California State University, Northridge Myth in The

Home , Charles Simic, Mark Strand

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

MYTH IN THE POETRY OF CHARLES SIMIC'S DISMANTLING THE SILENCE, RETURN TO A PLACE LIT BY A GLASS OF MILK, AND WHITE

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in

English

Jordan Douglas Jones

May 1986 The Thesis of Jordan Douglas Jones is approved:

Arthur Lane, PhD

Benjamin Saltman, PhD

Arlene Stiebel, PhD, Chairperson Committee on Honors

California State University, Northridge

ii ABSTRACT

MYTH IN THE POETRY OF CHARLES SIMIC'S

DISMANTLING THE SILENCE, RETURN TO A PLACE

LIT BY A GLASS OF MILK, AND WHITE

Jordan Douglas Jones

Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English

Charles Simic in the poetry of his books Dismantling the Silence, Return to a Place Lit By a Glass of Milk, and

White uses myth to reach beyond the autobiographical to the archetypal and thus negate the importance of the author.

In these poems, the poetic vocation mirrors the vocation of the· shaman as it has been elucidated by Mircea Eliade.

Both poet and shaman allow universal forces to work through them. Simic also discusses the myths of the origins and the return to the origins of objects and works of art; as well as the dangers one must encounter when allowing uni versal creative principles to work through one during the creation of art. An~ther aspect of myth which can be seen here is the Romantic concept of Einfuhlung, or loss of ego/

iii object distinction. The author describes his union with

particular natural objects. Simic also shows us the mythic transformation of "profane" objects into "sacred" ones. Finally, Simic's poetry can be viewed within the context of what Robert Bly has termed "leaping poetry."

Specifically, his nee-surrealist use of the "dark atmos phere" of the folklore of his Yugoslavian homeland as well as its -tone of command and its concern with origins links him with two contemporary Yugoslavian poets: Vasko Popa and Ivan V. Lalic. Ultimately, Simic's poetry is concerned with allowing impersonal, U?iversal, and mythic realities to present themselves.

iv MYTH IN THE POETRY OF CHARLES SIMIC'S

DISMANTLING THE SILENCE, RETURN TO A PLACE

LIT BY A GLASS OF MILK, AND WHITE.

Jordan Douglas Jones

In re-envisioning objects, in animating them,

Charles Simic is essentially involved in making the pro fane once again sacred. We can see this in his books

Dismantling the Silence, Return to a Place, Lit By a

Glass of Milk, and White. Eliade, in The Sacred and The

Profane, defines the sacred as "the manifestation of some thing of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural 'profane' world" (11). Simic, in his poems, is able to elevate common objects to the level of the sacred. He also evokes the external sacred time of the creation of these objects, as well as that of the poetic act itself.

1 2

Speaking of Ted Hughes, Ekbert Fass has written:

his role as poet remains that of a visionary

witness who, as Carl Jung puts it, "can only

obey the apparently alien impulse within him and

follow where it leads, sensing that his work is

greater than himself, and wields a power which

is not his and which he can·not command" (19).

In the poetry of Charles Simic, there is a similar recogni tion of the fundamental unimportance of the author. In the Introduction to his translations of Ivan V. Lalic's poems, Simic notes that "we can do little but great things can be done through us" (9). Simic's use of myth creates a poetry which reaches beyond the merely autobiographical to the archetypal. I intend to examine this employment of myth in the three books mentioned above first as it re lates to the definition of the poetic vocation; second, as it relates to myths of origins and of returns to ori gins; third, as it relates to the Romantic concept of

Einfuhlung, or loss of ego/object distinction; fourth, as it involves "profane" objects and makes them "sacred"; and finally, as it can be viewed within the context of what

Robert Bly has termed "leaping poetry," as illustrated by the neo-surrealist writers of Latin America and Europe

(especially those of Simic's native Yugoslavia).

In the poem "The Bird," Simic's persona is called

"From an apple tree I In the midst of. sleep" (Return to· a Place 4). This is a metaphor for the shamanic, 3

religious, or poetic calling. It is, in fact, illuminat- ing to view the vocation of the poet in these religious and mythical terms when considering Simic's work. Shaman- ism is the "technique of ecstasy" (Eliade, Shamanism 4) which was practiced by certain "primitive" societies.

