|
|
If you
haven't dipped your toe into the world of the former American poet laureate
Charles Simic, then I would recommend first investing in Unending Blues or the 1995 Faber Frightening
Toys,
a selection from several of his recent collections. Therein you will find a
surreal world, but one which is also very funny and full of distinctive,
disturbing images: Simic can move from the tragic to the humorously banal in
a line. The essay 'Poetry and History' in this collection quotes 'Cameo
Appearances', a typical Simic poem:
I had a small,
nonspeaking part
In a bloody epic. I
was one of the
Bombed and fleeing
humanity.
In the distance the
great leader
Crowed like a
rooster from a balcony,
Or was it a great
actor
Impersonating the
great leader...
Born in Yugoslavia, bombed, as he tells us, by both the Germans and the
Allies, longtime resident in America, Simic's work collages together the wry
shrug, the stupidity of war and the strange illogic of everyday life. His own
identity was itself heterogynous: 'I was already a concoction of Yugoslav,
American, Jewish, Irish, and Italian...' Displaced, aware of the futility of
mass political movements, when he comes to view the great leader, then why
wouldn't it be an actor he sees in the distance?
Unsuprisingly, some of the best pieces in this collection of prose, itself
mostly taken from earlier volumes, appraise the work of artists like Saul Steinberg
and Buster Keaton, fellow-travellers in the bizarre. The former's surreal
cartoons, one of which adorned the cover of Simic's 2010 collection Master
of Disguises,
and the latter's stoical face, pitched against a sea of troubles, belong to
the Simic universe. The Keaton essay, especially, is a gem: 'he was both
strange looking and perfectly ordinary' and his attitude towards the world is
Simic's, too - 'reality is a complicated machine running in mysterious ways
whose working he's trying to understand.' This phrase concisely sums up the
basic machinery of Keaton's best films, and it is an attitude Simic shares. A
radical individualist, he is drawn to others of that stamp: the box-collagist
Joseph Cornell and the Romanian philosopher E.M.Cioran are also discussed.
Several other essays here shed a little more light on Simic's own working
methods: he values paradox and impertinence in poetry, he is insomniac and
often writes in bed - none of these insights surprise those familiar with his
work. We just smile and nod sagely. Uh-huh, we think, just as I suspected.
Simic likes the playfulness of prose poems, and he writes hilariously about
his love of food: the essay here entitled 'The Romance of Sausages' is actually about
the allure of eating different lip-smacking different varieties of these.
When he turns to the more ostensibly serious matters of tyranny, history and
war, experience has often rendered these, too, absurdly familiar and funny:
in Chicago, he finds 'poor people, trash-strewn streets and laundry hanging
from fire-escapes' and concludes 'This I understood. I immediately felt at
home.' 'Orphan Factory' deals with what Simic precisely terms 'the
dismemberment of Yugoslavia' and the 'neofascist imbecilities' uttered by
intellectuals on both sides. America buys into this kind of mass behaviour,
too, and 'In Praise of Invective' skewers 'the enemies of the individual' who
are the slaves of ideology. These are not heavy-going ideological tracts,
however: the sense of righteous disgust is leavened by absurd examples and
Simic's felicitous use of anecdote, often involving members of his own
family. Additionally, a serious, uncollected piece, 'Oh, what a lovely war!'
dissects the war crimes of 1945 in a more sombre manner.
Simic has published several extensive collections of essays and memoirs in
the past, and this anthology selects a few examples from each. This handsome
volume, therefore, provides a guide to his thoughts, his obsessions and his
highly individual voice. Readers of his poetry won't need any more
persuading; those new to Simic could start here.
© M.C.
Caseley
|