New Poet Laureate Ponders His Craft

CHARLES SIMIC: I would certainly take a poem like by Emily Dickenson. I would take a poem like, the one about hearing a fly buzz when I, you know, die or -- one of Emily Dickenson's poems certainly. There is a certain slant of light winter afternoons. That's another one.

I would definitely take Walt Whitman's poem about crossing a Brooklyn ferry. It's a bit longer, but it's -- it's a poem that I can read, you know, endlessly.

I would take something by Wallace Stevens. I think I could take, let's see, the Idea of Order at Key West.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: I'd say I would take that one. And -

JEFFREY BROWN: And why -- why these poets or these poems?

CHARLES SIMIC: Well, these are poets who have been very important to me. I mean Stevens and Dickenson especially. They're probably my favorite poets. I mean I have read them, you know, countless times. I've taught them countless times. I know their poems well, and I mean the amazing thing is that they're poems that you can read again and again, again and again, and every time you read them, they seem richer. They nourish you.

And this is the kind of poems, this is the kind of poets. And, I mean, there are others, obviously.

JEFFREY BROWN: Are there - let me ask this question from Julia in San Diego: "If poetry reminds us of our humanity in an inhumane world, who are the poets that most lift your spirit when you are reading and looking for a sense of hope and meaning?"

CHARLES SIMIC: Well, I mean, aside from the ones that I just mentioned, "lift our hope" -- that's a hard one.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: I guess, you know, Whitman lifts our hope, but, let's see, in the 20^th century, who would lift our hope? There's a poet that I love very, very much, who's a mid-century American poet whose name was Theodore Roethke.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: And I like his poems. His major poems are very, very beautiful poems. I love the poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hmm.

CHARLES SIMIC: I think I like every poem she ever wrote, and she was a tough cookie.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean personally?

CHARLES SIMIC: Well, it's just the way -- no -- the way she looked at the world.

JEFFREY BROWN: Uh-huh.

CHARLES SIMIC: I mean she knew -- you know, she didn't pretend that the world is not, you know, nice. It's a tough world out there, and she was a level-headed and kind of sensible person.

But it's that vision, that kind of clarity of mind that inspires me, if I find -- to have the kind of qualities that the lady asked.

JEFFREY BROWN: You've named all American poets, and I know, because it's something we talked about, that you came to this country as a teenager --

CHARLES SIMIC: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: Was that a way of -- of learning about America or becoming an American, especially with people like Dickenson and Whitman?

CHARLES SIMIC: Oh, certainly. I mean if you're going to write, you know, in American English, you have to read American poetry.

I mean there are plenty of poets, you know, from elsewhere that I like very much. I certainly like 19^th-century French poetry, someone like Baudelaire or Arthur Rimbaud. You know, British poetry. I mean I like Philip Larkin. I like Yeats. I like Russian poetry. But, you know, since it's always about language, poetry is so much about language, you know, poets are basically employees of the dictionary. You know, they work for the dictionary and --

JEFFREY BROWN: You work for the dictionary?

CHARLES SIMIC: Yes, we work for the dictionary.

JEFFREY BROWN: What do you mean?

CHARLES SIMIC: Well, because we, you know, we make -- we take the word -- we keep the language, I think, honest and interesting, and we look up words all the time. We open them up. We, you know, put some words to use that haven't been used in a long time. You know, we stay away from euphemisms --

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: -- and other kinds of language. And so, yeah, I would say that's, you know, that's what I see --.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, that's what this sort of goes to, an even broader question from Joseph Anderson in Sunnyvale, California: "What is poetry and how to explain that to someone? I'm over 50, but since high school, I've had a difficult time trying to tell or trying to teach someone just what constitutes poetry."

CHARLES SIMIC: Well, I mean poetry is, you know, a complex thing. I mean there are many definitions of poetry and so forth, but I would simplify them. I mean any time you, you know, any human being, you know, is sitting someplace looking over a landscape and, you know, the sun is coming down and, you know, they find themselves humming a little bit. If they have a companion, they'll say something, you know, interesting, nice, about that landscape, the way the sky looks, the way the bank of clouds, the sun between them, and so forth. Well, in a way, you're already a poet. I mean poetry is not something that is outside, you know, the ordinary human condition. We're all poets. We all think about, you know, mortality. We all think about time passing, love, and God and, you know, the world. And, you know, anybody who is awake at 4 o'clock in the morning, you know, thinking about the universe and their little self is a kind of poet. He's a poet and a philosopher, but also a poet.

So, I mean there is that. There is that constant,

which is the explanation, the reason why people have been writing poetry for the last, you know, four or five thousand years. But then there's the whole tradition. I mean to be a poet, to make art, to make poetry, you know, there's a long tradition that goes back many, many centuries, many great poets, not just in the English language but in other languages --

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: -- going back to the ancients. So, once you decide that you want to be a poet and are going to write poetry, and to find out, you know, what others have done, I mean then you have to read a great deal. But, I mean, you know -- I mean that's all I can say at the moment.