ULtimately, the shaman is one who has been called to "re- nounce the simple human condition and become a more or less pliant instrument for some manifestation of the sacred" (23). As Simic has said:

Like the primitive man in an animistic universe,

the poet claims a common and essential ground

where everything has its root and correspon-

dence. This is what haunts: a realm where

magic is possible, where chance reigns, where

metaphors have their supreme logic ("Composi-

tion" 149).

These mysterious, ecstatic, and shamanic conceptions of the poetic vocation can be traced back to the Romantic poets. When Keats cries out in his famous letter to

Benjamin Bailey, "O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!" (Keats 1: 185), he not only illustrates the

Romantics' position relative to "consequitive reasoning," he also shows us that they believed poets are receivers

.;~- of inspirations greater than their own mental capacities could concoct. The poet, for the Romantics, is a mystic.

The connection between these Romantic theories and shamanic realities has been clearly pointed out by Ted Hughes, 4

himself a creator of poetry which deals with myth, in a review of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism:

The initiation dreams, the general schema of

shamanic flight, and the figures they (the sha

mans) encounter, are not a shaman monopoly:

they are, in fact, the basic experience of the

poetic temperament we call "romantic." .... The

shamans seem to undergo, at will and at pheno

menal intensity, and with practical results,

one of the main regenerating dramas of the

human psyche: the fundamental poetic event

(Faas 15).

The poet is a "technician of the sacred" to whom the sacred manifests itself; we will return to this idea later.

According to Eliade, in his book The Sacred and the

Profane, one significant pattern of interest in mythology is the idea that there once was a sacred time of origins, and that this sacred time can be recaptured or returned to with the aid of a shaman (68). Much of Simic's poetry seems to be concerned with these primeval origins. For him, "the poem is the place where the origins are allowed to think" ("Composition" 151). And he says in his Intra- duction to Lalic 's poems that in order "to renew 'itself poetry must return to its origins from time to time .•..

In the deepest sense the possibilities that allow us to create belong to· our ancestors" (9). As a mythographer and shamanic character, the poet steps aside, allowing 5

his origins to express themselves. In his poetry, Simic concentrates on the origins of objects (forks, spoons, shoes, axes) as well as on the origins of the poetic act itself. Both sets of myths of origins imply the existence of a 'sacred time' which may or may not be recaptured.

In his poem "Fork," he makes a leap from the violent appearance of the fork to its possible origins: "This strange thing must have crept I Right out of hell" (Dis mantling the Silence 55). Continuing to speculate, he says that "It resembles a bird's foot I Worn around the cannibal's neck." The fork, then, has its origins in an animistic world-view which precedes that of western civili zation.

Within the context of western culture, there can also be myths of origins. In his. poem "Brooms," Simic presents a more complex genesis:

In this and no other manner

Was the first ancestral broom made:

Namely, they plucked all the arrows

From the bent back of Saint Sebastian.

They tied them with a rope

On which Judas hung himself.

Stuck in the stilt

On which Copernicus

Touched the morning star ... 6

Then the broom was ready

To leave the monastery

(Return to a Place 22).

The associational leaps here, from the origins of Christi- anity to the origins of science and back, denote a strug- gle for meaning within the complex western tradition.

Later in the poem we find that "The secret teaching of brooms"

. . . says: the bones end up under the table .

Bread-crumbs have a mind of their own.

The milk is you-know-who's semen.

The mice have the last squeal (23).

Here Simic begins to yoke "elements together in a surreal process" which "creates a tone very similar to folktales and folklore" (Behm 91). The roots of the poem in its folkloric "'dark atmosphere' of wonder and mystery joined· with a sense of the ominous" (Behm 92) can be seen to lie in myth, which Joseph Campbell has defined as a "linguis- tic system .•. by which the unknown speaks to the knowing mind by way of a metaphor."

Perhaps the best place to view the communication of unknown origins through metaphor in the poetry of Charles

Simic is his poem "Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right

·~~· Hand" (Dismantling the Silence 52-53). In the poem, each finger is given certain traits which define it and shed light on its origins, and thus on its possible signifi- cance. The thumb, "loose tooth of a horse," was "attached 7

to my flesh I At the time of my birth." The second finger

"points the way ... I Watch, he points further. I He points to himself." The middle finger was "An old man at birth," has backache, and searches:

... within my hand

The way a dog looks

For fleas

With a sharp tooth.

For Simic, the fourth finger is "mystery" and "Some times ... I He jumps by himself I As though someone called his name." And the fifth finger has something which stirs,

"Something perpetually at the point of birth."

