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Interview: Charles Simic

A Serbian-American poet and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review, Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States in 1954 and started publishing poems by the age of twenty-one, around 1959. He earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1967, and within the year published his first full-length collection, What the Grass Says. He has since published more than sixty books in the United States and abroad along with numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He is the author of several books of essays and has edited several anthologies. He has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End. He was poet laureate of the US from 2007 to 2008.

Simic has taught American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire since 1973 and is now professor emeritus there. The following conversation took place at the Miami Book Fair shortly after the publication of Scribbled in the Dark (Ecco, 2017).

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

When your family first moved to the US, they settled in Chicago? I felt a connection to that because was born and raised in Hyde Park, Chicago.

Charles Simic:

Actually, it was New York, then Chicago, in Oak Park. We moved because my father’s job had moved to Chicago. I finished high school in Oak Park, then my parents broke up. I left home and was on my own, and got a job in the city on the Near North Side. Then I picked up and went to New York City.

After that, I came back to Chicago, but the family had fallen apart, and there was no money, so first I worked during the day at the Chicago Sun-Times. Not a fancy job, just a lowly job. I started going to school at night, at the University of Chicago. It took a couple of years because there weren’t too many courses at night, but it was an interesting time. I lived on the Near North Side because that’s where the Chicago Sun-Times was, by the Chicago River, so I’d go off to work, finish, then have to catch the . . .

TFR:

The L?

Simic:

Yes! The L train! You know, you’d go down south, to Hyde Park where the university was, and it was a different world there, in Hyde Park. And I was just saying to someone last night how Anglophiled it was at University of Chicago—all the professors wore tweeds and affected a British accent—even though they were born in Wisconsin or wherever.

TFR:

So, they put on fake accents?

Simic:

Yes, yes. And they would say to you, “Charles, if you like poetry, you must read Andrew Marvell.” And I’d say, “Sure, sure.”

(laughter)

TFR:

I’ve lived in Florida for nearly two decades now, but when I started in on the poems of section two in Scribbled in the Dark, the images grabbed me and took me back to my childhood. There’s “Bare Trees,” “January,” “In the Snow,” and “The Night and the Cold,” so many northern images that I felt I was back in wintertime Chicago. It was “Bare Trees” that reminded me of my lost period after high school when I wanted to attend the University but didn’t understand the process. I would go walk the grounds, wander the Oriental Institute, and just hope someone would ask, “Hi, want to take a class?” If I may, can I read you the lines that I felt the speaker was addressing me quite personally?

Simic:

Sure!

TFR:

“The bare branches moving in it, / Are like the fingers of the blind / Reaching to touch the face of someone / Who’s been calling out to them / In the voice of geese flying over, / The shots of a hunting rifle, / And a dog barking outside a trailer / For someone to hurry and let him in.”

Thank you for those words, I mean, yeah, that’s what it was like for me at nineteen.

On a larger subject, I’d like your opinion about the so-called state of poetry in the United States today.

Simic:

In the US there is more poetry being written than in the rest of the world put together. It’s an amazing, amazing thing. There isn’t a huge audience for poetry, but the number of poets now writing compared to when I started out in the fifties and mid-fifties has grown huge. I mean, in the city of Chicago, we knew the aspiring poets and contemporary poets. We knew about Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and all the others. I would say there were fifteen to twenty at a given time. It was like a cult!

Everybody was interested in literature, mostly fiction, of course, and not just American but European modern fiction as well. But poetry, well it was really an activity that was marginal, especially in Chicago—always like it had a chip on its shoulder culturally.

(laughter)

TFR:

That’s a colorful way to put it. I’m thinking of [Carl] Sandburg’s description in his poem “Chicago”—“the City of Big Shoulders.”

Simic:

It was such a small poetry community for a while, but then the Beats were the ones who made a big difference. It started with giving free poetry readings with [Allen] Ginsberg and everybody else. They were very, very popular. Then they were at colleges and universities giving readings, and a whole generation discovered this was a lot of fun! Both students and adults showed up to readings, so they started this thing in the sixties, and all of a sudden it caught on. I know my generation of poets profited from this—we were getting invitations from all across the country to come read. This was followed by the beginning of writing programs.

TFR:

Aaah, and now we have the “explosion” of writing programs.

