The poet Charles Simic has died, and the flood of posts on social media by poets who have been touched by his work, his friendship, and his mentorship is quite moving. I did not know Simic personally, but like many, for me his work and sensibility helped shaped my understanding of what a poem could be and what it means to be a poet.
Here is an excerpt from Simic's biography on the Poetry Foundation site:
Simic spent his formative years in Belgrade. His early childhood coincided with World War II and his family was forced to evacuate their home several times to escape indiscriminate bombing; as he has put it, “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin.” The atmosphere of violence and desperation continued after the war. Simic’s father left the country for work in Italy, and his mother tried several times to follow, only to be turned back by authorities. When Simic was fifteen, his mother finally arranged for the family to travel to Paris. After a year, Simic sailed for America and a reunion with his father. The family moved to Chicago, where Simic attended high school and began to take a serious interest in poetry—though he admits that one reason he began exploring the art form was to meet girls.
In Simic, we find an artist who reminds us of the importance of claiming your "in-between" status, the ways in which you may not fit into easy categories. About being named Poet Laureate in 2007, he responded, “I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was fifteen" (Academy of American Poets).
Below, I’ll post an excerpt from the asynchronous Lyric Essay class I taught many times for Creative Nonfiction. This month, I’m offering the same course through my own business. The course starts next week, and you can see details and register here. There is also some news about 2023 Generative Workshops and a discount for paid subscribers to this Substack at the bottom of this post.
From a written lecture on “Prose Poem, Literary Hybridity, and the Surreal” in my Lyric Essay class:
As David Lehman explains in the introduction to Great American Prose Poems, the contemporary prose poem scene in the U.S. is informed by the prose poem’s roots in French surrealism, and thus many people associate the form with the surrealist bent. (For more on the history of prose poem, check out this piece by Karen Volkman.) At the same time, many American practitioners of the form also bring in spoken language and unlikely discourses, “such as the newspaper article, the memo, the list, the parable, the speech, the dialogue.” Contemporary prose poem, then, like lyric essay is a hybrid form. Practitioners are often both drawing on the possibilities opened up by the experimentation that came before them and coming up with their own idea of the form even as they write. As Charles Simic explains, “The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does.” Simic describes the prose poem as a “veritable literary hybrid,” an “impossible amalgamation of lyric poetry, anecdote, fairy tale, allegory, joke, journal entry, and many other kinds of prose” (quoted in Great American Prose Poems, p. 14).
What, then, does the prose poem have to teach us about lyric essay? How can we use its models to find ways into fresh nonfiction writing of our own? In many ways, the prose poem's literary hybridity itself can show us what is possible in the stretching of a genre to suit one’s purposes. Additionally, one of my favorite qualities of prose poems I love is that it is often difficult to tell where the author is jumping off from autobiography into the surreal. I propose that this tweaking of reality— this ratcheting up of the absurd quality that life and memory sometimes take on— can be a method for introducing into our lyric essays the dreamlike (even uncanny) quality of that real life can have. So, while it’s important that in a piece that we are calling nonfiction, we report on “actual” occurrences and stick to the rules of the space-time continuum as we know it, we can nonetheless look to poetry to help us examine the edges of that actuality. What lies just at the edge of what we can understand? How can we represent that in nonfiction?
Here is an example of what I mean when I say that some prose poems exist in a blurry space between the realistic and the surreal or dream-like. In the prose poem below by Julia Story (a student of Simic’s, in fact!) a narrative is presented in a condensed yet evocative way that gives it the quality of a dream or of the the speaker choosing to withhold details for secret reasons of her own:
Indiana Problem (Toad Circus)
by Julia Story
The day after my toad circus the toads were all dead, crunchy and silent in their window well. I wanted to draw a doorway to walk through to get to the world of lilacs: purple, contagious green leaves and no movement but the steady invisible breathing of flowers. I knew I had to tell someone what I had done, so I first walked to the park and stayed there until dusk, sitting on the glider or in the middle of the rusty and dangerous merry-go-round; I can’t remember which. When it was nearly dark I walked home, certain that they were worried and maybe even out looking for me. When I got there I saw them busy in the kitchen through the window, so I hid in the backyard until it was good and dark, a living thing on a swing set in the gloom, the attic in my head cracking open for the first time and I went in.
(This poem originally appeared in The New Yorker.)
Similary, much of the work in Charles Simic's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The World Doesn't End is characterized by a surrealism that seems tinged by biography (or vice versa?). Here’s Simic:
Poetry, Simic reminds us, works through the image, through analogy. And the poetic image, as he points out, ultimately seeks to honor the spaces between language and experience, the ineffability of the inner world: “The advantage of the poetic image is that it preserves the wordless. It’s only through the use of analogy, seeing connections in disparate things, that I can hope to convey the fullness of the original moment. Analogy is a form of translation. I’m seeking an equivalent for the abyss that precedes language” (“Poetry and Experience,” 39).
You can watch Simic read one of his poems here.
(The last full paragraph above is adapted from my own unpublished essay “Witnessing the Witness: Psychic ‘Slippage’ in Elizabeth Bishop and Tomas Tranströmer,” which I will send out to paid subscribers soon.)
NEWS
I am currently offering four courses through Muse:
Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry and Nonfiction Play, a five-week asynchronous course running January 16th-February 19th. Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play. $250
Stringing the Beads: Group Developmental Editing. NEW DATES: Now begins March 13th. This guided asynchronous four-week online course is for intermediate to experienced writers of nonfiction who are interested in workshopping an ongoing or new essay project in an online group setting. Essays I have worked on with clients have appeared in Ron Slate’s On the Seawall, Literary Hub, Gulf Coast, Hobart, and Kenyon Review, among other venues. $240
Creativity Jumpstart. This class is entirely self-paced, meaning students will work through the material individually and on their own time. Lessons will guide you in writing memoir-based pieces as you work on loosening up as a writer and developing or reinforcing a creative practice. $50
2023 Drop-In Generative Writing Workshops. Join us for a selection of three-hour online workshops will happen on the fourth Saturday of the month from January 2023 to June 2023. The sessions can be taken separately or together. From $75
Paid subscribers to the Muse with JPC Substack receive 10% off 2023 Generative Writing Workshops. Founding members receive 30% off.
Paid subscribers also receive monthly subscriber-only discussions in comments and occasional surprise posts. They also help support my work!