Simic gives us here a series of symbolic metaphors about the fingers of the hand which serves as a sort of archetypal analysis of them. The thumb seems out of place, and therefore is 1 attached ' at birth . The index finger is the great indicator, something which can even point inward at what Simic has termed elsewhere "The Inner Man" (Dis mantling the Silence 28-29). The middle finger, in its length, is hunched over as if arthritic, as if searching for something it has lost. The fourth finger, like the thumb, seems misplaced. It is mysterious; it acts with a mysterious autonomy. The 'pinkie' is energetic and ever new, constantly being born. Each of these metaphors are attempts to get at archetypal, mythical representations of the parts of the hand. It is important to notice here 8

the recurrence of the world 'birth'; Simic is focussing on the origins of the fingers.

Integral to the mythical representation of origins is the ideal of returning to the time of origins or to a similar sacred time. Eliade says that there is a "motif on the 'perfection of the beginnings' ... not only ... in the mythical past but also the perfection that is to come in the future, after this world is destroyed" (Myth and

Reality 75). For Simic, the primitive, preconceptual, animal life, out of which 'thinking man' originated, is superior to our current state and might be returned to.

He writes, in his poem "Ax":

Whoever swings an ax

Knows the body of man

Will again be covered with fur.

The stench of blood and swamp water

Will return to its old resting place.

They'll spend their winters

Sleeping like the bears.

The skin on the breasts of their women

Will grow coarse. He who cannot

Grow teeth, will not survive.

He who cannot howl

Will not find his pack ...

These dark prophecies were gathered,

Unknown to myself, by my body 9

Which understands historical probabilities,

Lacking itself, in its essence, a future

(Dismantling the Silence 63).

Simic embraces a return to the animal nature of man in all its brutality of "stench of blood and swamp water," of coarse female skin, teeth of carnivores and hunting in packs. While these are certainly 'dark prophecies,' they are also truths which come out of a basic and bodily know ledge of mortality, of the fact that the individual or ganism lacks "in its essence, a future."

In his poem "Forest" (Dismantling the Silence 3),

Simic tells of the return of the primeval forest. "My. time is coming," says the forest, "Once again I My trees will swing their heavy bells." But this is not entirely an ahuman future, for "Whoever looks now in the palm of his hand I Will notice the imprints of strange flowers I

I have preserved in my rocks." Ultimately, sacred time is not something which must be recaptured; it is something which must be remembered or recognized: "The human body will be revealed for what it is-- I A cluster of roots I

Pulling in every direction." To the extent that humanity is not estranged from nature, it can be seen that the poet is only a 'technician of the sacred.' If the imperson- ality of nature is applied to persons, we can see a need for a negation of the personality of the author, a "pre sence of absence" (Jackson 140). Without this objectivity, the myths would not be able to speak. 10

In his long poem White (included in its entirety in

Selected Poems), Simic discusses this need for the author to stand back and allow the myths to speak by considering the genesis of artificial objects, the origins of writing.

Writing is for him a continual process of "learning how to begin again" (Schmidt 530). The first poem of the first of two ten-poem sequences reads:

Out of poverty

to begin again:

With the color of the bride

And that of blindness,

Touch what I can

Of the quick,

Speak and then wait,

As if this light

Will continue to linger

On the threshold (77).

We can see here the major themes of the entire sequence of poems, and of much of Simic's poetry. Writing is created "out of poverty." 'Beginning again' can be seen as a return to sacred time, the time of the first origins of the creative act. The goal is to lose oneself and sub- mit to the muses, to "Speak and then wait." This process 11 I '

of submission to experience and inspiration is a link be

tween Romantic aesthetics and shamanic practices; both of

which embrace an element of danger, the possibility that

the "color of the bride" might also be "that of blindness."

This dual nature of White, as both benevolent and

malicious, can be seen in the chapter "The Whiteness of

the Whale" in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. After listing

the commofr positive connotations of whiteness (which link

it with marriage, purity, royalty, and so on) Melville

delineates the 'appalling' nature of whiteness. He says

that" ... there yet lurks an elusive something in the

innermost idea of this hue, which strikes ... panic to the

soul" (7:235-36). Melville gives several reasons for the

fact that whiteness "in its profoundest idealised signifi

cance ... calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul" (7:239).

