a chat with the country’s new Poet Laureate

Poet Charles Simic came to this country from the former Yugoslavia as a teenager in 1954. He attended the same high school as Ernest Hemingway in a suburb of Chicago and later graduated from New York University. His first collection of poetry, “What the Grass Says,” was published in 1967. Forty years later, his work has received a long string of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. The poet has lived in a quiet, woodsy home in Strafford for about 30 years, and he is a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire. Simic has now published 18 books of poetry, along with a wealth of essays, prose pieces and translations. The Library of Congress recently named Simic the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, making him the fourth New Hampshire poet to receive the honor. When he takes over the post this fall, he will follow in the footsteps of Granite State writers Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin and current laureate Donald Hall, who lives in Danbury. The Wire recently caught up with Simic at his Strafford home to discuss his poetry and his new appointment. His 19th book of poetry, “That Little Something,” is slated for release early in 2008.

You are no stranger to acclaim, but how did it feel to be named Poet Laureate?

It’s a surprise. I can’t say that I anticipated that. You just don’t think of yourself as being named Poet Laureate. It’s a great honor, so I’m kind of still reeling from the effect. I still haven’t grasped it.

Being Poet Laureate does not come with any specific responsibilities or duties, but do you plan to use the title as a platform in any way?

Not as a platform. I don’t like anybody preaching to anyone else, especially poets. I will give many, many poetry readings. There are some programs the Library of Congress is engaged in, which I will encourage, endorse and work in. The original designation of Poet Laureate, before it was called Poet Laureate, was called Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. Most of the kinds of things that I’ll be doing I will be doing through that institution. But I will not go to Congress and say, ‘How about writing a law outlawing the writing of sestinas?’ (Laughs) I’m not going to pontificate about any subject. I’ll just be myself.

Under the title of Poet Laureate, do you see yourself as a spokesperson for the nation’s poets?

No. This is not in England, where the queen has a birthday and the Poet Laureate writes a poem, or some other member of the royal family is indisposed, they have a cold or something, and they write a poem. We don’t have to do that. (Laughs) I think it would feel presumptuous to try to speak for the entire nation. I’m not that kind of poet and I’m not going to change. I don’t think it’s possible for me to change to become that kind of poet.

Do you feel that poetry plays a significant role in a nation’s identity and culture?

It does. I mean, this country has produced a number of great poets since the 19th century, and if you think that most of those poets have been translated to almost every language in the world and it’s taught in schools, poetry is part of that culture and civilization. It’s a lasting value, and not just for people living in this country, but for the rest of the world.

You are originally from the former Yugoslavia. Do your roots there and your connection to that part of the world play a prominent role in your writing?

No. I left over 40 years ago. It’s been a long time. I was 15 when I left and now I’m almost 70. A lot of things have happened to me in between in this country. I don’t write about my childhood anymore, so the answer to that is, not really.
 
You are the fourth poet from New Hampshire to be named Poet Laureate. Do you feel a strong sense of home? In other words, do your immediate surroundings affect the way you write and the things you write about?

I think I do, although I’ve written a lot of poems about cities because I lived in New York City for a long time. You can’t avoid it. I mean, I’m stuck in my house like everybody else, and there are these long winters. I live in the woods. I look out and I see the same trees. Birdies come to the bird feeder, other animals cross the yard. Looking at this for all these years, driving these little side roads here in these little towns, it would be really strange if I wrote about other things and not that. So, yes, it influences me. It depends very much on the weather. If it’s a dark, late-December day and it gets almost night in the afternoon, that imagery, the look of the world outside, certainly influences me profoundly.

You have been described as a poet whose work is difficult to describe or categorize. Are there certain recurring themes in your poetry, or messages you try to get across?

I don’t think so. What makes it difficult to categorize my work is that, on one hand, I’m sort of a realist. I mean, I look at the world as it is. There’s a world out there, things happen in that world. On the other hand, I also have a great belief in imagination. Many of my poems are flights of imagination. Usually poets tend to be one or the other, and I seem to somehow combine them. But the kinds of poems that I write about now, I’ve been writing more poems having to do with the war in Iraq and the world as it has changed. But I’ve written in the past, too, poems that had to do with the Vietnam War and the brutal reality of the world. But then I would get tired of those kinds of poems and I would write poems about nature or about a missing cat or whatever. (Laughs) Whatever I’m doing now is not something new, but it’s something that I come back to from time to time, because, unfortunately, the world is also a nasty place. It’s a very beautiful place, but there are also nasty things going on, so I move between those two.

In the 40 years since your first collection of poetry was published in 1967, how much have you grown or developed as a poet?

I think I’ve changed. I do some things better, probably, but I still like some of my early poems. There’s something about one’s beginnings when one is very young and one doesn’t know what the hell one is doing that produces some very surprising kinds of things. I look at some of those poems and I think, ‘What made me write this way?’ They’re less polished, maybe, than they are now, but it would be better to say I have changed rather than I have grown better.

You’ve also been described as a poet who is simultaneously accessible and deep. How important is it to you to be understood by your readers? 

It’s important. I mean, you always write for an intelligent, sensitive reader who is going to grasp what you are saying. Sometimes poets say, ‘Oh, I don’t care. I just write for myself.’ That, to me, is sort of silly. You know, if you write a love poem, you want the person you wrote it to to understand. Imagine reading a poem and saying, ‘I don’t get it. What is this poem about?’ And you say, ‘Oh, it’s a love poem to you!’ (Laughs) It’s a complete failure! It’s a disaster! I have always felt that I want to communicate. I am saying these words to someone out there.

How is a poem born in your mind? Does it start with a single line that pops into your head?

It usually is something like that. It’s never been ideas so much as the material from memories of an event—some image, a group of words, a phrase, a bit of language—and out of these little somethings, which one writes down in some poems, unpredictably, something develops and the poem grows.

You also translate poetry. Do you think poetry translates well across languages, or is there a strong danger of losing or altering the meaning?

You don’t necessarily alter the meaning. You lose a lot. I mean, there are some things you just can’t translate. You can say translation is impossible, because when we think of poems that we love in the language that we speak, the imagery and the play of words, a lot of things come in. And the sound of the poems, the music of poetry, does not, for example, translate. When I heard Neruda read in New York many years ago, my Spanish was minimal. But I was in tears, because it sounded so beautiful. The way he read the Spanish language, it was so absolutely heartbreakingly beautiful. You can’t translate that. So you can say all sorts of things about the impossibility of translation. On the other hand, if you look at world literature, words have been translated for the last 3,000 years, from languages to languages, back and forth. We know so many great works, like Homer, you know, the great Greek poets, in translation. And translations vary. Some are better than others. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they’re not so good. But, despite the impossibility, still, it’s through translations that we know about other literatures, and there are translations that are miraculously good, that seem to capture, if not everything, most of what was there in the original.