CHARLES SIMIC
I have purchased many books over the years here, some very nice rare books, and I’ve also sold more books than I’ve bought. Today, as I was walking up Broadway, I remembered selling one particular book. This was roughly in 1960, I lived on East Thirteenth Street, just off University Place. I worked at NYU in the payroll department, and I used to get paid on Friday. I would be broke by Monday, but I don’t really remember how. It was Saturday morning and I was totally, completely broke, and there was rent to pay and other things to be paid, and I had sold all my books worth selling, but I had one left that a guy who was living at the apartment where I lived, that little place, gave me. It was the Oxford Latin Dictionary, and I just felt that this was an incredibly impressive book of probably five thousand pages that I had to have, though I never consulted it. In my desperation, I decided to sell it. As I said, it was Saturday morning, and the street was empty, though in this part of New York in those days, all of New York, really, on Saturday morning the streets were empty. The Strand was open, it was nine o’clock or later. I carried this really heavy book, which was so huge, the kind of thing that you need lecterns in libraries to sit on. I brought the book to the front where you sold books, and it was this sourpuss who never broke a smile, but just gave you the price of the books. I thought ten bucks for sure, maybe fifteen, which was a lot of money in those days. He offered me five. I was stunned, but decided to sell it anyway to avoid carrying the damn thing back about five or six blocks. That was just one of the many times and memorable moments at the Strand Book Store.
I came to New York from Chicago, in 1958, by myself. I was twenty years old, and kind of lonely. I lived in furnished rooms and fleabag hotels in the Village. I didn’t want to go back to Chicago, because when I left, my friends had asked me what was I going to do in New York if I did not know anybody here. I dismissed their words because I had always wanted to come back to New York, a city where I’d first lived after I came from Europe. Not enough jazz, not enough tears, or not enough galleries, or not enough, on and on, and you know. I was a snob. So I came to New York, and I didn’t know anyone. I lived in truly dumps—hotels where you knew that the room that you occupied, there were murders committed, that there was major violence. The carpet hadn’t been changed in thirty years. And in those days, people really chain-smoked. I wrote a poem about one of these dumps, “Self-Portrait in Bed.” It’s fun to write about these things viewed from a distance, when you are in your seventies. You realize you were an asshole, but you look at it with great affection: “How did this guy survive, on the grossest street?”
I also have several poems about libraries. I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries, and the great thing about such places, or a great bookstore like this, is that you walk around and suddenly you see something, and find yourself gasping and saying, “I can’t believe this book exists.” You sort of leap and grab it. You think somebody’s going to beat you to it. Those are very exciting moments. I wrote a poem about this dedicated to the late Mexican poet Octavio Paz, because one day we were talking about books that had fantastic titles that turned out to be mediocre.
One nice thing about a lot of poems is that you have no memory how they were written. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes even years. With the titles you often say to yourself that something sounds good and that you’ll work around it. About three years ago, I wrote “1938,” but it had occurred to me before. One day I was reading something—I don’t know what exactly, something about history—and 1938 was mentioned. I thought, that was the year I was born, and a lot of things were going on. I found it amazing that I was a little kid in a crib trying to pull a pillow off my booties, and all these things were happening in the world. So it occurred to me that I wanted to find out what was going on, simultaneously with my early days, and in years before I would have gone to the library and gotten some almanacs and looked up things, and so forth. I Googled 1938. And in less than a minute, I found pretty much everything that happened. I was interested in more or less historical things, events in popular culture, so on and so forth. I got an immense amount of information, and made a mistake: I printed it. It turned out to be eighty pages of stuff. Then I had to pick and choose, because there was so much going on at the same time, it took a long time. I think the poem was finally finished about three years ago, but it took maybe a couple of years, if not more. I kept putting things in and pulling things out. I knew it couldn’t be a very long poem because it’d go on and on. There were so many tempting options. It’s the only poem I’ve written like that.
I also very clearly remember how “My Turn to Confess” occurred to me. We were talking about interviews, and somebody asked what I thought about confessional poetry. I said that, if the poet is a good liar, that’s fine, as long as he or she doesn’t tell the truth. Afterwards I felt guilty, you know, what sort of wise guy said that.
TÉA OBREHT
I’ll start off confessing that I’ve been a fan of Mr. Simic’s poetry. I’m a fellow Yugoslav, and more importantly, I feel, a fellow Belgrader. So I want to start off by asking you about your childhood memories of that city.