It is possible that "by its indefiniteness it shadows forth

the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus

·stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation"

(7:243). Or it could be "that as in essence whiteness is

not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and

at the same time the concrete of all colours" (7:243). One

can also understand that "the great principle of light,

for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if

operating without medium upon matter, would touch all ob

jects, even tulips and roses, with its own black tinge"

(7:244). The fear in all of these possibilities is the

possible annihilation of all individuality and distinction. 12

The 'heartless voids' would annihilate; whiteness itself might be either the absence of distinction or the terrible wedding of all things into an indistinct hodgepodge; or light, without refraction, might merely annihilate our ex perience of distinction.

For Simic, White is a threat because it is an unknown vastness out of which the poet must draw the work, in an annihilation of the author. It is the duty of the author to say, "White--let me stand aside I So that the future may see you " (84). But this is not just the deference of an author faced with the immensities out of which he creates; Simic feels that you can't call him "a cook I If the pot's got me under its cover" (82). The universal and threatening whiteness which is Simic's metaphor for poetic creation is otherworldly and inhuman in a Melvillian sense, for Simic says, "There are words I need. I They are not near men" (79). It is also important to note that

White is associated with the solitude of the author:

This is the last summoning.

Solitude--as in the beginning.

A zero burped a bigger zero-

It's an awful licking I got (86).

Ultimately, "White, from which all the colors of the spec trum proceed, here represents the inscrutable source of all images which the poet, in his acts of making, must 13

perilously explore ... " (Shaw 26). Or, as Simic has put it,

in the act of writing" ... that slumbering, almost anony mous content becomes audible, when its privacy is abolished

and it translates itself into language .... I realize that

I know nothing of the actual cause, and furthermore, that

I had no choice .... 11 (Turner 279).

"With the second poem (of the first series of ten), we see the poet beginning in earnest his task of shedding his old self" (Schmidt 532). Simic writes: "All that is near, / I no longer give it a name" (77). He has become

the passive receiver whose only action is to:

ask

to be tied to its tail

When it goes marrying

Its cousins, the stars (77).

The author only desires that he be allowed to cling to

White as it makes its great journey.

This submission is not without its dangers, as I have noted above. Just as the shaman's initiation requires:

dismemberment of the body, followed by a re

newal of the internal organs and viscera; ascent

to the sky and dialogue with the gods or spirits;

descent to the underworld and conversations with

spirits and the souls of dead shamans; various

revelations, both religious and shamanic ...

(Eliade, Shamanism 34). 14

the vocation of writing demands the destruction of one's

own personality and a confrontation with cosmic powers.

As Simic has said in his essay "Domain of the Marvellous

Prey":

"I" is many. "I" is an organizing principle,

a necessary fiction. Actually, I'd put more

emphasis on consciousness: that which witnes-

ses has no need of a pronoun .... So, perhaps,

the seeming absence of the author is the de

scription of one of its manifestations, in this

case an increase of consciousness at the expense

of the subject (qtd. in Jackson 140-41).

This 'increase of consciousness' reminds one of Keats

and his concept of 'negative capability.' Keats called

for a transcendence of the self within the work. When he

wrote that "the sense of Beauty ... obliterates all consi

deration" (Keats 1:194), he seems to have demanded a poe

tic submission to experience which mirrors shamanic ini-

tiation. Keats' "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" ( 1:193),

in which the man of poetic achievement is supposed to

dwell, remind one of the imbalance, both psychological

and spiritual, which precedes the vocational calling of

a shaman: " ... like any other religious vocation, the

shamanic vocation is manifested by a crisis, a temporary

derangement of the future shaman's spiritual equilibrium"

(Eliade, Shamanism xii). Further, negative capability means for Keats an 'imaginative openness' which in essence 15

negates the ego: to deny an experience or an insight because it does not conform to a pre-conceived systematic structure would be "an egoistic assertion of one's own identity" (Bate 249). Similar, but perhaps more dramatic, is the initiation crisis of the shaman, which we might in terpret "as a sign that the profane man is being "dis solved" and a new personality being prepared for birth"

(Eliade, Rites and Symbols 89).

The author too seems to 'dissolve' as he submits to what he sees. In Simic's "The Invention of Nothing," we find the world disappearing around the persona of the author and taking him with it:

I didn't notice

while I wrote here

that nothing remains of the world

except my table and chair ....

The color of nothing is blue.

