The Effable & Ineffable Meet in the Work of Charles Simic
At Los Angeles Book Review, Sven Birkerts writes about Charles Simic's new book of prose, The Life of Images: Selected Prose, and a concurrently published new collection of poems, The Lunatic (both HarperCollins). He starts by thinking on the cover image of the prose, a photograph by Helen Levitt: "I’ve let myself imagine Simic combing through archives in search of appropriate images and coming to rest on this one. Surely he saw the off-kilter figure as stand-in for himself, the poet; the man’s overall aura of hapless disarray would have sealed the deal." More:
...[I]n one of the earliest essays in the book, “Note on Poetry and Philosophy,” the poet lays out the ground of his own practice, giving us his metaphysical bona fides. He invokes Martin Heidegger with the idea that “it is not the poet who speaks through the poem but the work itself.” The philosopher famously affirmed that “language speaks,” and Simic echoes the idea: “This has always been my experience,” he insists. “The poet is at the mercy of his metaphors. Everything is at the mercy of the poet’s metaphors — even Language, who is their Lord and master.”
Though Simic is clearly conversant with Western philosophy — the essays in the first part of the book draw amply, but never stuffily, on his readings in this vein — the poet is too much a phenomenologist, too much a lover of the particularity of things, to trade off concreteness for abstraction. In the same essay, a few paragraphs on, he writes:
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one’s walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. […] where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear.
These objets trouvés of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meanings of the words begins to emerge.
Voilà! (Quite literally.) Two profound concepts have been brought together: the operations of chance (in this regard Simic is very much a follower of the surrealist ethos), and the belief that in fortunate, but not entirely accidental, circumstances, a work gets produced that expresses something deeper than the artist’s own ego. The process is not, however, a repudiation of the self. For Simic then goes on to say:
The poem is an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again. That this happens at times, happens in poems in many different and contradictory ways, is as great a mystery as the mystery of being itself.
The poems themselves, in The Lunatic as in his many other books, embody, maybe even arise from this coming together of effable and ineffable, from these trouvés that are always being strewn in front of us, had we but eyes to see.
Read the full essay at LARB.