The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, page 4
The worst offense one can commit in a poem is humor. Irony and wit are acceptable, but laughter in a lyric poem is a serious transgression. Great art, or so people think, is serious business. The more solemn the tone, the worthier of respect it is. Plato censored poetry that provokes “frivolous laughter,” and so do my students reading Frank O’Hara.
Imagism is realism minus the moral. If Imagist poems were didactic, people would find them more acceptable.
Here’s the moralist definition of “the beautiful”: Not life as it is, but life as it ought to be.
What John Gardner in his Moral Fiction doesn’t get is that the history of Western literature is really a long quarrel between the poet and the priest, the poet and the schoolteacher.
How to communicate consciousness . . . the present moment lived intensely that language locked in the temporal order of the sentence cannot reproduce?
Time is the lapse between perception and recognition (consciousness of that perception).
The last hundred years of literary history have proved that there are a number of contradictory and yet, nevertheless, successful ways of writing a poem. What do Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Yeats, Williams, and Stevens have in common? Plenty, and nothing at all.
Poem: A theater in which one is the auditorium, the stage, the sets, the actors, the author, the public, the critic. All at once!
Myth: Finding a hidden plot in a metaphor. There’s a story and a cosmology in every great metaphor.
I love the saying “No two eggs are alike.”
There are critics unable to experience the figurative, the way some people are color-blind and tone-deaf, or lack a sense of humor. They can tell it’s a metaphor, but it doesn’t do anything for them. If it cannot be paraphrased, this then becomes a further proof that it’s completely worthless.
Metaphor proves the existence of Heaven and Hell.
Ideological criticism is always stationary. It has its “true position,” from which it doesn’t budge. It’s like insisting that all paintings should be viewed from a distance of ten feet and only ten feet. Many paintings do not fully exist at that distance, of course. Besides, one is never at a single vantage point except intellectually. In life and in art one is simultaneously in several places at once.
It is the object I’m watching, the fork, for example, which sets up the rules of its visibility.
The modern poem implies a modern aesthetics and philosophy. Poetry written in that mode cannot be understood without an understanding of modern intellectual history. This seems pretty obvious, but not to everyone. Many of our leading literary critics have not read as widely as our poets. The poets’ readings are much more adventurous. And then, of course, there’s painting and cinema, which the critics customarily forget.
It goes without saying that a Chinese has a greater appreciation of Chinese poetry than a Westerner. But poetry is not only what stays in the cultural context, but what transcends it.
The theory of archetypes: Inside is where we meet everyone else; it’s on the outside that we are truly alone.
Two ways of creating: To uncover what is already there or to make something entirely new. My problem is that I believe in both.
“Momentary deities” is, I believe, how the Greeks thought of words.
Consciousness: Separating “I” from “it.” The “I” can be spoken but not the “it.”
“He has great images,” we used to say, and we meant that the poet kept surprising us by his wild associations. Total freedom of the imagination was our ideal then. That’s all we loved and demanded from the poetry we were going to write.
Beautiful, mysterious images are static. Too many such images clog the poem. A mysterious image is a holy, wonder-working icon. How many of those can you have in a single poem?
The inventor of the modern metaphor, Arthur Rimbaud, regarded himself as a seer. He saw that the secret ambition of a radical metaphor is metaphysical. It could open new worlds. It could touch the absolute. He gave up poetry when he began to doubt that truth.
Most poets do not understand their own metaphors.
I proclaim the hermeneutics of the perfectly clear. Its ambition is to find hidden opacities in the brightest sunlight.
Nietzsche: “A small overstrained animal whose days are numbered” proposes the “object of its love.” That’s what my poems are about.
Contemporary poets have for the most part forgotten about symbolism, especially its one great insight that Being cannot be stated but only hinted at.
It’s curious that there are still critics who equate imagination and fantasy.
Certain philosophers have understood the poetic image better than literary critics. Bachelard, Heidegger, and Ricoeur come to mind. They grasped its epistemological and metaphysical ambition. The critics too often see the image solely in literary terms.
What a mess! I believe in images as vehicles of transcendence, but I don’t believe in God!
Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” has comic potential, besides being the best formulation of the comic spirit.
“We understand others as a result of the speed with which we pass over words,” says Valéry. This describes for me what happens in a free verse poem. One speeds up, or one slows down the flow of words. One pauses . . . One says nothing . . . Then, one resumes one’s pace.
The common object is the sphinx, whose riddle the contemplative poet must solve.