I strike it with my left hand and my hand disappears.

Why am I so quiet then

and so happy? (Dismantling the Silence 79-80).

The danger and the beauty of the vocation of writing lies in losing oneself to greater realities which lead one knows not where. To create something new, under the influence of the presence of White, one must pursue the

"Little known vowel; /Noose big for us all" (79). This seems also to suggest that in the discovery of new 16

realities, in the creation of new poems, the reader will participate, will be. one of the victims of the hanging since the noose is "big for us all." In the last two poems of the first sequence, Simic brings out more of these images of the dangers of writing. He says, presumably to

White, "You had me hoodwinked. I I see your brand new claws," and later, "what do I betray I By desiring your purity?" (81). The final poem of this sequence seems to allow the fear of the unknown and the images of the author's absence to coalesce:

We haven't gone far ...

Fear lives there too.

Five ears of my fingertips

Against the white page.

What do you hear?

We hear holy nothing

Blindfolding itself.

It touched you once, twice

And tore like a stitch

Out of a new wound (81-82).

Ultimately, the author is not in control of the creative act. He is under .the pot's cover, being cooked (82). 17

The experiences the author would like to relate are transcendent, unable to be articulated:

It has to be cold

So the breath turns white,

And then mother, who's fast enough

To write his life on it? (83-84)

According to Simic, it should be the writer's goal to

'step aside' (84) so that the act of creation itself might be seen. This is accomplished by "Solitude--as in the beginning" (86). The return to the origins of writing, like the shamanic initiation, is a private act.

At the end of White, after the two series of ten poems, there is a poem entitled "What the White Had to

Say" (87-88). The White says, "Because I am the bullet I

That has gone through everyone already, I I thought of you long before you thought of me" (87). Poetry, being archetypal and ancient, knows all, and the individual author is subsumed by it. In a sense, the author must try to live in Keats' "negative capability" without succumbing to the need to write, which process "murders to dissect," as Wordsworth has said of reductive transformation. Ac- cording to Simic, the author should "linger I On the

.~4.· threshold" ( 7 7). This is because all writing is a failed attempt to recreate the impetus to write: "If I didn't err, there wouldn't be these smudges" ( 83). The goal of the poet, Simic seems to be saying, is the poetic 18 I '

experience and not the poetic artifact, the living myth and not the dead story of the myth. Simic says the poet must

possess:

In the beginning, always a myth of origins of

the poetic act. A longing to lower oneself one

notch below language, to scoop out the bottom-

that place of 'original action and desire,' to

recover our mute existence, to recreate what

is unspoken and enduring in words, and thus

live twice as it were ... the poet claims a

common and essential ground where everything

has its root and correspondence ("Composition

149).

The most obvious way of pursuing this poetics of "our mute existence" and of animism would be through the Roman tic concept of Einfuhlung, or the loss of distinctions between ego and object. This experience has been defined variously. Shelley, for example, wrote that "Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction" (qtd. in

Abrams 347). And Keats said that "if a Sparrow come be fore my Window I take part in its existince and pick about the Gravel" (1:186). Keats experienced Einfuhlung on an intimate level and with individual objects instead of with the entirety of a landscape, making him an exception among 19

the Romantics (Abrams 347). Simic too, deals with indi-

vidual objects: brooms, forks, stones, shoes, and so on.

He has said that "you hold the stone in your hand and some

thing passes between you and the inanimate, but that's on

the level of muscles. And that's very far from language.

You have to translate it carefully" (qtd. in Contoski 145).

It is precisely this experj_ence which we must not "murder

to dissect."

A good example of Simic's expression of Einfuhlung is his poem "Stone" (Dismantling the Silence 59). It is

not so much the fullness of the experience that strikes

us here as it is the fullness of the conception. For Simic,

to "Go inside a stone I That would be my way." He does not describe the experience of union, he describes an idea of it:

From the outside the stone is a riddle:

No one knows how to answer it.

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet

Even though a cow steps on it full weight,

Even though a child throws it in a river;

The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed

To the river bottom

Where the fishes come to knock on it

And listen.

Though this is speculation, there is an insight, a feeling that the poet has witnessed a kind of communion between objects, humans, and animals. 20

For Simic, the idea of Einfuhlung is often conceived of as a journey. In his poem "Explorers," the explorers

"arrive inside I The object at evening. I There's no one to greet them" (Selected Poems 36). As the explorers take notes about the vacant place which they have discovered, a voice speaks to them, indicating that the object is not as vacant as they had thought:

It says: I'm grateful

That you've finally come.

