View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by RERO DOC Digital Library Dissertation to fulfil the requirements for the doctorate in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland Orphan of Silence: The Poetry of Charles Simic By Goran Mijuk Accepted by the Faculty of Letters at the request of Professor Robert Rehder and Professor Anthony Mortimer. Fribourg, February 1, 2002. Professor Marcel Piérart, Dean. 2 T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S Acknowledgements 3 List of Abbreviations 4 - 5 Preface 6 - 7 Chronology of Charles Simic’s Life 8 - 11 I Orphan of Silence: An Introduction 12 - 31 II Translation 32 - 52 III Dismantling the Silence 53 - 78 IV Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk 79 -105 V Unending Blues 106-134 VI Hotel Insomnia 135-161 VII Wonderful Words, Silent Truth 162-176 Bibliography 177-184 3 A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S I would first like to thank my parents who have never stopped reminding me that without their help I would not have been able to juggle the challenges of working full time for the Reuters News Agency, writing a doctoral thesis and keeping my household in order. I am grateful for the support they have given me. It has made my life comfortable even in difficult times. I would also like to thank Prof. Robert Rehder, who has helped in innumerable instances to improve this work and who has shown me that reworking a paper might be a painful task but that any such effort is worthwhile. His thinking and writing about literature has been of tremendous help for my personal and professional development. My sister Gordana and my friends Judith Huber and Carey Sargent, who volunteered to read this work, took great pains to help me improve this thesis and I am very grateful for their assistance. A special thanks goes to all my friends who have patiently endured my bad temper after staying awake whole nights working on the thesis. I met the poet Charles Simic only when I had nearly finished this thesis on his poetry. Our meeting took place in Berlin in the summer of 2001. During the afternoon we were together we hardly talked about literature. We discussed the stock market, the climate in Berlin, the "Buletten", a typical local meat dish, that reminded us of a similar dish back in Yugoslavia and we talked about the war in our homeland. He told me about his family, his life in the United States and his busy schedule. It was an afternoon full of jokes and laughter. What surprised me most was Mr. Simic’s openness towards a young man he did not know. I did not have the impression of meeting a stranger. He was the person I hoped to meet: full of humour, intelligence and understanding. It was a pleasure to meet him and the pleasure of reading his poetry has increased all the more. 4 L I S T O F A B B R E V I A T I O N S Except for the works listed below, a full reference is given in the footnotes the first time that a work is cited, after which a shorter form is used. Poetry: WGS What the Grass Says, Santa Cruz, Kayak, 1967. SAUSTN Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes, Santa Cruz, Kayak, 1969. DS Dismantling the Silence, New York, Braziller, 1971. W White, New York, New River Press, 1972. RPLGM Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, New York, Braziller, 1974 BL Biography and a Lament, Poems 1961-1967, Hartford, Conn., Bartholomew’s Cobble, 1976. CG Charon’s Cosmology, New York, Braziller, 1977. CB Classic Ballroom Dances, New York, Braziller, 1980. A Austerities, New York, Braziller, 1982. WFUV Weather Forecast for Utopia & Vicinity, Poems 1967-1982, Barrytown, N.Y., Station Hill Press, 1983. UB Unending Blues, San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1986. WDE The World Doesn’t End, San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1989. TBGD The Book of Gods and Devils, San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1990. SP Selected Poems, 1963-1983: Revised and Expanded, New York, Braziller, 1990. HI Hotel Insomnia, San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1992. 5 WH A Wedding in Hell, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1994. WBC Walking the Black Cat, San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1996. J Jackstraws, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1999. Essays: UC The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1985. WWST Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1990. UFT The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994. OF Orphan Factory, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997. 6 P R E F A C E Asked about the "greatest myth about poetry that has been perpetrated upon the readers of poetry" in an interview with the literary journal Crazy Horse in 1972, the poet Charles Simic answers, that this myth "must be the idea that a poem can be fully explicated, and in prose. I sense an immense terror behind that need. Get rid of mystery, out with complexity and imagination! A totalitarian impulse" (UC 9). My impulse to write this work is not totalitarian and I do not believe that I can fully explicate Simic’s poetry. I agree with Simic that poetry defies any attempt to be explained completely. Though an analysis can unveil some of the content of a poem, the analysis itself lacks the vital qualities of the poem: the tone, the sound and the choice of words. The experience of reading a poem remains mysterious. However, there is an undeniable impulse to solve the mystery of a poem and to understand its complexity. I am fascinated by Simic’s work and I wish to move nearer to it by thinking and writing about his poetry and his prose. The experience of reading a poem is not enough to understand a poet’s work. By writing about it, we discover more. Too many things float away and go unnoticed while reading a poem. Although writing about poetry will not ultimately solve the mystery of poetry, it can at least draw us nearer to it. My intention in this work is to look at Simic’s development from his first book of poetry, What the Grass Says (1967), until Jackstraws (1999). I do not wish to pin Simic down as a surrealist, imagist nor realist. The focus is on the analysis of individual poems. Simultaneously, I attempt to put the analysed poems into relation with his work as a whole. The thesis is structured in chronological order. The work is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter concentrates on Simic’s idea of poetry. In this part, "The Orphan of Silence: An Introduction", I rely mainly on interviews and essays in order to explain Simic’s understanding of poetry. I also refer to some of his poems to strengthen the argument. The main focus lies on the notion "orphan of silence". In the second chapter, "Translation", the focus is on Simic’s reading experience and his thinking about translation and how this process has influenced his idea of poetry. In "Dismantling the Silence", the central idea of silence and its impact on his poetry is discussed. In contrast to the first and second chapters, the focus shifts towards the analysis of individual poems. In this part of the book, What the Grass Says (1967), Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes (1969), Dismantling the Silence (1971) and White (1972) are analysed. In the fourth chapter, "Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk", I focus on the importance of biography, history and war for the understanding of Simic’s poetry and, simultaneously, I try to show how his 7 poetry has developed in comparison to his earlier work. This chapter spans the years from 1974 to 1982 and comprises the four books Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (1974), Charon’s Cosmology (1977), Classic Ballroom Dances (1980) and Austerities (1982). In "Unending Blues", the fifth chapter of the thesis, Simic’s relation to blues and jazz music takes centre stage. In this part of the work the importance of issues such as poverty or social inequality is analysed. In "Unending Blues", the books Weather Forecast for Utopia & Vicinity (1983), Unending Blues (1986), The World Doesn’t End (1989) and The Book of Gods and Devils (1990) are summarised. In "Hotel Insomnia", I will look at the books Hotel Insomnia (1992), A Wedding in Hell (1994), Walking the Black Cat (1996) and Jackstraws (1999). In this chapter I attempt to show that while most of Simic’s recent poetry has not changed radically as far as ideas are concerned, his language has changed subtly in this most recent period of his career. Moreover, I intend to pay particular attention to Simic’s attitude towards the war in former Yugoslavia. In the last chapter, "Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: A Conclusion", I try to summarise the previous chapters and I intend to put Simic’s work in the context of contemporary American poetry. Throughout the work I make references to Simic’s essays and interviews. I also try to comment upon his style constantly and show how language and form develop. 8 C H R O N O L O G Y O F C H A R L E S S I M I C’S L I F E 1938 Born May 9 in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, to George Simic, an engineer, and Helen Matijević Simic.1 1954 Simic leaves Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in New York.