splendid poverties

I remember lying in a ditch and staring at some pebbles while German bombers were flying over our heads. That was long ago, I don’t remember the face of my mother nor the faces of the people who were with us, but I still see those perfectly ordinary pebbles.
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The pebbles stayed in their otherness, stayed forever in memory. Can language do justice to such moments of heightened consciousness? Speech is always less. When it comes to conveying what it means to be truly conscious, one approximates, one fails miserably.

Wittgenstein puts it this way: “What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses ‘itself’ in language, we cannot express by means of language. This has been my experience many times. Words are impoverishments, splendid poverties.

—Charles Simic, “Reading Philosophy at Night,” The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015)

never pure

Mallarmé has been both an ideal and a dead end for poets. His greatness, Octavio Paz wrote [in The Bow and the Lyre (1975)], “lies not just in his attempt to create a language that would be the magic double of the universe—The Work conceived as a Cosmos—but above all in the consciousness of the impossibility of transforming that language into theater, into dialog with man.” Once there is nothing left but a few cryptic words for the initiates, what started out as a new understanding of aesthetics has turned into mysticism. A poem cannot be pure: it is a marriage of contradictions, reverence and blasphemy, asceticism and sensuality. As much as I admire [Roberto] Colasso’s uncompromising search for the heart of the poetic, I’m not convinced that such a search is the best way to go about writing poetry. The most attractive and puzzling aspect of the long history of poetry is that no conception of the poem is final.

—Charles Simic, “Literature and the Gods: Roberto Colasso,” The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015)

full of bluster

Young poets have to be full of bluster about what they are doing; otherwise they’d have no confidence to keep writing.

—Charles Simic "The Great Poets’ Brawl of ’68," New York Review of Books, April 23, 2014

useless objects

When Arp writes of a “bladeless knife from which a handle is missing,” when Norge speaks of a “time when the onion used to make people laugh,” we have images, configurations, which employ archetypal elements but are not properly speaking archetypes. Instead, we have the emergence of entities which only by the force of utterance and the upheaval they cause in the imagination and thought acquire existence and even reality. These “useless objects” have a strange authority. Even as visionary acts, they consist of particulars and thus curiously provide us with a semblance of actual experience.

—Charles Simic, “Negative Capability and its Children,” Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (Tendril, 1984), edited by Paul Mariani and George Murphy

invitation to a voyage

The ideal place to teach creative writing is a used book store, says my friend Vava Hristić.
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My hunch that language is inadequate when speaking about experience is really a religious idea, what they call negative theology.
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Poetry tries to bridge the abyss lying between the name and the thing. That language is a problem is no news to poets.
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A New Hampshire high school student reading an ancient Chinese poem and being moved—A theory of literature that cannot account for that commonplace miracle is worthless.
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For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
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Seeing the familiar with new eyes, that quintessential idea of modern art and literature, the exile and immigrant experience daily.
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A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.

—Charles Simic, The Poet’s Notebook (WW Norton & Co., 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss.

found objects

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. These objets trouvés of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge. That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.

—Charles Simic, "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy," Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (Poets on Poetry series, U. of Michigan Press, 1990)

weather report

There is a weather report in almost every folk poem. The sun is shining; it was snowing; the wind was blowing…The folk poet knows that it’s wise to immediately establish the connection between the personal and the cosmic.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)