Like Tony Hoagland, Charles Simic is no one-trick pony. In addition to his prowess in poetry, he knows his way around an essay, too. Yesterday, reading “Notes on Poetry and Philosophy,” I noted much of interest, both from Simic and from the poets and philosophers he quotes.
For instance, Wallace Stevens once said that the twentieth-century poet is “a metaphysician in the dark.” Simic, not so sure, compares this idea to chasing a black cat in a dark room. Not only is poetry on the loose in there, but theology and Western and Eastern Philosophies as well. So if you’re bumping heads a lot, don’t be surprised. And if there’s no cat to begin with, don’t be surprised by that, either. It may be the trickster Devil and not the cat that’s truly on the loose in the dark.
Surprisingly, Simic does not believe that poets know what they are going to write about in advance, simply sitting down to execute those ideas. He says, “My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one’s walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.,… where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear.”
He then shares the pleasing (to oft rejected poets like us) anecdote of the time he wrote a series of poems about ordinary objects such as knives, spoons, and forks. The poems were summarily rejected by a poetry editor who wrote back asking why the young Simic wasted his time on such topics.
Simic was struck by how an “insider” like this editor might consider certain topics worthy and serious enough to write about and certain others not. In his own defense, he quoted Husserl: “Back to things themselves.” (This reminds me of William Carlos Williams famous words, “No ideas but in things.”)
Added Simic: “An object is the irreducible itself, a convenient place to begin, it seemed to me. What appealed to me, too, was the discipline, the attention required, and the dialectics that went with it. You look and you don’t see. It’s so familiar that it is invisible, etc. I mean, anybody can tell when you’re faking it. Everybody is an expert when it comes to forks. Plus, all genuine poetry in my view is antipoetry.”
The gist of Simic’s philosophy on poetry comes after he quotes Jack Spicer: “Poets think they’re pitchers when they’re really catchers.”
Simic riffs on this idea: “Everything would be very simple if we could will our metaphors. We cannot.
“This is true of poems, too. We may start believing that we are recreating an experience, that we are making an attempt at mimesis, but then the language takes over,. Suddenly the words have a mind of their own.
“It’s like saying, ‘I wanted to go to church but the poem took me to the dog races.’
“When it first happened I was horrified. It took me years to admit that the poem is smarter than I am. Now I go where it wants to go.”
The basis of all this talk? Simic’s love of philosophy—Heidegger in particular. Old Heidegger said that poetry could not be understood until thinking itself was understood. “Then he says, most interestingly, that the nature of thinking is something other than thinking, something other than willing.
“It’s this ‘other’ that poetry sets traps for.”
That’s philosophy for you. Something is what it is not. In short, according to Simic, “The labor of poetry is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words….
“Being cannot be represented and uttered—as poor realists foolishly believe—but only hinted at. Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words.”
I’ll come back to Simic’s essay for more later. That seems enough to chew over for today. Plus, I have to open my poetry file now so my poems can write me.
Should be nice for a change, don’t you think? Like having your car tugged slowly through an automatic car wash, only with words and sentences instead of suds and brushes….
4 thoughts on ““All Genuine Poetry in My View Is Antipoetry.””
AND Simic’s “object” poems are among his best. “Spoon” inspired me for many years and still does, requiring the poet-observer to give deep attention to any object.
I, too, am of the opinion that there two poetries: 1 is real poetry, the kind that make your hair stand on end, and 2, there is anti-poetry. The first is easy. You merely have to proceed by example. Can you imagine writing this? ‘So lust, through to a radiant, angel link’d / Will sate itself in a celestial bed/ And pray on garbage.’ That’s the ghost in Hamlet talking—and I suppose it’s no surprise that Shakespeare wrote real poetry. But what about anti-poetry? Can you imagine writing this? ,Prose is deep but natural, prose is social,/ prose can propose,/ poetry, such repose,/and such longueur./
Well, I don’t have to imagine writing this. I merely have to remember doing it. The trouble is I don’t.; it was chosen pretty much at random from my blog. I’ve been keeping this blog for ten years now, and its got at least one entry for every month—okay, I did miss a couple of months there—but I was sick—and I mean really sick—brain surgery kind of sick. But I’m wandering from my point,
Which is: I’ve got a lot of poems there, and the quality is uneven, and truth to tell, I don’t really know if this is good poetry or bad poetry; real poetry or anti-poetry. I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s idea that if you live outside the law, you’ve got to be really honest…
But about what?
I think most everything we write is practice, which like published poems can be good and “bad” but even “bad” is good as it is necessary. Thanks for checking in and good luck with the poetry, anti- or pro-!
I disagree with Simic. Form, not content, distinguishes poetry from prose. Notice I don’t assume one type of writing is superior to the other, avoiding the confusion of the terms with the evaluative adjectives “poetic” and “prosaic.” Poetry (maybe better defined as “verse”) is a type of writing organized by line and stanza. Prose is organized by paragraphs. Perhaps, using this basic definition, there are only four types of writing: prosaic poetry, poetic poetry, prosaic prose, and poetic prose. So that silly term “prose poem” may now be discussed as poetic prose. There! See how easy it is to untangle that knotty old issue of the difference between prose and poetry?