J. Riddel: “What is it the poet reaches? Not mere knowledge. He obtains entrance into the relationship of word and thing.”
Beware of synchronicity—“the meaningful coincidence of an external event with an inner motive.” That way madness lies.
The provincialism of our criticism: One reads B and Y, but not Z, D, or N. One has an extremely narrow knowledge of the field, yet nevertheless likes to generalize about American poetry.
“The Triumph of Pere Ubu,” an essay on History and Stupidity. That would be something.!
“Truth eludes the methodical man,” says Gadamer. Thank God! That’s why poets have a chance.
Poe: “The word infinity, like the words God and spirit, is by no means the expression of an idea, but an effort at one.”
What to call “It?” You need a word. You need several words for the ineffable.
Here’s what I understand to be the spirit of Dada: Gentle, kind, most indulgent and benevolent reader, friend of friends, brother and sister of my soul, kiss my ass!
Form is “timing”—the exact amount of silence necessary between words and images to make them meaningful. The stand-up comedians know all about that.
Poe in Eureka: “Space and duration are one.” Space is the image of Time in the moment of consciousness.
The fate of the poet is the fate of the soul in every man and woman.
I always had the clearest sense that a lot of people out there would have killed me if given an opportunity. It’s a long list. Stalin, Hitler, Mao are on it, of course. And that’s only our century! The Catholic Church, the Puritans, the Moslems, etc., etc. I represent what has always been joyfully exterminated.
Note to future historians: Don’t read old issues of The New York Times. Read the poets.
Time is the subjective par excellence. Objectively, time doesn’t exist, despite the appearances. This is Gurdjieff’s idea, which fascinated my father.
Imagism is about the passion for accuracy. To get it right, etc. But, it’s not easy to get “it” right! A philosophical problem. Imagism is the epistemology of modern poetry.
A metaphysics without a self and without a God! Is that what you want, Simic?
“The iron hand of necessity shaking the dicebox of chance.” I believe that’s Nietzsche’s phrase. I’ve been worrying about it for years.
The most profound thing that Emerson said about the poet is that he knows the Secret of the World: that Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.
I have an idea for a new game of chess in which the value of each figure would change from move to move. Pawns could become knights, the king could turn into a queen, and so on. The choice would be the player’s. His opponent would have to anticipate all the additional options. A game of infinite and dizzying complexity.
A poem is a place where affinities are discovered. Poetry is a way of thinking through affinities.
The cookie-cutter poets. The cookie-cutters are made of gold and sit under glass in their grandparents’ parlors.
I like the folksy vulgarity of Chaucer, Rabelais, and Cervantes.
There are poets who treat you like an imbecile, and there are poets who treat you like a poet.
“The greatest danger to the poem is the poetic.” I don’t remember who said that.
What the political right and left have in common is their hatred of modern art and literature. Come to think of it, all the churches hate it, too, which doesn’t leave us many supporters. On the one hand we have the dopey rich who collect Andy Warhol’s soup cans, and on the other hand some poor kid in love with the poems of Russell Edson and Sylvia Plath. Oh boy!
Everything was right with the world until that yokel Rimbaud opened his mouth.
To the narrative poets: What do you think Pound meant when he said, “Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose”?
Everybody wants to be able to paraphrase the content of the poem, except the poet.
The encounter between philosophy and poetry, my little lambs, is not a tragedy but a sublime comedy.
IV
The poet is like a compulsive talker at a funeral. People nudge him and tell him to be quiet and he apologizes, agrees that this is not the place, and so on and so forth as he goes on blabbering.
Cioran writes, “God is afraid of man. . . . Man is a monster, and history has proved it.”
My ideal is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, a catalog of many varieties of mopiness human beings are subject to, everything from the gloom caused by the evils of the world to the kind caused by lovers’ squabbles. Burton, who is one of the great stylists in the language, wrote the book to relieve his own low spirits. The result is the most cheerful book on general unhappiness we have.
“A book suitable for reading in an abandoned house among weeds on a still night and a full stomach,” writes Felisberto Hernandez, who once described a young woman about to recite one of her poems as assuming an attitude that made one think of something between infinity and a sneeze.
In no other century, in no other literature of the past has the image been this important. In the age of ideology and advertisement, the poet, too, trusts the eyes more than the ear.
No preconceived aesthetic sense can guide the poet and the artist in American cities, where chance rules.
In poetry, to quote a bluesman who calls himself Satan, one must “learn to do wrong with respect.”
