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. 

Calasso

Roberto Calasso (Photo by Louis Monie)

I see Roberto Calasso died recently (“Roberto Calasso, Renaissance Man of Letters, Dies at 80,” The New York Times, July 30,2021). I know of his work only indirectly through a wonderful review-essay by Charles Simic, titled “Paradise Lost" (The New York Review of Books, September 20, 2001; re-titled "Literature and the Gods: Roberto Calasso," in Simic’s 2015 collection The Life of Images). 

In his piece, Simic describes Calasso’s re-creation of the myth of Persephone, the goddess of fertility who was carried off into the underworld by Hades. Normally, I have little patience for this sort of thing – it’s too unreal. But the meaning Simic extracts from it is fascinating: 

Our precarious life, fleeting and irreplaceable, has another dimension. That which exists once and only once is beautiful, the myths keep telling us. It is precisely because we are mortal beings that things have a significance and an intense presence at times.

The linking of aesthetics and mortality seems to me inspired! It’s why I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art. Life is transient. We must try to capture it, preserve it, before it disappears.  

Postscript: Adam Zagajewski 1945 - 2021

Adam Zagajewski (Alamy)

I see in the Times that Adam Zagajewski died (“Adam Zagajewski, Poet of the Past’s Presence, Dies at 75”). Over the years, he contributed sixteen poems to The New Yorker. See, for example, “In the Valleys” (May 2, 2011), “Ordinary Life” (November 26, 2007), and “Karmelicka” (October 8, 2007). I know him best through his prose, particularly his memoir Another Beauty (2000). That book contains a wonderful meditation on blackbirds:

The blackbird’s song can’t be compared with art, with Bach’s arias; its sense eludes us completely, and if we listen too long, it may strike us as monotonous. For all this, though, it expresses us, it expresses human beings too. It’s a love song, and so it’s our song, the song of those who sleep and love, or loved once upon a time. What a pity that we sleep as they sing, that we aren’t there to hear it, that our ears are sunk in the pillows’ warm substance.

And to think that this frenzied concert, this extraordinary concert full of passion, provoking pity and envy, takes place each day at daybreak from March to June in every European city, London, Munich, Krakow, Arezzo, Stockholm. An unheard concert aimed straight at the sky, unreviewed, unattended, unrewarded, unpaid, with egoless artists.

The poor blackbirds sang most beautifully when no one could hear them except for policemen, milkmen (back when there were still milkmen), janitors scurrying to bureaus and offices, and of course insomniacs. Who knows, perhaps the inhabitants of those cities would be slightly different, a bit more generous, transformed somehow, if they’d heard this concert, which speaks to the human heart even though it’s intended in principle for the hearts of small songbirds alone.

When the concert had ended, as it always does, around sunrise, when daylight vanquishes the night’s intruders, silence fell, a moment of quiet, which then quickly filled with the following sound: the carefree, silly chattering of sparrows.

Reviewing Another Beauty in the May 9, 2002, New York Review of Books, Charles Simic quotes the above passage and says of the blackbirds,

The nothingness that troubles certain thinkers is not their concern. They agree to every kind of light, every kind of weather so that they may seize each moment and exist. They have no time to bother themselves with our ever-changing theories of reality; being in that moment is serious enough of a task for them. [“The Mystery of Presence”]

In the summer, red-winged blackbirds frequent a pond near where I live. Often when I see one, I think of Simic’s inspired line (“They agree to every kind of light, every kind of weather so that they may seize each moment and exist”), and remind myself to try to be more blackbird-like in my outlook. 

January 6, 2020 Issue

Gerald Stern has one of the most distinctive “voices” of any poet I know of. His “Warbler,” in this week’s issue, is actually a quite restrained example of it. But it’s there in the third stanza, in the way he moves from “bird” to “buried” and then to this delightfully surprising part: “in this case in the freezer, / a cold graveyard, / two cartons of ice cream, / one vanilla, one dulce de leche, / to remember him by.” In a Stern poem, you never know what's coming next. 

Charles Simic, in his “You Can’t Keep a Good Sonnet Down” (Memory Piano, 2006), says that Stern has a “talking voice, friendly and often rambling. His freedom to go wherever his imagination happens to take him gives his poems a feel of adventure that is hard to resist.” I agree. Consider his extraordinary “The World We Should Have Stayed In” (The New Yorker, October 6, 2014):