JEFFREY BROWN: Does poetry -- here's a question from Scott Conley, San Francisco -- a lot of Californians today; that's nice: "I am a recovering trial lawyer, age 83, who has recently taken up writing poetry and essays. Why can poetry often speak much better than prose can?"

Now, when you wake up at 4:00 in the morning, and I know you told me you're -- you're a life-long insomniac --

CHARLES SIMIC: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: -- you're thinking in poetry as opposed to prose?

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: I think I'm thinking in a special language that only insomniacs speak.

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: Which is neither one nor the other. It's probably -- mostly a language of images, you know. You know, it's not that you speak to yourself in sentences, but you kind of play films, late-night, you know, films of your life.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: Your guilty conscience plays films. Let's put it that way. But, well, poetry -- the concentration of poetry, the premise that you can say everything in a few words, the way poetry employs imagination, the way emotion is included, that -- paradoxically that spare quality can convey so much more than pages and pages of prose, when done well.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm. Because you write a lot of -- you write a lot of prose.

CHARLES SIMIC: I do, and I love prose.

JEFFREY BROWN: Uh-huh. And how, in your head, do you think of them as -- as different, or does one do something for you that the other does not do?

CHARLES SIMIC: Exactly. I mean it's -- I mean poetry is -- I mean it's a totally different kind of activity in my psyche. I mean when I -- you know, poetry, I feel connected with imagination, with a certain way of looking at language, experiencing language. And prose is this other thing here, which is, you know, discursive, and you -- and where ideas and stories are told.

So, you know, it's -- it's very difficult to kind of find sort of find sort of -- to compare the two. It's like, you know, it's like sort of, you know, it's like music and literature, architecture and painting.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: Yes, they all have something in common, but they -- we know when something is a poem and when, you know, that kind of language appears, and it serves specific purposes which prose does not serve.

What do you find?

CHARLES SIMIC: I think there's more interest in poetry in this country now than when I started in the 1950s.

JEFFREY BROWN: Really?

CHARLES SIMIC: Oh, I mean by -- by a long, long shot. It's not just my view. I mean Donald Hall was saying the same thing, the last Poet Laureate.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: There are more books, more literary magazines. There's an, you know, immense activity in poetry, which, I mean, you didn't have, you know, 50 years ago. You had -- what you had 50 years ago, you had more serious teaching of poetry in schools, high schools and elementary schools. I think that has gone down.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: But, just in terms of, you know, poetry readings, which, of course, you know, given everywhere, the poetry reading series given in every university, every college in this country -- have programs.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yeah.

CHARLES SIMIC: There are hundreds of writing programs. Books keep coming out.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's curious, though, that, as you say, that there's this -- there's less of it in -- of serious looking at poetry, teaching of poetry, at one level, at early levels in education, and yet there is more -- more out there. How does that happen?

CHARLES SIMIC: It's -- it's really incomprehensible to me. I mean, it doesn't make sense, but, of course, a lot of things don't make sense in the United States.

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: So, I kind of accept it. It's -- I think a lot has to do, of course, with the popularity of writing programs and, you know, readings. This, you know, unusual thing, you know, having readings everywhere in every college and university. So, you know, audiences come. People come to listen to these readings, and some of the audiences are quite large, you know.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: Two or three hundred people. If they go once, they go again because listening to poetry is enjoyable.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: So, all this somehow has conspired to create a large audience for poetry in this country and despite everything else that's going on with the education, which is mostly, you know, bad.

JEFFREY BROWN: We had a few people who are worried about the state of poetry and seemed to be pointing a finger at -- at poets themselves.

Here's -- let me read a couple of them. Michelle Ott from Florence, South Carolina: "It seems that the vast majority of poetry written today is kind of a poet-to-poet exchange. It's obtuse and ordinary humans get stuck and quit early on in the poem. Rightly so, because reading the rest wouldn't help either. I agree with you that poetry helps us become more aware of our humanity, but not if the common man no longer reads it. What suggestions do you have for getting that smaller percentage, the understandable stuff that's still good poetry, off the shelves and into the hands of the general public?"

And then George Mason from Fresno, California: "So much modern poetry, like so much modern classical music, seems to be intentionally and almost ridiculously obtuse, as if obfuscation were a legitimate substitution for beauty. And, lo and behold, it gets published."

CHARLES SIMIC: I don't think this is right. I don't think that they're familiar with enough poetry. Most American poetry is incredibly accessible and clear. I mean, if you go back, you know, to the beginnings, I mean, to Whitman -- I mean Whitman is clear.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: Dickenson is difficult, but many of her poems are clear. You get to the 20^th century -- Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams. Eliot is difficult. All right, you know, and Stevens. But coming today, I mean, these are poets, you know, American poets, let's say, of the last 20--30 years who really want to communicate. When they go to give these readings, I mean, the reason all these hundreds, thousands of readings are given around the country is because people understand what these poems are saying.

