Defence of Poetry 1997: Charles Simic

January 18, 2006 [for M.B. and D.K.]   


When I was still a snot-nosed kid, my name was Ovid, Horace, Catallus, Sextus Propertius and Martial. My specialty was mixing the serious with the trivial, the frivolous with the high-minded. I was a holy terror. I wrote lines like these:

When she’s on her chaise-long, make haste to find a footstool
For those dainty feet of hers, help her on and off
With the slippers

or:

Whoever hopes to count
The love-games of your bed
Might as well list the stars
Glittering overhead
or every grain of sand
In Africa’s desert land.

“Better a metropolitan city were sacked,” Robert Burton wrote, “a royal army overcome, an invincible armada sunk, a twenty thousand kings should perish, than her little finger ache.” That was my rule too. I had nothing to do with sundry windbags who write odes to every two-bit tyrant that comes along, tabulate their conquests, glorify their slaughter of the barbarians and praise their incomparable wisdom in peace and war. I poked fun at the rich and the powerful and gossiped about their wives and daughters playing grab-ass while their husbands’ backs were turned. I didn’t even spare the gods. I made them into a lot of brawling, drunken, revengeful, senile wife-swappers.
I myself roamed the streets of Rome at all hours frequently inebriated. I fell in and out of love a thousand times, never failing to tell the whole world about my new love’s incomparable virtues and perversities down to its every lascivious detail. Then, I got into trouble. The Emperor sent one of us into permanent exile to a god-forsaken, hellhole at the farthest reaches of the empire. His official guardians of virtue took the opportunity to warn the populace against lyric poetry, which is nothing more, so they said, but a call-to debauchery and brazen mockery of everything we hold sacred.

Of course, nobody bothered the official eulogists-for-hire busy protecting the solemnities of state and church from ridicule. It was the lyric poem with its exaltation of intimacy that was suspect ever since Sappho started the craze by elevating individual destiny over the fate of the tribe, preferring, so she informed us, to savor Anactoria’s “lovely step, her sparkling glance and her face, than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and glittering armor.”

It’s true. It was the love of that kind of irreverence, as much as anything else, that started me in poetry. The itch to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the naked body, claim that one has seen an angel in the same breath as one shouts that there’s no god, and so forth. The discovery that the tragic and the comic are always entwined together made me roll on the floor with happiness. Seduction, too, was always on my mind. My usual line of jive went this way: If you take off your shirt, my dear, and let my tongue get acquainted with yours, I’ll praise your beauty in my poems and your name will live forever. It worked, too. Lyric poetry is nothing more but a huge, centuries-old effort to introduce our immortal souls to our genital organs.

In the so-called Dark Ages, mud was everywhere up to the knees and the common folk made their bed for the night on the dirt floor, cozy and restfut in one big embrace with their children, their pigs and sheep, and dogs and cats, while the hens and the rooster perched on the rafters over their heads, and only the horse slept standing up with his head sticking out of the window on the lookout for poets. For centuries, yokels, as well as ladies and gents, had little to amuse themselves with, but a few strains of Gregorian chant and the daily earful of a lot of bad cussing about the hard life and the weather.

Your typical poet was a lone, bummed-out, lice-rilden monk, reduced to roaming the countryside, begging every night for a few crumbs and a bit of straw to sleep on in some rich man’s drafty castle, where in gratitude for the hospitality, he would offer a gamut of racy love poems, pious legends of saints’ lives, drinking songs, funeral laments, faithful-wife poems, sly satires of King’s and Pope’s ways, in the meantime being extra careful to make the murderous and drunken company at the table laugh and even shed a tear at how hungry and cold, skinny and forlorn he looks now that – oh the sweet voice of the woodland nightingale – he even lost his cloak and breeches at dice!

I turn to you in misery and tears
As turns the stag, when his strength gives out.

You get the idea? Oh, the guises I had, more aliases than all the con artists of the world put together.

I was that petty felon Villon who almost ended up strung up by his neck, Guillem IX, Duke of Aquitaine who wrote his poems while he snored away in the saddle, Shakespeare, who some scholars tell us was not really called that but something else, Signor Dante who gave us a first-class tour of hell to prepare us for the horrors of the twentieth century, and so many others. My fondest memory remains of one, Thomas Bastard, who lived from 1566 to 1618 and whose life and career my anthology of Elizabethan verse describes, more or less, thus:

A country clergyman who made pitiably small headway in life, Bastard published his book in 1598. It was much ridiculed. Bastard died, touched in his wits, in debtors’ prison in Dorcester.