The clothes, the food, the nickel-coated iron
flower tables, the glass-and-wood-fluted doorknob
but most of all the baby girls holding
chicks in one arm and grapes in the other
just before the murder of the Gypsies
under Tiso the priest, Slovak, Roman Catholic,
no cousin to Andy, he Carpatho-Russian
or most of all Peter Oresick, he of Ford City,
he of Highland Park and East Liberty
Carpatho-Russian too, or just Ruthenian,
me staring at a coconut tree, I swear it,
listening late on a Saturday afternoon
a few weeks before my 88th to
airplane after airplane and reading the trailers
by the underwater lights of yon organ-shaped
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool
the noise a kind of roar when they got close
I’m watching from the fifth floor up, Warholean
here and there oh mostly on the elevator but
certainly by the pool, his European relatives
basking under his long serrated leaves
coconuts near the top—ripe and dangerous—
like Peter, coming from one of the villages inside
Pittsburgh, like me, half eastern Poland, half southern
Ukraine born in the Hill, on Wylie Avenue,
the first village east of downtown Pittsburgh,
Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill,
two blocks—at least—a string of small stores and
Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s, I was
born at the end of an era, I hung on with
my fingers then with my nails, Judith Vollmer’s
family was Polish but they were twelve miles away from
Peter’s village, this was a meal at Weinstein’s:
chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then
matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by
roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish
or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw
and Jewish pickles on the side and plates
of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel,
Yiddish the lingua franca, tea in a glass,
the world we should have stayed in, for in America
you burn in one place, then another.

The connections here are flying – from “nickel-coated iron flower tables” to “the murder of the Gypsies” to Andy Warhol to Peter Oresick to “me staring at a coconut tree” to “airplane after airplane” to “reading the trailers / by the underwater lights” to “organ-shaped /
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool” to an elevator to “long serrated leaves / coconuts near the top – ripe and dangerous” to “downtown Pittsburgh” to “Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill” to “a string of small stores and / Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s” to “Judith Vollmer’s / family” to the amazing “meal at Weinstein’s” described in seven glorious lines of delectable detail – lines that make me smile every time I read them.

What a strange, exhilarating, eccentric, surreal, inspired assemblage! You might call it almost crazy. I love it. 

Simic on Vendler: A Questionable Criticism

Helen Vendler (Photo by Janet Reider)

I want to consider a questionable comment on Helen Vendler’s criticism that Charles Simic makes in his “The Incomparable Critic” (The New York Review of Book, August 13, 2015), a review of Vendler’s recent essay collection The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar. Simic says,

 She’s drawn to ideas in poems, conveys them well, but tends at times to devalue physical setting, “what the eye beholds,” as if it were only a prop and not the hook that draws the reader in. The “poet’s sense of the world,” “the savor of life,”  “the vulgate of experience” as Stevens called it – she often doesn’t do justice to these in my view.

Simic supports his point with an example. He says,

I have in mind her analysis of a poem like “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where she follows the poet’s thinking well enough, but doesn’t show how closely tied Stevens’s meditation is to the changes taking place in the sea and the sky as the tropical night descends and the unknown woman walking along the shore sings her song, and why the speaker in the poem not only comes to understand what he is experiencing, but once he does is overcome with emotion, and so are we as readers. We are moved because we had experienced something like that once and couldn’t find words for it, and now have them. It’s that recognition that links the reader to the poet, and its interdependence of reality and imagination that Stevens strives to sort out in the poem.

If true, Simic’s comment would, for me, be a damning criticism of Vendler’s approach. In my opinion, one can’t respond meaningfully to an artwork to which one hasn’t responded sensually. But Vendler’s writing has never struck me as a devaluation of physical setting or an underestimation of “what the eye beholds.” On the contrary, her work has taught me the value of sensual apprehension. Her expressions of pleasure regarding physical description are among the most memorable passages in all her writings. For example, in “Elizabeth Bishop” (included in her great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us), she says of Bishop’s “The Moose,”

In the first half of the poem one of the geographies of the world is given an ineffable beauty, both plain and luxurious. Nova Scotia’s tides, sunsets, villages, fog, flora, fauna, and people are all summoned quietly into verse, as if for a last farewell, as the speaker journeys away to Boston. The verse, like the landscape, is “old-fashioned.”

The bus starts. The light
is deepening; the fog
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens’ feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage rosesand lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.

That “exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness” is marvelously fine. There are many examples of Vendler’s sensuous appreciation of physical description. Here’s another one; it’s an excerpt from her “Seamus Heaney” (included in her brilliant 1988 collection The Music of What Happens):

He [Heaney] sees the long, dark body of the Grauballe man, preserved for nearly two thousand years, and almost numbers its bones:

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan's foot
or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

If, in the end, the Grauballe man is made to stand, in one of Heaney’s anxious moralities, for “hooded victim, / slashed and dumped,” he is also, in the plainness of his utter amalgamation of all being (tar, water, wood, basalt, egg, swan, root, mussel, eel, mud, armor, leather), a figure of incomparable beauty.