And so this notion that poetry is obscure and poetry is difficult, it's just not true. Sure, there are difficult poems. There are obscure poems, but they represent a minority. And I would advise the two people to, you know, to go to a bookstore or a library and, you know, just look for some, you know, contemporary anthologies or some recently published volumes, and they'll be surprised.

Patricia from East Quogue, New York: "If you were to address a class of middle school English students, what would you want them to leave thinking about?"

CHARLES SIMIC: Well, I would first read them some poems. I would read them poems, not my poems, but poems that are accessible, poems that would surprise how entertaining they are, how beautiful, how moving. And there are, you know, lots of poems like that to choose from. And it's -- I mean teaching poetry is -- is a process of trying to make the students not be afraid of poetry.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not be -- not be afraid?

CHARLES SIMIC: Not be afraid.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: Because they become, you know, thinking like, oh, poetry -- oh, God, that's boring and difficult. And to convey to them that poetry is written by, you know, human beings like themselves, who also wonder about things that they wonder about. And, you know, beginning with work that is accessible, that is clear. I mentioned Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop has poems that, you know, if you read it to -- to your dog --

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: -- he'd understand. He'd wag his tail. So, I love --

JEFFREY BROWN: That's an interesting test for a poem, isn't it?

CHARLES SIMIC: Oh, dogs are smart.

JEFFREY BROWN: You had a dog, right, for a long time?

CHARLES SIMIC: Yes. I would --

JEFFREY BROWN: Did you used to read to your dog?

CHARLES SIMIC: You bet! I loved that. You know, I mean -- they recognize some words. I mean every 30, 40 words -- understand, like, you know, car.

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: Ride. So, yes, but teaching poetry to the young, I just -- I really always liked that, and I've taught some -- in some very tough schools in New York City. I'm, you know, Poet in the Schools. The toughest of the toughest. And I -- you know, you get them to begin to pay attention, and they're surprised when they discover that they actually like poetry.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hmm. What about the role of criticism today? There are several questions about this.

There's a Frederick Rodgers in Portland, Oregon: "I have been a long admirer of your dynamic, provocative poetry, especially in the New Yorker. I have for years found insightful, close readings of my poems valuable. So -- but you -- you write lots of criticism. It's clearly important to you. So, how do you see the role of -- of a critic and of criticism today?

CHARLES SIMIC: Well, I think, I mean, what a critic does -- I mean when I write my pieces for New York Review of Books, I'm doing two things. I mean, obviously, I'm, you know, writing about a particular poet, you know, trying to say something about their work and their new book or whatever is. I'm also, you know, trying to situate him in the history of, you know, American poetry, American literature, and in a language that, again, is accessible to the general reader. I don't write for, you know, poets or specialists. I avoid literary jargon -- in order to, you know, to say this is something worth reading.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: If there -- you know, if there are problems with the work, then I'll, you know, I will say, you know, this poem fails because of this or that. But it's -- it's a -- I want to avoid a cliché. The, you know, say, challenging. It's -- the best thing about writing about literature is that it forces you to explain why you like what you like and why something you feel has failed is not working.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hmm.

CHARLES SIMIC: And we kind of sense these things as we read. You know, something is not right there. But to explain it, to make it plausible, to, you know, to share it with other people. I think a good review, an interestingly written review, I should say, or a piece of criticism should, if it's good, if it works, should make the reader run and get the book.

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: You know. And --

JEFFREY BROWN: I mean, do you see yourself as an -- as sort of an advocate for literature, for poetry?

CHARLES SIMIC: Yes. Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: And, you know, as a critic, what you do is you sort of repeat, try to kind of evoke the kind of discussions that people who like to read have about books. You know, you've both read the same book, and then you have an argument about it. And in a way, writing a review is trying articulate various positions around a piece of -- a particular piece of work.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm. Well, finally, and speaking of being an advocate, several people wrote in asking about what you plan to do as Laureate.

I have Ann Pacheco from Eugene, Oregon: "Many of the recent laureates have had specific projects they initiated while in this position -- Billy Collins' Poetry 180, Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project. Do you have plans to do anything like this?"

And, similarly, Bruce Hoch from Gainesville, Florida: "I liked, still do, when Robert Pinsky as Laureate formed the Favorite Poem Project where ordinary people recite. What will you do as Laureate?"

Pressure's on.

CHARLES SIMIC: It's a -- pressure's on.

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: I still don't have an answer. I -- I haven't come up with anything that pleases me. I've had a lot of ideas, but they are either, you know, not very serious or I -- I see -- if they are serious, then I see the problems with them in the long run. So, I don't have anything. I --

JEFFREY BROWN: Hm-mm.

CHARLES SIMIC: I hate to disappoint your --

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you have a little time -- you have a little time to come up with something.

CHARLES SIMIC: I do. I do.

[Laughter.]

CHARLES SIMIC: I'm counting on that.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Well, we'll -- we will be watching.

Let me thank all our viewers for writing in, and I apologize that I couldn't get to everybody's, but thanks for all the good questions.

And, Charles Simic, thanks so much for talking to us.

CHARLES SIMIC: Thank you.