In honor of our new Poet Laureate I went back to my Vermont College essays and pulled out this one on Charles Simic’s book of poems, The Voice at 3 A.M. I’ve also included one of my favorite poems of his at the conclusion.

Charles Simic is a complex man with complex thoughts. He possesses a large cache of memories from his childhood in Yugoslavia where he lived through the German and Allied bombings, as well as those as a young immigrant to the U.S. in the fifties and sixties. The chaotic and frightening circumstances of his childhood in combination with the educated and articulate adult he grew to be create poetry that combines tenderness and vulnerability with an often acerbic or pragmatic view of the world. Simic is not willing to allow one emotional force to rule his experiences, rather he gives himself permission to put on the page the very duplicity that haunts, as well as informs him.

 Simic’s poetry dwells frequently on the subject of death; how he observes its affect on people, contemplating his own, and the temporal nature of our soul inhabiting such a fragile vessel. He has seen much death from an early age and has respect, as well as an almost casual familiarity with the way it goes about its appointed task. In the poem “Death, The Philosopher” death is personified, is said to have an “unfortunate passion,” to love “the way the summer dusk fell” and to give “excellent advice by example.” In the last four lines Simic brings himself into the poem:

Miraculously lucid, you, too, came to ask
About the strangeness of it all.
Charles, you said,
How strange you should be here at all!

The sense I had when reading this poem is that there are so many mysteries in life and you can dwell on how dreadful it is, how confusing, and how there seems to be no way to “figure it out,” but in that truth is the strangest of all truths; the unfathomable miracle of your very existence.

Simic has a talent for stringing disparate images together in a poem to create a strong mood, whether it is playful, sensual or somber. One of my favorite lines in the selection is seen in these two stanzas from the poem, “Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness”:

…Someone rising to eloquence

After a funeral, or in the naked arms of a woman
Who has her head averted because she’s crying,
And doesn’t know why. A hairline fracture of the soul
Because of the way light falls on these bare trees and bushes.

Sea-blackened rocks inscrutable as chess players…
One spoke to them of words failing…
Of great works and little faith of blues in each bite of bread.
Above the clouds the firm No went on pacing.

These lines speak of the beauty of sorrow, of how we reach out in our awkward way to comfort each other in times of loss, even though we are inadequate to the task. The line that is most striking is “A hairline fracture of the soul…” It describes a moment of being caught off guard by a slant of light through the trees, or the scent of jasmine on a summer’s evening, or the cry of a child and how, in that instant the soul cracks open, reveals itself, and we are nothing but pure energy.

Although a good many of the poems in this collection (which are selections from 1986 to 2003) dwell on the dark and disturbing aspects of life in the 20th century and the struggle of an individual who has seen more than his share of pain and suffering, there are poems that touch the lighter side and those that exhibit a sweetness and serenity. “De Occulta Philosophia” is one of the latter, and perhaps my favorite poem in the book. Here the narrator speaks to the evening sunlight and “Seeks initiation / Into your occult ways.” There is humility in the voice of the speaker, who is in awe of the incredible majesty in such a display:

Tell me something of your study
Of lengthening shadows,
The blazing windowpanes
Where the soul is turned into light—
Or don’t just now.

The narrator exhibits a longing, a desire to touch the elusive quality of light, of shadow, of the quiet power in the setting sun. In the end the narrator realizes that he is but a mortal, “Seated in a shadowy back room / At the edge of a village,” and although he is given a certain knowledge in his experience of the sunset, he will forever be unable to understand such a profound phenomena in the way he craves.

One of the primary strengths in Simic’s poems is his ability to bring forth images that are both vivid and unusual. They reminded me of French or Italian art films, with the shadows and sharp edges of black and white photography and the sparse, poignant lines of the actors. He is a master at creating mood in his poems as seen in the first stanza of “Against Whatever it is That’s Encroaching:

Best of all is to be idle,
And especially on a Thursday,
And to sip wine while studying the light:
The way it ages, yellows, turns ashen
And then hesitates forever
On the threshold of the night
That could be bringing the first frost.     

Using the words “idle,” “ages,” “yellows,” “ashen,” and “hesitates” there is a strong sense of suspension of time, a slow motion, a remembrance, as if in a dream where all is seen as a movie, and the dreamer knows it is a dream. The melancholia sets up the next two stanzas where a young boy is watching a man (perhaps his father) with two “loose” women whispering and drinking together. We see this all as through a thin veil until the last lines, when the boy reveals his thoughts as he sees in all this revelry the conflicting emotions of one of the women:

The grown-ups raise their glasses to him,
The giddy-headed, red-haired woman
With eyes tightly shut,
As if she were about to cry or sing.

Above all I admire the honesty of Charles Simic’s poetry. There is not an iota of pretension. His poetry requires the reader to slow down and listen carefully to what he is saying to be able to go with him, but when you do (as I finally did), the originality of his perceptions and his sensitivity to human suffering is an enriching and emotionally fulfilling experience.

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.