The soul squawking to the body about its days being numbered. That’s what most blues songs and lyric poems are about.
Collage is a mystic’s medium.
I’m a jailbird from every Garden of Eden, every Utopia that has ever been imagined.
“The future will be post-individualist,” the critic Frederic Jameson tells us. Whether it’ll be Stalin’s, Hitler’s, or Mao’s model, he doesn’t say.
Things, do you know suffering? The mystery of the object is the mystery of a closed door. The object is the place where the real and the imaginary collide.
Ars poetica: I ate the white chickens and left the red wheelbarrow out in the rain.
As a poet, the Lord of the Universe is hopelessly obscure.
Intense experience eludes language. Language is the Fall from the awe and consciousness of being.
To be a poet is to feel something like a unicyclist in a desert, a pornographic magician performing in the corner of the church during Mass, a drag queen attending night classes and blowing kisses at the teacher.
The prose poem is a fabulous beast like the sphinx. A monster made up of prose and poetry.
A horror movie for vegetarians: Greasy sausages kept falling from the sky into people’s bean soup.
“They are bad for you,” my friends tell me. As if all that stands between me and immortality are a couple of Italian sausages.
She is a passionate multiculturalist except when it comes to ethnic food. This is where she draws the line. If these minorities could learn to forgo deep-fried foods, she could open her heart to them even more.
In the school of virtue, I’m still five years old. I want to sit in some woman’s lap and suck her breast, but they won’t let me. Give me my thumb to chew at least, I protest! But they sprinkle hot chili sauce on all my fingers and order me to stand in the corner.
American unhappiness has no history because history has to do with real events and not with a Dream.
How is it that certain expressions of our own subjectivity in poetry strike the reader as merely self-indulgent or sentimental, while others, equally personal, have a universal resonance? The answer may be that there are two kinds of poets: Those who ask the reader to wallow in self-pity with them and those who simply remind them of their common human predicament.
To rescue the banal is every lyric poet’s ambition.
All lives are strange, but the lives of immigrants and exiles are even more so. My parents died a long way from where they were born. It’s not how they imagined their lives were going to be. Even at the age of eighty-eight in a nursing home in Dover, New Hampshire, my mother was puzzled. What does it all mean, she wanted to know? What terrified her was the likelihood that it meant nothing.
Our conservatives and liberals both dream of censorship. Their ideal, without them realizing it, is Mao’s China. Only a few books in bookstores and libraries, and every one of them carrying a wholesome message.
American academics suffer from cultural insecurity. They really don’t know who they are, but our writers do, and that’s the problem.
“She faked orgasm each time she masturbated,” writes an unknown wit in a tabloid.
My father’s comment on an old waiter in our favorite Greek restaurant: “His grandpa ran the shadow projector in Plato’s Cave.”
“I would have given my pants for . . . ,” he kept shouting all his life.
Some readers find my poems obscure because, well, I don’t sum it up for them. That is to say, I have too much respect for them to play the preacher, but that’s what they want from their poets.
My student Jeff McRae says, “Life at its best is a beautiful sadness.”
To me the test of a literary theory is what it has to say about the lyric poem. If it avoids the lyric or stumbles over it, I say forget it. It’s a fraud.
Here’s the first rule of insomnia: Don’t talk to the heroes and villains on the screen.
Memory: Not my own. Whose then? At 4 a.m., when the heart skips a beat or two, I saw myself with arms spread on the gallows about to address a huge crowd and found no words in my mouth.
Years later, when some of my high school teachers in Yugoslavia were told that I had graduated from the university, they just laughed and refused to believe any of it.
“That lazy bum? Never in a thousand years.”
My mother took an equally dim view. “He’ll end up in prison,” she told everybody.
I don’t think she ever truly believed I was actually a professor at a university. He’s lying to me, she thought, or he has them all hoodwinked in some way, but is bound to be found out sooner or later.
In the beginning there were Whitman and Dickinson and Poe. Whitman was our Homer and Dickinson our Sappho, but who the hell was Poe?
The aim of ideologies of ethnicity, nationality, religion, and gender is to remove the sense of one’s own individual limitations and failure as a human being and to replace the “I” by a “we.”
The best recommendation for wine, tobacco, sex and loose talk is that every so-called moral majority is against them.
The often-heard assertion that there’s no truth outside of language is just jive.
Our rich are torn between self-pity (they’re paying too much in taxes) and self-adulation. To live without excuses is now a profoundly un-American attitude.
He kissed ass so much his brain had turdified.