It was beginning to get lonely.

I recognize you. You are all

That has always eluded me.

May this be my country

(Selected Poems 37).

First we notice here the longing for this type of union

("May this by my country") and then we notice that the object itself "was beginning to get lonely." Simic is involved in re-envisioning objects as entities with souls and thoughts, in_making them again sacred and vivifying.

He refers to shoes in his poem "My Shoes" (Dismantling the Silence 58) as the "secret face of my inner life"; his attempt to make objects sacred again goes beyond mere pan- theism to the Romantic concept of Einfuhlung and to primitive animism. The shoes not only possess a soul, but that soul also is seen to unite with the soul of the poem's speaker. 21

In "Return to a Place Lit By a Glass of Milk" (Simic,

Return to a Place 61), he writes that "A glass of milk glows on the table. I Only you can reach it for me now."

Love is sanctifying here; it has made surrounding profane objects (the glass of milk) sacred and strangely significant. "Simic's habit has been to look so long and fixedly at common objects that they acquire haloes of strangeness, and become disquietingly animated" (Shaw 25). It is this measure of attention which makes Simic's objects appear as sacred. In his poem "Butcher Shop" (Dismantling the

Silence 24), the blood on an apron is "smeared into a map I

Of the Great continents of blood, I The great rivers and oceans of blood.'' Even more transcendentally significant is the revelation that "knives glitter like altars I -In a dark church." He defines a butcher shop in terms of

Judea-Christian religious symbols. In one sense, profane objects become menacingly sacred as they are shown to mirror the metaphor of holy sacrifice. More important here, however, is the fact that everyday objects are made sacred only through focussed attention.

According to Eliade, "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane" (The Sacred and The

Profane 11). In Simic's poem "The Bird" (Return to a

Place 5), referred to earlier, the speaker climbs "the thread I Of the bird's whistle I like smoke." This journey into the heights, drawn by a sacred bird in an 22

experience which parallels the initiation dreams of sha mans, leaves the speaker with a greater perspective. He dreams he has "The eyes of that bird." He is able to watch

"from the heights, I How the roads meet I And part once again." It is this ecstatic experience of expanded under- standing which, according to Eliade, makes the sacred equivalent to power, "and, in the last analysis, to reality"

(The Sacred and The Profane 12).

In these poems, Simic makes objects sacred through heightened attention and attempts to recreate the sacred time of creation. In The Sacred and The Profane, 'sacred time' ii defined as ''circular time, reversable and recover able, a sort of eternal mythical present that is periodi cally reintegrated by means of rites" (70). It is:

a primordial mythical time made present ... it

d o e s no t ' pas s ' . . '· i t d o e s n o t c on s t i t u t e an

irreversable duration. It is an ontological

Parmenidean time; it always remains equal to

itself, it neither changes nor is it exhausted (69).

The poem can be this place: "out of the simultaneity of experience, the event of Language is an emergence into

1 in ear time" (Simi c, "Composition-" 149) . Simic goes on to say that this sacred time, this experience of simulta neity which the poem tries to communicate, "is what doesn't have a locus. It is spherical, all encompassing" (150).

The task of the poet is to bring us back to the timeless 23

origins. "The poet manipulates in order to restore

strangeness to the ordinary" (150). For Simic, "The dif-

ficulty of modern poetry ... is that it has invested all its energies to permit that ancestral and archetypal thought to become audible in its purity" (151).

Specifically, Simic is speaking of 'modern' as the period from the imagists to the surrealists (150). His own work has been categorized as lying within the scope of contemporary surrealism or 'deep imagism,' as Jerome

Rothenberg has termed it (Behm 50). This would ally him with poets such as Robert Bly, James Wright, W.S. Merwin,

Mark Strand, Gregory Orr, and Jerome Rothenberg (Behm

50-51), as well as with the European and Latin American surrealists which Bly, Wright, Merwin, S~mic, and Strand have helped to introduce to American audiences through their translations. (I am speaking of Federico Garcia

Lorca, Antonio Machado, Caesar Vallejo, Georg Trakl, Vasko

Papa, and others.)

In Another Republic, Charles Simic and Mark Strand present some of the lesser known of these European and

South American writers who they feel "have influenced not only the work of the editors but that of an entire generation of American poets" (17). They divide these writers into the general categories of historical and mythological.