CHARLES SIMIC
Like with any war child, I had plenty of memories. I’ve mentioned this many times, but I was born in 1938, and on April 6, 1941, Belgrade was bombed by the Nazis. We lived right in the heart of the city, and I think it was probably one morning when a bomb hit the building across the street, and pretty much destroyed it. I was in bed, I was two years old, and I flew out of bed, and landed on the floor, and what I vaguely remember: sort of bright lights, and the building was on fire, and broken glass, and my mother was in the next room, and picking me off of the floor. She carried me away, we went into the cellar, as we used to do. I grew up in an occupied country that was occupied mostly by Germans, but there were some parts that were occupied by Italians, or by Hungarians. There was also a civil war going on. Yugoslavia, depending how you count, began maybe three, four, five, maybe six factions, killing each other in the countryside. Actually, being in the city was much safer than being in some small village. You know how it is if you live and write in the heart of a city. Streets used to be full of kids in those days, and we used to play screaming, and those years they could stop you from going down and playing with those kids, and my memories even from second year are vivid. Then in 1944, the city got bombed by the Allies. We were pro-Allies, so they were going to hit the Germans, but they never hit them but us instead. There was plenty of action, and my memories are extremely vivid. The end of the war is something I’ve written about. There were dead bodies on the street, people are hanged from telephone poles, there were millions of things going on. Then after the war, in 1953, it was communism and so forth, the restive depression. We were starving after the war. There was nothing to eat, that’s what I remember of those years.
On the other hand, I don’t have many bad memories. There was really some awful stuff, but I had a great time growing up. I sometimes think that this is something about me that is a little defective in some way, like some brick fell on my head, because I really had a ball. I was always playing on the street. Parents were all busy, my father was in Italy at the end of the war and didn’t come back, and my mother … we were running loose like all the other kids. Paradise. Years later, I’ve met people who grew up in war-zone Berlin and a wonderful woman my age who grew up in Warsaw in 1944, which was awful. But she said, “Charlie, you’re forgetting one thing: we were so happy, because there was no school.” She was absolutely right, I’d forgotten.
TÉA OBREHT
Since there was no school, what was your relationship to literature growing up at that time?
CHARLES SIMIC
Once you could read, you read anything you could get your hands on. Winter came, and crummy weather. Before the war, before comics came, in Yugoslavia, all the American comic books were translated, all kinds of trashy literature, and then after that, just out of sheer boredom, my father had a big library, and we read a lot of books, and enjoyed some of them. In school, we read Yugoslav literature, we had to read poetry, but I don’t remember in school being interested in what we read. Like everywhere else in the world, literature taught in school, especially poetry, was a form of punishment. Before I came to the U.S., I was in a school in Paris for a year, and it was the same thing. We read great nineteenth century French poets—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine—and we had to memorize the poems. Teachers were just lazy old civil servants, who had the class take turns reciting these poems. It was something terrible for me, because I spoke French with a heavy accent, and my fellow students really enjoyed it. So the literature that made an impression on me was my private reading in idle hours. I read things that are ridiculous for a very young reader, things by Dickens, or Balzac, things that really aren’t books. Besides reading, there was no other way to spend a rainy day.
TÉA OBREHT
You’ve been a city-dweller for much of your life: first Belgrade, then Paris, Chicago, and New York. It’s no surprise that cityscapes figure really prominently in your work. What moves you about cities?
CHARLES SIMIC
My imagination is activated by cities in a way it isn’t in the country. I’ve been living in the countryside since 1973, in a little village. I feel at home there and I love it, but I don’t notice ten percent of what I see in a city. There, the moment I’m on the street, and I look down the block, and see people coming this way and that way, I look at faces, right away, you associate things … My imagination is stimulated, entertained. When I travel I feel instantly at home in cities. I know how to talk to city people, and even if I love being in the country, it’s not the same.
TÉA OBREHT
Would you say that there’s something universal about cities that transcends geographical locations?
CHARLES SIMIC
Oh, yes, I think so. There was a lot I loved about Belgrade before I went to Paris. In those days there were plenty of movie houses, and we were close, so we’d skip school, and stand there for hours looking at photographs of Randolph Scott with his pistol. A lot of stuff meant absolutely nothing to me. I loved the modern part of the city, where you felt like you were in the twentieth century. The thing about Eastern Europe, especially in those days, was that by the time you got to the outskirts of a city, you were in the nineteenth century, and this is true not just of Belgrade, but some people say it happens also in Sofia, or Bucharest. If you went thirty miles farther, you were in the eighteenth century. If you kept going, you ended up in the tenth century.
