remembered well or fondly. When this type of poetry is aimed toward children, however, it can be warmly welcomed and actively appreciated. For example, "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley: "the Gobble-uns 'll git you/Ef you/Don't/Watch/Out!"

Image from Jeannette's Sketchblog accessed 6/6/08.

Both methods can be useful for those poets who say nothing makes sense to them until they write about it, but it seems to me the didactic sort is more likely to be used by the poet who has a vision of some sort. The 'sit quietly' poet is not one who is charged up about something and wants to express love for something in particular in myriad ways with dozens of poems. Petrarch's vision was Love and his vision was Laura and for him his vision was one in which Love and Laura were one. Petrarch's poems followed a formula which today we call the Petrarchan sonnet. I am calling it a didactic method because the writing is formulaic. I'm not convinced that Petrarch was trying, with his poems, to teach us something.

The notion of a poet of vision is an interesting one I think. It think William Blake was clearly a poet of vision. William Shakespeare, I don't think so. Or, his vision is summed up in the sentence, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." William Stafford's vision, perhaps, was one of justice: "Justice will take a million intricate adjustments." I've landed on a large topic here, haven't I. Part of that is due to me as a reader and thinker, and part of that is due to the poets who wrote the poems I've been thinking about.

Then there is a connection in the notion of vision to the importance of perception, especially in such religious practices as Hinduism and Buddhism. And then there's the reverence for the divine which returns us to the importance of attitude and will, and the notion that to pay attention to something is to love it.

Clearly a noticeable difference when the ego is present and assertive and when the ego acknowledges that it is serving something greater than itself.

That's all I've got for now.

Three Poems

Two poems that are not great but are nevertheless worth considering.

County Fair by Charles Simic

If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

From Hotel Insomnia, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved.

It seems a simple poem at first. I laughed out loud when I read it the first time and then again when I read it to a few friends. A six-legged dog at a county fair lays around most of the time. For the speaker, the dog seems to be about as interesting as the fact that it's “a cold, dark night/To be out at the fair.” When the dog's keeper throws a stick and the dog fetches it, the poem gets even more interesting.

First of all, the speaker of the poem is acting as witness and more. I didn't see this at first because the importance of the dog is downplayed (in line two) and because the “we” of the poem is never clarified. But the speaker is more than a witness when making the assertion “One got used to them quickly.” How would the speaker know how quickly you or I might get used to the dog's extra legs? It's an interesting assertion. It almost seems to me an allusion to the part toward the end of The Stranger by Albert Camus in which the narrator talks about how a man could get used to anything, even to living in the trunk of a tree. But one reason I remember “County Fair” as well as I do is because of the extra legs and the hilarity of the speaker's matter-of-fact description of them without being judgmental about the keeper's intent to hoodwink people in order to separate them from their money (Why else would there be a six-legged dog at a county fair?). So to me it's interesting that the six legs are treated so casually in the poem because it is those six legs that for me make the poem memorable.

The addition of the drunken girl's laughter and the drunken man's persistent kissing increase the value of the poem. The two of them get three of the poem's sixteen lines, which doesn't seem like much, but if we take them out of the poem, we lose the idea that the speaker knows of the humor in the dog keeper's attempt at deception by adding a pair of phony legs to her dog. We also lose the idea that the speaker of the poem is aware of people doing what they want without regard to what others are doing or thinking around them.

The last line adds still another dimension. Are the girl and man part of “the whole show”? Is the speaker aware of the unclear meaning of the last line? Finally, we are left with the dog standing there with the stick in its mouth, looking “back at us.” Maybe the dog has lost interest in the fetch and will not return with the stick. And we still don't know who the “us” is.

Here is another poem that I would say is not great but is nevertheless worth considering.

Why I Am Happy by William Stafford

Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

When I read this poem the first time, I was disappointed. I couldn't understand how a poet who had been writing and publishing for so many years could write something as simple and bland as this. In that reading, I didn't consider that Stafford may be using metaphor here. Perhaps the lake is an attitude. Whatever the case, the speaker of the poem seems satisfied in her knowledge and is not interested in telling where the lake is. Whatever the 'now' is, it is enough.

These poems seem to me to have in common the idea that any life will do and that what matters is love of self or at least respect of self. Speaking of self-love, it occurs to me now that self-love could be Aristotle's “prime mover.”

And now I come to Derek Walcott's poem “Love After Love:”

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Charles Simic at the Chicago Library

One of my favorite books is The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, the book continues to inspire me as a place where humanity and poetry intersect. I'm sure humanity and poetry intersect in other poetry as well, but in Simic's work it's like an analysis that includes inspiration. If there is such a thing as a map of intuition, this is it. The word surreal or surrealism is often applied to it. It seems to me a type of wit. Wit in the sense that the so-called Metaphysical poets used the term.

Mr. Simic is now U.S. Poet Laureate, and he will be reading in Chicago this Saturday, the 26th of April, 2008. I so want to go, but with gas prices the way they are it isn't reasonable for me to go, especially since I'm without a job and looking for work. It's a five-plus hour drive for me (one way).

Announcement:

Poetry Off the Shelf: Charles Simic
SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 12:00 PM
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium

Harold Washington Library Center

400 South State Street

Noon. Free Admission.
Charles Simic, current Poet Laureate of the United States, was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953, at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New England, where he was a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire until his retirement. A poet, essayist, and translator, he has been honored with the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic has published numerous collections of poems, among them, My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); Classic Ballroom Dances (1980), which won the University of Chicago's Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America's di Castagnola Award. His new book of poems, That Little Something, will be out in Spring of 2008. Simic has also published several prose books and translations.

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public Library

This announcement and a selection of Mr. Simic's poems posted online are available at The Poetry Foundation, http://poetryfoundation.org/programs/events.html accessed 4/23/08.