Simic:

Yes, yes. They keep turning out poets. So you see, it’s really impossible to get a clear picture of what’s going on. There was a time until about ten to fifteen years ago, when someone like me who was real passionate about poetry, and others who were passionate, could get a clear idea who the poets of the generation were, even by region, East Coast, West Coast, etc. But now, with the proliferation of poetry on the Internet—I mean, you used to go to bookstores to find out about new poems and poets! There were so many everywhere, each town had a bookstore, and you went to the poetry section, and you could see who was doing what. Sure books are still coming out, but not so easily displayed. They aren’t as “seen.” So now, as I say, it’s beyond anyone’s ability to answer confidently where poetry is going.

TFR:

Tell me your thoughts on something I heard on NPR. It was a comment on poetry, and how in Europe three to four hundred will gather for a reading, but in the US only a few dozen.

Simic:

No, that’s not true.

TFR:

I’m glad to hear it!

Simic:

Years ago, in Russia, when poetry was read, there used to be a lot of people, in Paris maybe a few more, in Germany a little better, and in Spain even more, but here in the United States, there are readings even in remote areas at state universities, in the Dakotas, in Oklahoma, and Kansas. Perhaps because there’s not as much to do, as many activities all the time, they’ll have a poetry series each year which they alternate with fiction, and anyone with respect for literature will come and listen. Hundreds show up! Now, in New York City there’s too many other things going on, so only a few dozen may attend. And now, more recently, it’s just impossible to tell. There’s live reading groups online, and YouTube readings. It’s just impossible to grasp.

TFR:

I wonder, in hindsight, what will we see? I mean, as far as schools of poetry, movements of poetry, eras of poetry. We had the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Black Mountain Poets, and as you mentioned the Beats. What will this era be called, if anything? The Onliners? The Techs? My students go to poetry slams, and most participate, too. That’s kept poetry vibrant for them. I just wonder what this era will be—there’s a lot of political and social justice work out there bringing awareness to the art. Poetry still has a job to do.

Simic:

Yes, yes.

TFR:

Let’s get back to Scribbled in the Dark. When I read the title poem, I knew I wanted to ask you about it.

Simic:

This is a kind of big city experience in this poem. Up until a few years ago, I used to teach at both the University of New Hampshire and NYU, which gave me an apartment. One summer night, late, the Village is full of people, it’s 3:00 a.m., and I hear shrieks in the street, and I wonder, is it joy or fear? Is someone arguing? It could be anything! So I’m in bed, and I get up and look down at the street because it’s dark, and I’m up then—you see, I’m an insomniac, so was my father, it runs in my family, but it’s no big deal, and so if I lie there in the dark I get rest to a degree but no sleep. But, if I turn on the lights it feels like a struggle. And if I have an idea that comes to me, I don’t want to turn on the lights, but I can’t help myself, I have to write the idea down, so there I am, scribbling in the dark, but (laughs), often it’s quite hard to read what I wrote in the morning. But it works—I’ve been doing this for years, because, you know, you’ll forget in the morning.

TFR:

I love that.

Your poem “The White Cat,” where you say “the one who disappeared,” is profound to read.

Simic:

That’s actually kind of a true story.

I’ve lived in a little village in New Hampshire for forty-five years, and I know all my neighbors, a long time, and you get to know each other, and get to chatting, and someday someone says, “I wondered what happened to so-and-so,” and that’s how it starts.

TFR:

It resonates. I like your line, too, “my childhood, a silent movie.” What a metaphor.

Simic:

This was in my childhood in Belgrade. They were still showing silent films. My grandmother and mom would take me, and I’d fall asleep. My mother would nudge me and wake me up during a scene and say, “Look, look, a horsey!” And I’d say “Horsey!” The city was occupied then, and we had a curfew. We had to be home by 10:00 p.m. or we could end up in a camp.

TFR:

Wow. That’s experience, and your experience is, of course, unique, but it’s the commonalities that fascinate me, that span generations, that are ageless. I was raised by my grandmother, who was born in 1892, and she played the piano at the local theater playing silent movies when she was a young girl. We’re still those children, aren’t we? We remember so much.

Simic:

If you want to have a perfect memory of childhood, I don’t know, I had bombs falling all around and worried they’d fall on my head. It wasn’t perfect.

TFR:

I know. As instructors we joke “no one wants to read a happy story.” Some dark material makes the best poetry. I want you to know that I mention two quotes of yours at the beginning of all my poetry course sections.

Simic:

Yes?

TFR:

The two that I always refer to are “Don’t tell the readers what they already know about life” and “Don’t assume you’re the only one in the world who suffers.” I hear these two when working on my own writing, every time, and students struggle so with these concepts.

Simic:

You must out-write yourself. You have to find the way to make it interesting for the reader. You can’t say it in the same old way. You must work to captivate the reader.