Postscript: Charles Simic 1938 - 2023

Charles Simic (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

I don’t know how I missed it, but I just found out today that Charles Simic died last month, age eighty-four. He wrote several critical pieces that are among my touchstones. One of them is “Aberlardo Morell’s Poetry of Appearances” (included in his 2003 collection The Metaphysician in the Dark), in which he said of Morell’s photos,

The commonplace object is singled out, brought out of its anonymity, so that it stands before us fully revealed in its uniqueness and its otherness. In the metaphysical solitude of the object we catch a glimpse of our own. Here is the unknowable ground of appearances, that something that is always there without being perceived, the world in its nameless, uninterpreted presence which the camera makes visible. That’s what casts the spell on me in Morell’s photographs: the evidence that our daily lives are the sight of momentary insights and beauties which lie around us to be recovered.

Another piece I treasure is his “Poetry in Unlikely Places” (The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003; included in his 2006 collection Memory Piano), a review of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Simic wrote:

Nevertheless, he is a far more original poet in my view when he had no plan in mind, when a poem came to him in the fish soup he was eating, as it were. Something close at hand, perfectly familiar, and yet somehow never fully noticed in its peculiarity set his imagination going. Can’t you see how interesting artichokes are? the poem about them says. For Neruda almost everything that exists deserves equal reverence and can become a subject of poetry.

My favorite Simic essay is “The Life of Images” (collected in his 2015 book of the same name). It’s a consideration of the photography of Berenice Abbott. It concludes:

The enigma of the ordinary – that’s what makes old photographs so poignant: An ancient streetcar in sepia color. A few men holding on to their hats on a windy day. They hurry with their faces averted except for one befuddled old fellow who has stopped and is looking over his shoulder at what we cannot see, but where, we suspect, we ourselves will be coming into view someday, as hurried and ephemeral as any one of them.

“The enigma of the ordinary” – right there is Simic’s great subject. I say “is” because, for me, his essays will always be alive.