Poet Laureate Simic

Ramming Charles Simic up to his new title—Poet Laureate—makes me smirk. Poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, and even Colley Cibber seem perfectly fine for honorifics and poems composed on state occasions, but Charles Simic falls the other way. Reading his poetry elicits feelings of familiarity, though not always comfort, and his work makes me want to call him “Chas,” “Charlie,” “Chuck,” or “Chuckie.”

He might hate my nicknames—I wouldn’t blame him, for who wants to be “Chuckie”?—but then again, maybe he wouldn’t mind. After all, he is the poet who wrote “Watermelons”:

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand
We eat the smile
and spit out the teeth.

Simic occupies the shaded intersections of the odd Venn diagram bubbles of American poetry—he is an American surrealist and realist, a seriously humorous American poet, an absurd moralist, a comprehensive miniature artist. He often defies classification. Thus he may be the perfect choice for an American Poet Laureate, a Whitmanesque embodiment of singing everyone by singing only yourself.

My nicknaming him is no disrespect. Quite the contrary, comparing Simic to that other nicknamed former poet laureate Billy Collins, Simic seems just as witty and more varied in his style and subjects. I like Collins very much. He has a pleasant voice. But Simic has a surprising, sometimes disturbing one. Collins is perfect for offering in snippets, and I’ve been known to. Simic’s poems, however, are hard to subdivide. One of my favorites is “County Fair,” which I’ll offer in full:

If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

I’m not fooled by this subject and neither is Simic. A six-legged dog is safely unconventional, the most naked, pandering sort of novelty. What Simic does with that dog makes the poem, however. He deflates his balloon by the second line. “It doesn’t matter” whether you’ve seen the dog. You get used to him. You’ve seen things like him. What you haven’t seen are those “other things” you could have noted and didn’t: the night, the temperature, the gentle bond between dog and “keeper.”

The two extra legs, Simic says baldly and unromantically, are just “flapping around.” Having six legs isn’t half as notable as the drunk girl laughing at the dog or the boyfriend who chooses this moment to kiss her neck. They surpass the dog, unaccountably attaining a freakishness the dog’s retrieving a stick lacks. By the end of the poem, when the dog looks at us, we feel more for the dog—with him—than for or with the laughing drunk girl. And, if that was “the whole show,” it was worth it.

Collins’ droll observations are wonderful and clever, eminently quotable, but more direct than what you usually find in Simic. In “County Fair,” Simic doesn’t need to tell us how to feel or hide in cleverly turned phrasing. He makes his meaning happen. I love that dog. I don’t quite know why except that Simic made me.

Though I won’t try your patience, I could easily cut and paste four or five other wonderful Simic poems. Find: “Toy Factory,” “Breasts,”* “The Big War,” and “Crazy About Her Shrimp.” You’ll enjoy getting to know him.

I am happy whoever chooses the American Poet Laureate chose Charlie Simic. I would even semi-publicly congratulate him except that I hold with April Bernard, one of my poetry teachers and a fine poet, who used to point out that many efforts to publicize poetry end up setting it apart and making it “special” only in the not-so-good sense of the word. “Poet Laureate” may be a role too big for anyone to wear, an impossibility akin to “Surgeon General” or “U. S. Postmaster.” But if Simic must be our six-legged dog, I hope he’ll be a six-legged dog we’ll love.

OK…one more Simic, appropriately titled “Charles Simic”:

Charles Simic is a sentence.
A sentence has a beginning and an end.

Is he a simple or compound sentence?
It depends on the weather,
It depends on the stars above.

What is the subject of the sentence?
The subject is your beloved Charles Simic.

How many verbs are there in the sentence?
Eating, sleeping, and fucking are some of its verbs.

What is the object of the sentence?
The object, my little ones,
Is not yet in sight.

And who is writing this awkward sentence?
A blackmailer, a girl in love,
And an applicant for a job.

Will they end with a period or a question mark?
They’ll end with an exclamation point and an ink spot.

*Warning: if you follow this link, you’ll find photos…so much for my G rating!