Deb Aronson

Charles Simic

For The Love of PoetryFor The Love of Poetry

First appeared in Council Chronicle: National Council of Teachers of English in March 2008 under Profiles

As a child, poet Charles Simic played in the bombed-out buildings of his Belgrade neighborhood. His earliest memories include being thrown out of bed and across the room by the impact of a bomb, and seeing flames and dust and smoke so thick it was like nighttime at noon. Perhaps even more surreal were his experiences as a “displaced person” in France, where his family fled from Hitler’s forces.

“It’s hard for people who have never had the experience to truly grasp what it means to lack proper documents,” he writes in his memoir, A Fly in the Soup. “The pleasure of humiliating the powerless must not be underestimated.”

Hearing about Simic’s childhood, it’s hard to imagine him surviving it at all, much less accomplishing so much. Yet, since arriving in Chicago in 1954 at the age of 16 with only the most tenuous understanding of English and little ability to speak it, Simic has written 20 volumes of poetry, numerous essays and other collections. In addition, he has been recognized with, among other things, the MacArthur “genius” Grant, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Wallace Stevens award. He serves as the poetry editor of the Paris Review, writes for the New York Review of Books, and is now the Poet Laureate of the United States.

“Our Most Disquieting Muse”

Simic has harnessed the chaos and arbitrariness of his youth to write poems that have been described as “surrealist with a purpose.” Or perhaps his poems reflect his continuing struggles to make sense of those otherworldly experiences. “The disconcerting shifts and sinister imagery that characterize his work are always intended to suggest — however obliquely — the existential questions that trouble our day-to-day lives, ” David Orr wrote in a New York Times Book Review of Simic’s work.

In either case, he is, as the Harvard Review once wrote, “perhaps our most disquieting muse.”

Although Simic, whose voice retains traces of his native country, has translated numerous works of poetry from Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian and French, he has always written in English.

“I wanted my friends to hear my poetry,” he explains.

Those friends were ones he found at Chicago’s Oak Park High School. In addition to friends, Simic found some outstanding teachers, bookstores, libraries and fellow writers. He did struggle to learn English, but his solution was to read all the time, at least a book a day.

“I wouldn’t have been able to write if I hadn’t read so much,” he says. Simic’s other formative experience was being forced to memorize poems, during his otherwise hellish year in France. Though he says he resented it at the time, he later came to consider it an important part of learning to love language and, from there, to write poetry.

Still not envisioning himself as a poet with a capital “P,” Simic headed to New York City after high school. There he worked at various day jobs, writing poetry on the side.

“Writing poetry was something I did without thinking it would be my profession or my lifelong ambition,” he says.

That changed when Simic published two volumes of poetry, one in 1967 (What the Grass Says) and one in 1969 (Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes). Colleges began inviting him to come and teach. Although reluctant at first, that changed as he and his wife contemplated living in New York City with their infant daughter.

Simic accepted an offer from California State University - Hayward. And so he became a Poet. After three years the Simics went to University of New Hampshire (UNH) and never left.

Simic, professor emeritus at UNH, became a college teacher almost by accident. Nevertheless, his experiences in New York City high schools as part of a “Poets in Schools” program gave him some much-needed confidence.

Wanna Hear a Love Poem?

“The high school classrooms were scary then; they are even scarier today,” says Simic. “So you go into a rowdy class and the teacher says, ‘we have a poet with us today.’ The students look at you in disbelief. I ask them, ‘do any of you write love notes to some of the people in class? You take care when you write these things, right? You want to make sure whoever reads it is impressed’ and I start explaining the effort it takes because it takes many efforts to write a love note. Now they’re interested, and I say, ‘wanna hear a love poem?’ “Those classes, which were terrifying, gave me tremendous confidence,” he says.

Simic figured out, in part from his own experiences and in part from the students, that the key is to find poems that connect and speak to each student.

“What you do is you bring them poems that are very difficult for any human being, who has any imagination or thought processes, to resist,” he says.

The connection will be different for every student and every school and cannot succeed with a cookie cutter approach. Simic tells of going to schools in Arizona where students were introduced to poetry through works by Robert Frost.

“Those poems were culturally remote from the lives of the students and, I daresay, impossible to teach for that reason,” he says.

Instead of teaching Robert Frost to students who have never been to New England, find something closer to their own lives, he suggests.

Simic revels in overcoming that resistance to poetry that he found both in high schools and in colleges.

“I can teach anyone to love poetry,” he says. It would sound brash, even arrogant, if he weren’t so matter of fact about it.

The Value of Poetry

“Nobody thinks they like poetry; that’s the first feeling,” he says. “Even college freshmen and sophomores, they think poetry is difficult. They are well behaved but there is still a resistance.

“I tell them, “you don’t have to like every poem in this anthology, some of them are boring, some of them I don’t understand, some of them I don’t care if I understand, but there are some that I love, that bring tears to my eyes. You’re going to find your own that do that to you.

“That’s the fun of teaching. That you have a sort of resistance in the group and you try to convince them of the value of what they are reading.”

Simic encourages teachers to persevere, not just for their students, but for themselves.

“The value of teaching poetry for the teacher is one has to do the impossible; to teach a reluctant group to like poetry and in the process endlessly find a new way of articulating what is poetry.”