My life was like the History of Costumes. One season I wore a powdered wig, rode in a glass coach, scribbled sonnets between duels on the cuff of my shirt, taking time-out to praise classical measures and restraint, next I was a wild-haired revolutionary shouting encouragement while standing on some real or imaginary barricade, claiming that poets are nothing less but the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Some nerve, you must be saying to yourself. Ha-ha! Just wait till I tell you about my American adventures.


II

No sooner had Columbus sailed back to Spain, I started scribbling poems. It must have been the climate in the new world, hot and humid in the south, bleak and cold in the north, so for years I couldn’t get a decent poem written in this vast land of mystery. How many still remember that the first explorers and settlers expected to run into the Chinese over the next horizon? The Frenchman Nicollet even went and provided himself in Paris with a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with birds and flowers in order to be properly attired while crossing the prairie and finally sitting down to sip tea and schmooze with some old mandarin. In any case, it took years of sleepwalking to open my eyes and see where I truly was.

Forget about Eldorado and New Jerusalem. Forget about the devil in the forest and the comely witches stripping to frolic naked around his campfire. Forget about Oriental spices and jewels. Here were grim little towns with factory walls black with age. Here were crowded tenements with men and women huddled against the weather, knees drawn up, lying on their side, their heads touching the roach-infested floor. Here were seedy rooming houses populated by an assortment of loners, eccentrics, bad poets and a dozen other kinds of losers.
How quickly the New World got old. For Poe, Melville and Hawthorne, it already felt like being buried alive. The eyes of their men and women are often lusterless. Their heroes seem weary, resigned like Bartleby to staring at walls. For others like Ralph Waldo Emerson, America still remained to be truly discovered.

The American Declaration of Independence occurred in 1776; its declaration of literary sovereignty had to wait till 1840’s and the essays of Emerson. “The poet is the eye and tongue of every living and every inanimate things. Poetry is nothing less bet a divinely appointed medium. God himself doesn’t speak prose, but communicates with us through hints, omens and not-yet-perceived resemblances in objects lying around us,” he wrote.

“The invariable mark of wisdom, Emerson tells us, is to see the miraculous in the common.” Unfortunately, “American life storms about us daily, but is slow to find a tongue. I look in vain,’ he concludes, “for the poet whom I describe.”

He didn’t have to wait long. No sooner were the words out his mouth, along came Walt Whitman proclaiming that the “Americans of all nations at anytime upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” and that “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

How do you like that, I said to myself?

This is what you shall do, Whitman says: “Love the earth and the sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for stupid and crazy . . . hate tyrants . . . re-examine everything you have been told in school and church or any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” 

I tell you, I felt right at home in America.

The American poet, in Whitman’s visionary optimism, is the one who brings to us the news that the lowest is as sacred as the highest. All truths wait in all things to be discovered. The lines in his hand, he says, puts to scorn all machinery. The ant is equally perfect, and so is a tree toad. The cow with head bowed munching the grass surpasses any statue. He proposes to make a poem of things overlooked, slighted and forbidden. He intends to free the howls restrained by decorum and to let the sound of his “barbaric yawp” be heard over the roofs of the world.
One of Whitman’s greatest poetic inventions is the catalogue. The underlying ambition of his long poems is to remember and include everyone and list their individual occupations and destinies in an act of god-like omniscience. The number of unknown heroes is equal to the greatest heroes known, he assures us, and he will name them all. In his great poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he addresses his future readers thus:

It avails not, time and place – distance avails not,I’m with you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,Just as any of you is one of the living crowd, I was one of a crowd,Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d...

It’s hard to resist Whitman – and yet, his big embrace has always been a bit embarrassing to American poets. Over the last century, he was both detested and admired. Even his mentor Emerson who greeted his debut as the fulfillment of his own fondest hopes, eventually found him too much to take. In a country founded by the followers of Calvin, Whitman’s exuberant praise of all matters sexual is a permanent scandal. Luckily for us, we have Emily Dickinson as Whitman’s opposite, a poet reserved and suspicious in the face of his utopian grandeur and self-confident rhetoric.