Of course, there are many ways to appreciate poetry; sensual response is only one of them. I suppose that a poem such as Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” could be enjoyed purely as seascape (“the outer voice of sky / And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled”; “mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea”; “The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, / As the night descended, tilting in the air”), as Simic suggests. But reading it, particularly the words “But it was more than that,” you sense that Stevens intended something else, that description, however beautiful, was not his endpoint. Vendler, in her “Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions, Dedicated to Paul Alpers” (included in The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar), ingeniously interprets “The Idea of Order at Key West” as an elaboration of a new poetic that is “neither instinctual nor mimetic; it is an abstract one of intellectual artifice, of exact measurement, of geometric lines and demarcated spatial lines.” Vendler’s interpretation reveals, for me, at least, a newly perceived aspect of “The Idea of Order at Key West” – “the spirit’s mastery, by the geometrical abstraction afforded by lyric language, of the sublime landscape of the night sky.”  

May 30, 2011 Issue

One of the great things about art is the way it can redeem the discarded, the outmoded, the obsolete. Think of Joseph Cornell and the way he made assemblages out of what he called ephemera. As Charles Simic says, in his great essay on Cornell called “The Image Hunter” (The New York Review of Books, October 24, 2002; included in Simic’s 2006 collection Memory Piano):

If he [Cornell] had not eventually figured how to make original twentieth-century art out of his stashes of old movie magazines, moldy engravings, yellowed postcards, maps, guidebooks, film strips, photographs of ballet dancers, and hundreds of other items stored in shoe boxes and scrapbooks in his basement, they would have ended up at a dump or in a flea market.

I thought of Cornell when I was reading Andrea K. Scott’s “Futurism” in this week’s issue of the magazine. It’s about the artist Cory Arcangel, who uses obsolete computer equipment to generate drawings, sculptures, videos, and photographs. Scott says, “Arcangel finds an abject beauty in the way that modern technology is doomed to obsolescence.”

One of Arcangel’s best-known works is his video installation “Super Mario Clouds,” which he created, Scott says, by “taking the code to the classic 1985 Nintendo cartridge and erasing everything but the clouds, which typically drift behind the action.” In “Futurism,” Scott does a good job describing Arcangel’s art. But as I read the piece, I found myself resisting it. Arcangel’s virtual bowlers, pixellated clouds, YouTube clips of cats jumping on pianos, Photoshop-gradient photographs, etc., just don’t work for me. I wonder if they work for Scott. Nowhere in her piece does the word “pleasure” occur, unless you count “gloriously cheesy,” which is her description of a website that Arcangel has developed. As an art critic, Scott is nothing if not sensual. Her “Critic’s Notebook” pieces are filled with sensual, tactile description and expressions of pleasure. That’s what I like about them. I recall her ravishing review of the Lynda Benglis show at New Museum (“Making a Splash,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011), in which she said, “It was a knotty time to make art, and Bengalis literalized it in tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting, which gave way to elegant arabesques of pleated metal and Zen-punk wonders in glass and ceramic.” I devour description like that. “Futurism” is almost completely devoid of it. The reason, I think, is that Arcangel’s work didn’t sufficiently excite Scott’s considerable descriptive power.

Jeffrey Toobin’s “Madoff’s Curveball,” is also in this week’s issue. It’s about New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon and Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. It’s a fascinating story and Toobin tells it very well. One aspect of it troubles me. Toobin shows that the complaint lodged against Wilpon by bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard contains a false accusation. Picard alleges that Wilpon and his partner, Saul Katz, were warned by their financial manager, Peter Stamos, that Madoff was “too good to be true.” But, according to Toobin, Picard knew when he made this allegation that Stamos actually said the opposite. Toobin says:

There is something troubling, however, about the way the Picard complaint portrays Stamos as the Cassandra of the Madoff scandal—the person whose persistent warnings were ignored by Wilpon and Katz. Wilpon’s lawyers at Davis Polk discovered that Stamos had given a deposition during Picard’s investigation, and the transcript gives a very different picture of Stamos’s state of mind from that portrayed in Picard’s complaint. “I’m embarrassed to say that I said to Mr. Katz on a number of occasions that my assumption is that Mr. Madoff is . . . among the most honest and honorable men that we will ever meet,” Stamos testified. “And number two, that he is perhaps one of the—my assumption is he’s perhaps one of the best hedge fund managers in modern times. . . . All the way to the time when the fraud was discovered, I had the same conclusion.” In fact, it appears that no one in the Stamos firm had any words of warning about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme until after his fraud was discovered.

To me this is damning evidence against Picard. He’s making an accusation against Wilpon that he knows is false. It would seem to me to be grounds for dismissal of the complaint against Wilpon and for discipline proceedings against Picard. Curiously – and this is the part that bothers me – Toobin not only shrinks from drawing this conclusion, he also appears to rationalize Picard’s wrongful action. Toobin says:

Complaints in civil cases are designed to be argumentative documents, but Picard’s words about Stamos seem typical of an approach that seems to find malevolent intent in virtually everything Wilpon and Katz did.

But surely Picard’s words are more than just “argumentative”; they’re blatantly false! I find it hard to accept that the court would allow Picard to get away with such an underhanded tactic. I wish that Toobin, instead of trying to excuse Picard’s action as “typical,” had forcefully condemned it. In his failure to do so, he mars what is otherwise a consummate piece of journalism.