When I got to Paris, again, I really liked the modern part of the city. I found some pretty beautiful old quarters, the Champs-Élysées, the movie theaters, the gardens and nightclubs, and I thought it was like Belgrade, but fifty times bigger. Of course, when I arrived to New York I felt this could not be beaten.
TÉA OBREHT
I grew up in places that had a really rich heritage, but I never appreciated it until after I left. Then people would ask me, and I realized it was beautiful, but I never paid attention to the old part at all. Now, you’re a self-professed insomniac. Much of your poetry has to do with nighttime loneliness and spectatorship of strange moments, and surreal entities as a result of solitude in the dark. I’m finding myself very lucky right now to be writing on a daily basis. But while I wrote The Tiger’s Wife, most of those writing hours were between midnight and five in the morning. Do you consider insomnia a part of your writing routine?
CHARLES SIMIC
It was, and I think there was also a practical aspect about this. When I lived in New York, I worked during the day; I had office jobs, nine-to-five. When I left the office I would go out to bars, maybe at five o’clock, and have a beer. If I got home by midnight, that was an early night. I had infinite energy in those days, so I always sat up late and wrote. I used to smoke, and sitting up late at night, I’d smoke, listening to records, and whatever. Now I don’t smoke anymore, plus my eyes aren’t as great, so I don’t do it. Most of my writing these days is done fairly early in the morning. Also at dinner hour I always get inspired.
With poetry, nobody can write for eight hours. I also write a lot of prose and books about this and that, and you really work, six or seven hours, you can spend day after day on an essay. That’s not the case with poetry. Fiction writers really have to work. Poets, I mean, very, very rarely you’ll have a kind of binge. Most of the time, things come to you. “In Confession” was probably jotted down in a restaurant while I was waiting for a dinner. With poetry, later on you tinker with it, you revise it endlessly, but it’s not something you say, “Oh! I have to finish this poem! I have to do it today!” A ten-line poem? No, that’s not how you start. You can’t say to yourself, you’ll write a five-line poem. So, how do you do that? You endlessly tinker something that’s much longer, like a sort of an accordion thing—it gets longer, shorter, longer, shorter, longer, shorter. Months go by, and one day you look at it, and you see that there are only five lines that are worth keeping. It’s a very different way of working than the way a fiction writer works.
TÉA OBREHT
Worth trying, though, I think, even for fiction. The problem that I have is that anything I write is way too long, and so it’s usually only the five lines …
CHARLES SIMIC
It’s always easier to be a poet. I like paring down. It’s astonishing when you realize you spent months, sometimes even years, deluding yourself. Once I had this sort of sequence of poems, something about New York City, I don’t even remember what it was—but it was four or five pages, and then one day I’d reduced it to a dozen lines, and it seemed fine. But there’s no way to generalize about poets. Everybody writes differently.
TÉA OBREHT
Have you ever been surprised to learn something about yourself, your preoccupations, your thoughts, after looking back on completed work?
CHARLES SIMIC
That’s the interesting thing about writing. And it comes slowly. We don’t reread poems, or think about it. One doesn’t look at your poems from a distance, or critically, the way you look at somebody else’s. You have other things to do. So they come as a surprise. The first time I published a poem was in 1959, such a long time ago. After forty years or more, it just hit me how much violence there is in my early poems. I’m a person who really dislikes violence. I do not associate myself with it, but there are so many hangings, and so many atrocities in those verses. Really they are not just only biographical elements, every time that I’ve seen something like that happening in the world … The extent of it kind of surprised me. Somebody once asked me directly if I was obsessed with violence. We lack the self-knowledge to admit this and I’m good-natured.
TÉA OBREHT
This leads to my next and final question. It’s something that I’ve been asked myself, and due to your background, I’m sure you frequently come across this kind of query. Do you feel that your commitment to poetry, or indeed to any art form, comes with a sense of social or political obligation?