As far as Dickinson is able to figure it out, we, human beings, live in a magic prison, a haunted house, a dark labyrinth, an inscrutable forest, trapped in a finite infinite, an uncertain certainty, caught in a maze of oxymorons and paradoxes in a universe whose chief characteristic is its ambiguity.

Her America comes with a large graveyard. “That bareheaded life under the grass worries one like a wasp,” she says, or, “had we the first intimation of the definition of life, the calmest of us would be lunatics”.
 
Dickinson’s vision is tragic. She knows we pay dearly for every ecstatic moment we snatch in our lives. For her a poet is a recluse, a secret blasphemer, and a heroic failure, at best. Still, in her inability to submit to bounds and limits, she is like Whitman. They both aim to join heaven and earth in their poems.
 
What makes American poetry interesting is the notion that writing poetry can become the place where fundamental epistemological, metaphysical and aesthetic questions can be raised and answered. Poetry for Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and so many others, is the process through which ideas are tested, dramatized, made both a personal and a cosmic issue. As Dickinson says, “To be human is more than to be divine, for when Christ was divine he was uncontented till he had been human.” I like that. The poet’s struggle may be solitary, but it is an exemplary struggle, nevertheless.
 
What an ideal situation to find oneself in, especially for an immigrant! American poetry’s dizzying ambition to answer al the major philosophical and theological questions is unparalleled. Its mixture of empiricism and idealism may have its beginnings in the British and German Romantic movement, but it exceeds them in its sheer gall. Grand Inquisitors, philosopher kings, totalitarian cops of all stripes would have plenty to do here. The rack and thumb-screw would be turning around the clock after a pronouncement like the following:
 
“The poet – when he is writing – is a priest; the poem is a temple; epiphanies and communion take place within it,” Denise Levertov wrote twenty years ago.
 
Our poets are spiritual adventurers of a peculiar sort. ‘No ideas but in things’, we claim. We are always insisting that we are starting from scratch, at the foot of the ladder, as it were: naked, without history, frequently without any religious belief, climbing an imaginary ladder up to heaven to find out for ourselves what all the fuss is about.
 
American literature is a great paradox factory. On one hand, we desire to embody and express rare visionary states, and on the other, we wish to give our reader a hard and dry look at the everyday reality. “Literalists of the imagination” is what Marianne Moore wanted us to be. Finding a place for the genuine in this artifice we call poetry, (which she herself admitted of disliking), is our national project.
 
“No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism,” Whitman wrote. What his poems have, instead, and what he never tires of eulogizing for being the foundation of everything he regards as genuine and real, is American speech. The contemporary poet, Heather McHugh, shows it off nicely in one of her poems:
 
A few sashay, a few finagle.
Some make whoopee, some
make good. But most make
diddly-squat. I tell you this
 
is what I love about
America – the words it puts in
my mouth.
 
The most original achievement of American literature, we may boast, is the absence of an official literary language and our insistence that the only way to tell human beings about angels is to show them first a blade of grass.
 
 
III

Ah, the two thousand year old poet! It’s not easy being me after all the ill-treatment, adversity and bad luck I had. You’ve got to see the nightmares I get from all the bad poems I’ve written. A day doesn’t go by without some professor wagging her finger at me. Why only recently I was described as a self-pitying little fascist, peddling his phallocentric petty bourgeois claptrap. Twenty centuries of ridicule, my friends. Pedants pouring over my poems, teaching them to the young in such a way, they are guaranteed to hate poetry for the rest of their lives. Some morning when the weather is damp, I get a sore neck as if I were still Sir Walter Raleigh, convicted on charges of blasphemy and sedition, awaiting the executioner’s ax in the Tower of London.
 
Here’s my view of these many centuries: One worse than the other, if you ask me. A break in the clouds here and there, an afternoon nap in the shade in the arms of the one and only, maybe a kiss or two, and that’s about it. Sooner or later, the mal gets eaten, the last drop of tomato sauce runs down your chin, and you’re left with just some chicken bones on your plate. The rest of the time it’s plagues, wars, famines, persecutions, exile and hundreds of other calamities and miseries.
 