"The origins of the mythological vision can be seen in surrealism, which, by concerning itself with the uncon scious, found a method for uncovering and using archetypal 24

imagery" (17). This is the kind of poetry which Robert

Bly has termed "leaping poetry"; in which, he says, there is "a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the un known part and back to the known" (1). While I would con tend that such 'leaping' is the fundamental activity of all poetry, since it is grounded in metaphor, it does seem true that the focus on the unconscious in the work of these nee-surrealists has created or re-discovered a new kind of 'leap.' According to Simic and Strand, this attention to the unconscious:

restored to the familiar world its strangeness

and gave back to the poet his role of myth-

maker. Thus for the mythological poet the mira-

culous is close at hand, easily encountered if

he pays attention, as he must, since attention

is his most important faculty (17).

Among these European and Latin American surrealists,

Simic's work seems closest to that of his countrymen Vasko

Popa and Ivan Lalic. Simic is a "surrealist in Yugosla- vian folklore" (Behm 50) and he does speak in the same

Yugoslavian folkloric tonalities as Popa and Lalic. Simic has described Papa's poetry as "remarkable for its elemen tal surrealism coupled undoubtedly with an animistic, myth making approach to reality" (Popa x). Most importantly, however, we notice that Popa ''does not rely on these sources directly; instead he uses the syntactic, rhythmical, 25 ' .

and imaginative principles inherent in their construction to embody his own perceptions, which are profoundly of his own time and place" (Papa x). The same might be said of

Simic, who tells us that "If you've eaten today, no reason to think you'll eat tomorrow. I People c~n also be proc essed into soap" (Dismantling the Silence 17); using mythic or folkloric tonalities, he describes specifically contem porary situations.

Simic's use of folklore gives the poems a "dark atmos phere" as well as providing Simic with a wealth of poetic forms, such as "the riddle, the proverb, the question posed and answered askew" (Shaw 25). Throughout these poems there is a folkloric tone of menace. In "Tapestry"

(Dismantling the Silence 31), we are shown a tapestry which "hangs from heaven to earth." It is, perhaps, the tapestry of history, or of the folktales which have come down to us through history. Among the images woven into the tapestry are those of:

a chicken carried off by a fox,

a naked couple on their wedding night,

a column of smoke,

an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk.

While the 'naked couple' would not appear ominous of it self, they are made to appear ominous by being juxtaposed with the stolen chicken, the smoke, and the evil-eyed woman. At the end of the poem, it is foretold that a man will enter a barbershop where "They'll shave his beard, 26

nose, ears and hair I To look like everyone else." Here, especially in conjunction with the smoke image above, we are reminded of the Nazi death camps, and Simic subsumes this particular horror into the general tone of threat and menace which we often encounter in folklore.

Elsewhere, Simic reinterprets folktales, juxtaposing two or three of them in order to view them in a new context. His poem "The Wedding" (Return to. a Place 37-38) does this with nursery rhymes and the story of Cinderella:

And what does he wear?

Something new,. something worn,

Something borrowed, something stolen,

And a keen blade

Of a knife in her slipper.

Later, we are told that the wedding ring is made "Of bread crust," and that it is wrapped in "loneliness I Instead of a napkin." Also, it is revealed that "The church is far I And its bleached graveyard." The poem ends with a dark and altered version of a nursery rhyme:

Star-light, star-bright,

Last star I see this morning,

Don't breathe now

I'm kissing an emptiness

A thousand years long. 27

This empty marriage kiss is not what we would expect, given the rhyme which Simic e_vokes before it. But the way he twists that rhyme prepares us for the 'kissing' of 'empti ness,' and the theme of one being tricked into marriage is not unfamiliar to the realm of folklore. Throughout his work, in poems such as "Fork," and "Brooms," and

"Butcher Shop," Simic uses this dark side of folklore, which reaches toward an ancestral and archetypal speech and links him again with his countrymen Popa and Lalic.

Popa's poems are often voiced as directions or com mands, as recipes for the creation of transcendent experiences. In "Before the Game," he tells us to:

Shut one eye then the other

Peek into every corner of yourself

See that there are no nails or thieves

See that there are no cuckoo's eggs (1)

He then tells us to jump high ("on top of yourself") to fall deep ("to the bottom of your abyss"). Finally he declares that "Who doesn't break into pieces I Who remains whole and gets up whole I Plays" (1). Presumably the game is that of life, that of increased awareness.