CHARLES SIMIC
No, I don’t. If you look at American poetry, you find Walt Whitman, who was certainly aware of the Civil War. He wrote poems and prose. But Emily Dickinson does not mention it directly. She lived in her house in Amherst, and her room looked at this church across the street, where there were weekly funerals of young boys she knew who had died in the Civil War. You would expect her to pen something on that life, and though she wrote beautiful letters of condolence, she didn’t write a poem about it. I’ve never thought this made her a lesser poet. It isn’t an obligation. I’ve written about politics because I’m always interested in it, and I read newspapers. But I think what I dislike about that sort of pressure is that it implies that writers have this special vision and a certain obligation to say something about current affairs, because they have sensitive souls and certain qualities that the rest of the world is waiting to hear. I think back on the poetry readings held against the war. I participated and I went to them, and everybody who worked on them had their heart in the right place, but the poetry really sucked. Nothing of that time remained, and for an excellent reason, which was that it was worthless. They were not even as good as editorials against the war. That kind of cured me. Also, we both come from Yugoslavia, where communism was in everyone’s school literature. In those days it was like Stalinism, telling us about the happy workers who are digging ditches and working in mines.
I hate that stuff, but if you look at my poems, in every book there are at least four or five poems that deal with that reality which we describe as politics.
TÉA OBREHT
But it’s liberating to hear that you feel you can do it as a personal reaction to something as opposed to some sort of required response.
CHARLES SIMIC
I mean the idea of ordering somebody to do something escapes me.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
What do you find more challenging, writing poetry or working on translations?
CHARLES SIMIC
Everything is hard. Writing essays is hard. Translations have special difficulties. This is a vast subject, but I’ll narrow it down to this: I have poems that were written a long time ago, and I know that perhaps, in most cases, they’re not all that they could have been, but I’ve never touched them again. Because it’s mine and, you know, forget it. On the other hand, translation is an endless thing. Reading is awful because of translation. You sometimes work for years translating poems. Once it’s done I don’t look at it anymore, but then once the book has been around for thirty years, one of those translations may come up, and then, instantly, you start looking at the translation and see how this could be improved, I see some turn of phrase that just escaped me at the time. Translations seem never finished, and if I had time, I might end up retranslating some of my favorite poets. Vasko Popa was a very difficult poet to translate, because his poems are short, and when I look at them I see the problem. They’re awkward. It’s not that you missed the meaning, but that it sounds like a translation, and the solution that eluded you all these years is already there. This happens with translations. When you’re doing your own poetry, you can simply say, “Bye-bye. I don’t even want to look at this thing again.”
I have a question for Ms. Obreht. I read The Tiger’s Wife and there are many layers in the story, there are subplots in the subplots, like that part about the hunter, or the butcher who wants to be a musician. All these stories render depth to the main story. How does that work? When you start off you have one layer?
TÉA OBREHT
It was my first time writing, so every aspect of writing the novel was a complete learning experience, and half the time I was not sure, I was just trying. Eventually, what kept me going on to deeper layers was the feeling that it was too superficial, or that I didn’t understand properly what a certain character was doing or where it came from. So I would write something that would serve as an explanation. I know for some people it worked and for some people it didn’t, but the effect this had for me was that it created a 3-D picture. The layers expanded in directions that I couldn’t really account for and hadn’t planned on, and so eventually I ended up having to storyboard it, which was the practical solution. It was the first time a project had taken off and left me behind.
I’d like Mr. Simic to talk about some of the poets he has admired over the years.
CHARLES SIMIC
Whitman, and Dickinson, who I think is my favorite poet. Wallace Stevens and Dickinson are two poets that I can read every day of my life. There are others, lots of poets that I adore. I mentioned those French poets that I hated at the time when I had to recite their verses and humiliate myself, but I realized many, many years later that saying those poems aloud, even in French, had a huge influence on me. Baudelaire is still one of my favorite poets. I started writing without realizing I was trying to imitate something that I had heard.
In your writing process, how do you rank image, sound, history, and memory?
CHARLES SIMIC
It depends; I’ve written poems starting from every one of those things. Sometimes you just have a sound. You go around mumbling, and somebody asks, “What are you mumbling about?” And then you realize you are doing it. When I think I have a great idea, it never works. You can spend months working on it and then you realize that it was not a good idea. With images, something suddenly pops out of your memory. Like in my poem “Paradise,” where I did see a couple. This was somewhere around Ninth Avenue, maybe on Forty-ninth Street. I had been at a poker game, though I wasn’t a gambler, I didn’t have any money. When I left, I walked back to my house here in the Village, it was a nice morning, dawn. And I did meet those two. I didn’t think about them for years. The book came out 1990 more or less, and the poem was probably written in the 1980s. And everything else came back, all those memories. I find even more interesting are those poems that start with a phrase or an image that you have no idea where it comes from. But you want it so much that your task is to sort of invent a poem to go around it. It’s great. It’s an adventure, where you have no idea where you’re going. It may not work, but it’s a lot of fun.