I suppose you think I am exaggerating? You imagine yourselves, of course, in a Renaissance palazzo attended and closely fussed over by numerous servants while you argue about the paintings of Titian and Campanella’s “City of the Sun” with princes and high-born floozies. Don’t make me laugh. All I see is open sewers in the streets reeking with stench of horse and human excrement, while nearby a twelve-year-old witch is being burnt at the stake by the Inquisition.
 
I’m digressing to make a point: The true poet always knew the score. Happiness, love, and the vision of the Almighty and his angels happen only in rarest of times. The moment you taste this morsel of bliss, this crumb of perfection and begin to savor it and lick your lips – oops! Your house catches fire, someone runs off with your wife, or you break your leg.
 
Poetry is best, therefore, when it finds itself at the heart of the human comedy. There’s no more reliable reporter of what it means to be stuck in this eternal can of worms. My view is that poetry is inevitable, irreplaceable, necessary as daily bread. Even if you were to find yourself living in the crummiest country in the world in an age of unparalleled vileness and stupidity, poetry would get written and its beauty and eloquence would give you hope. I know what troubles you. All that hyperbole and embellishment poets are prone to, all that nonsense talk and bizarre imagery they are forever hustling. Poets know that the only way to tell the truth is to lie. They put all their trust in their metaphors and into their wildest flights of the imagination. Poetry is the only place, come to think of it, where an incorrigible liar can have an honest existence providing he or she lies real good.
 
Is the two thousand year old poet getting tired of it all, you wonder? Absolutely not. Still full of spunk when she walks in wearing a gown of green silk that sticks to her lush curves like a coating of virgin olive oil.
 
In any case, here are a few short edifying anecdotes from my long life, that may amuse you or make you foreswear poetry and poets once and for all:
 
 
FIVE LITTLE-KNOWN ANECDOTES FROM THE LIFE OF A 2000 YEAR OLD POET
 
1.
Wherever he was, the 2000 year old poet was always scribbling something furiously. Once, the great Napoleon caught him chewing the end of his quill and exclaimed: “I hope you are not writing more of that snooze-inducing doggerel, poor man?”
 
“No, no,” the old poet replied. “I’m just picking my teeth after a splendid meal of boiled lion’s head served in cold vinaigrette.”
 
2.
As you’ve undoubtedly heard, scholars believe that the 2000 year old poet’s dog, Beelzebub, ate his one perfect, super-excellent, sublime and inimitable, never-published poem. The poet, as you’d expect, was pretty upset about that and always envied his colleague, the playwright Shakespeare, whose wife kept guard day and night, with a rolling pin, over his greatest play.
 
3.
The old poet loved to play the lyre. The moment he woke in the morning, he’d grab the lyre and start practicing. The same at night. He’d go sit on the potty and strum the lyre to pass the time away. This annoying habit of his explains why so many sane and rational people in the last few centuries left Europe, heedless of the dangers of the high seas, for such distant and savage places as American and Australia.
 
4.
Alas, I burn and am not believed. (Petrach)
 
There were actually three Lauras and not one as the poems of the old poet lead you to believe. They laughed at everything the master recited, and so had to eventually withdraw to a nunnery to hide the contortions on their lovely faces. Some days they’d laugh so hard, they’d fall out of their chairs. This would distress the old poet so much that for months he couldn’t write another word. The moment he did, the three Lauras would begin cackling again and slapping their sides even in the midst of their morning prayers.
 
5.
It took two thousand years, but finally the old poet became famous. Even in such far away places as Argentina, young housewives would stare at his picture for hours on end admiring his curly locks and thereafter go mad just as Ophelia did. They’d sleepwalk out in their white nightgowns and stand under some lone streetlight with eyes tightly closed, taking two dreamy steps this way, one dreamy step back . . .
 
That’s how tango was invented, by the way, and so many other things that have benefited humanity . . . Like the idea of meaning for instance.
 
Do you hear what I’m saying?
 
Life would be perfectly pointless if the poets didn’t come and tell you, again and again, that all your amours, all your sufferings and favorite memories are, indeed, deeply significant, important and even intelligible, and that you, when all’s said and done, really have no cause to fret about anything, as long as the poets are there doing the worrying for you night and day.