This tone of command is also found in Simic. In his poem "Psalm" (Dismantling the Silence 32), he commands

"Old ones to the side," and later, "All priests into mouse holes. I All merchants into pigs. We'll cut their throats later." I t i s t o b e u n d e r .s t o o d t h a t "No one i s t o t o u c h the children I No one is to shovel out the dreamers." This 28

poem serves as an incantation. As Simic has said of Vasko

Popa's poetry, "you are reading magic formulas. If they enchant, it is to make you see clearly" (Popa ix). "Psalm" is also a list of methods for revolt against outdated morality, religion, and economics. It is the program of

~revolution, of the left or right. But it applies less as a call to political action than as a metaphor and per sonal psychological plan for "anyone looking for a broom closet" in order to clean up their lives, in order to es cape the prosaic lives of old ones, priests, and merchants and return to the magical poetic life of children and dreamers.

Just as Simic has his experiences of union with ob jects, and Popa has his realization in his poem "Dream and

Pebble" that a pebble "listens to itself I Among the worlds a world" (25); Ivan Lalic sees "things that startle like stars with their presence" (32). Lalic is, like Simic, intensely concerned with our origins in a sacred time.

In the poem "Awakening" (35), he says he knows that:

... the sky was all around us once.

Like a clear light it broke into us.

Who can remember that? 0 ancient usage

Of words that taste like dream and generation

And in "East" (33), he connects that 'clear light' once again with the experience of waking; it is "One extinct light which seemingly returns I Before each awakening, burning bird in a flash, I 0 how terribly distant is the 29

pure spring of it." Instead of the affirmation of Simic

("the body of man I Will again be covered with fur" (Dis mantling the Silence 63); "Once again I My trees will swing their heavy bells" (Dismantling the Silence 3)),

Lalic's consideration of the return to sacred time is full of doubt. Sacred time is for him an "extinct light" which only "seemingly returns" and is, in fact, "terribly distant." Sacred time is a "clear light"; "who can remember that?" Furthermore, it is insubstantial and tastes

"like dream and generation." Yet these doubts only reveal

Lalic's longing for the kind of surety of the return to a time of origins which Simic expresses. For both Lalic and Simic, "the poem lives in a forgotten place," as Lalic has said (9). Both poets attempt to return to this place and show its significant objects to us. They are involved in "unlocking names" (Lalic 67) of these objects, in "jus tifying a world I I did not create" (67).

The poet is, for Simic, a kind of mediator between our prosaic lives and the sacred, as is the shaman. In linking us up with transcendent, archetypal realities, he can help us to return to pre-historical and mythic origins.

In one sense, this kind of poet offers himself ~p to the immensities of the universe, allowing himself to receive whatever the cosmos has to give. This receptivity is what

Keats called 'negative capability,' the capability to dwell in "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts." This kind of poet is also concerned with insuring that he speaks in a 30

universal voice and not merely an autobiographical one; in thi~ sense he makes a seco~d sacrifice. Being open to cosmic influences, to the eternal cycles of regeneration, and being determined to avoid the strictly personal, the poet may, according to Simic, rediscover timeless essences or origins. These may be origins of objects, as in many of Simic's poems in Dismantling the Silence, and Return to a Place Lit By a Glass of Milk, or they may be the ori gins of the author's impulse to create, as in White. The poet may find his ego united with and redefined by seem ingly inanimate objects, and negated once again in that way. For example, by his risk-taking close attention to objects, we have seen that Simic has been able to elevate them from the profane to the sacred in a primitivistic, animistic manner. The poet, in Simic, moves from the conscious mind to the unconscious and back to the conscious in 'leaps' that resemble the strides the shaman must make to move back and forth between the heavens, the world, and the underworld. These jumps are dangerous for the psyche of the poet, as the analogous ones are for shamans, yet they are necessary in order to maintain our contact with myth. "Myth is mute," as Norman 0. Brown has said (qtd. in Behm 7). Nevertheless, because a poet like Simic has the humility to stand aside we may hear "that ancestral and archetypal thought ... become audible in its purity"

(Simic, "Composition" 151), even if that purity is like 31

"the most beautiful riddle" and "has no answer" (Simic,

Selected Poems 88). 32 fl •

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